As far as the-end-of-something symbolism went, this year’s Burning Man festival was about as sharp as it gets: A social-media optimized version of Woodstock ’99. Consider: The 2023 edition of…
, by model Cindy Crawford and entrepreneur Rande Gerber, as well as the couple’s daughter, model Kaia Gerber, and her boyfriend, “Elvis” star Austin Butler. No less a personage than Neal Katyal, once the acting solicitor general of the United States, posted about his own early retreat from bedlam, accompanied by a photo of himself in happier Burning Man times, wearing a propeller beanie and a grotesque grimacing figurine around his neck on a gold chain.
All of which, to those of a certain cast of mind, both confirms a symbolic view of American life, and then flips it on its head. First, there was both a confirmation that, yes, in a sphere not only separate from but invisible to all but the very elite, there is an endless party going on; then, the power struggle got pleasingly inverted. The citizens of the Capitol, as it were, were suddenly in the midst of the Hunger Games.
This is a takeaway that diverges from how Burning Man might like to see itself — the festival is intended as a coming-together to foster creativity and interconnectedness. That lends the fact of the celebrities booking it out of there as soon as things got bad an especially jangling symbolic resonance — working together to create a self-sustaining community for a week is a lot easier when the sun is shining.
None of this is to minimize the suffering or discontent of those civilian souls who wait all year for Burning Man, or to say that there’s solely a cynical spin on this. (The sole fatality at this year’s event, authorities have said, was
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