Since Occupy Wall Street began to ramp up after the infamous video of young women getting maced, now and then you’ll hear someone toss off a reference to Burning Man as a means of comparison. They’re both big, both progressive-ish, both, seemingly chaotic, and both theatrical; so it seems like a good comparison, right?
A video by Ian Mackenzie
Caveat Magister over at the Burning Blog, doesn’t think so. He’s apparently gotten so fed up with it, that he’s taken it upon himself to write an article about how the two events are fundamentally different.
Occupy Wall Street. Photo by Lourenço Parente.
Now, everyone is responsible for their own burn, so I’m not going to say that Caveat is wrong exactly. I disagree with him in some ways, sure, otherwise I wouldn’t be writing articles for Occupy Burners. The correctness of the matter I’ll leave for readers to decide. What I’m more interested in looking at is what exactly people mean when they compare the two.
Right off the bat, I’m going to admit that he’s right in as much as OWS and Burning Man are not the same. But at a certain level, the similarities are striking. He said in his article, “Occupy Wall Street is certainly an experiment in socially relevant communal living that involves camping and picking up after yourselves.”
That is true yes, but it’s more than that as well. Those exist all over the country and are mostly self-congratulatory and never amount to much more than a way for entitled left-leaning teenagers to feel good about themselves. In order for it to mean something there has to be organization.
There’ve been several phases in the mainstream media’s attempt to discredit the Occupy movement (something I’ll be writing more about), but a main one early on was the oft-repeated claim that Occupiers have no clear demands or coherent message.
A look at the signs being held up at any OWS action goes a long way to disproving that idea. The things we want are many and varied, in much the same way that theme camps at a burn are of every conceivable concept and style. But there are undeniable cohesive threads running through them. That is to say, there are bedrock level connections despite the plurality of approach. At a burn they’re codified in the Ten Principles. Occupy Wall Street hasn’t codified theirs yet, but Burners have been doing this thing for twenty years. OWS has been around just under three months. Give them time. And it’s not going to come out as a list of demands, that’s unrealistic. It’s not what the Occupiers are about.
Because, like Burners, they’re about creating a better world where everyone can play the part they want to play. At a Burn, each theme camps fits — if somewhat messily — into its place within the larger event. And that is what Occupy Wall Street is attempting to achieve as well.
If it seems that they’re spending most of their time saying no to things — to banks, to police brutality, to unaccountable revolving-door businesscrats — well, like Caveat mentioned in his post, those things are all worth saying no to. And necessarily so.
Every attempt to do something different or make something new, was at first a no.
Burning Man. Photo by Neil Girling.
When John Law and the Cacophony Society started throwing the twisted desert party that would eventually metamorphose into Burning Man, they weren’t doing it out of a positive imperative to change the world. They were doing it because they wanted to, because it was awesome, and because they didn’t fit in to default society. To oversimplify, they were basically doing it as a way to say fuck you to everyone who had labeled them as weirdos.
And when Larry Harvey brought the Man out to the desert, maybe he did have a vision of a better world. He is a pretty big hippie after all. But seriously, he did it as a fuck you to the cops that wouldn’t let him burn it on Baker Beach. But there was a realization that they had
something good going, and evolved from there.
You don’t change the world with a drive-by shooting range.
But maybe the underlying freedom that being able to drive fast and shoot guns represents allows people to think in ways they couldn’t when they’re hemmed in by custom and authority and the straight concrete edges of skyscrapers.
Occupy Wall Street is a different sort of protest, growing out of a different tradition on different sides of an enormous country, but it’s still a way to say “No, we’re not going to do it that way anymore.” Like a General Assembly attempting to reach consensus, both are ways to practice being free.
So sure, the two events are not exactly the same. Not even close, as far as content goes. But they both emerge from the same spirit. It seems to me that when people say they’re like one another, it’s because they’re similarly hard to describe. I’d venture that this is because of their vertical hierarchy more than because of the spectacle.
People are used to spectacle. It’s devolution and self-reliance that really trips them out.
Mumbles Prometheus is a part-time linguist, part-time self-described visionary. He’s a hard-working member of North Texas underground. His beard is pretty fantastic too.
