Finally, if this broadcast feels impersonal, I hope you will remember that individual responses generally elicit personal replies. And even if I'm sometimes too swamped to write back, I delight in hearing from you.>
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SURREALITY TV: FROM BURNING MAN TO RUNNING MAN

Governor Schwartzenegger.

I repeat. Governor Schwartzenegger.

That's right. Say it aloud several times. Who needs drugs to feel like they're hallucinating?

But I get ahead of myself.

Let me back up to my last communiqué, dispatched as I was heading off to Burning Man, muttering darkly about taking Serious Measures to Reorganize my Strategy, implying that I would return from Black Rock City with a clarified sense of direction and purpose.

Well, I did. Sort of. It is true that Burning Man provided me some chewy food for thought. I found myself fundamentally questioning the Bohemianism to which I have been firmly committed since I reacted to turning 14 in a hick Wyoming town by buying a motorcycle, leading my Mormon Boy Scout troop into depravity, reading "On the Road," and learning how to smirk like James Dean.

Since then, I've been, without apology, a biker, a beatnik, a hippie, a cyberpunk, a burner, and a 40 year thorn in the side of Authority. That I was also a Republican during much of that time owed more to a desire to be a politically effective libertarian and environmentalist in a one-party state than any personal resonance with the God-as-Abusive-Father side of the American cultural canyon. I've marched against 4 wars (three hot, one cold), defended wild nature in both ecology and human affairs, and ingested practically every known substance even suspected to induce mysticism.

In the service of liberty, I've worn fashions that would embarrass Elton John. I've championed the strangest in their right to be odd and endeavored to make of myself a general zone of amnesty. I have been (and remain) pro-choice in all regards. For many years, my car wore a bumper sticker that proclaimed, "It's Still Not Weird Enough For Me." I meant it.

But lately, as I've said, it's been plenty weird enough for me and Burning Man weirded me further out. While this year's burn was as fecund as ever in random acts of genius, terrifying beauties, and carelessly open hearts, I found myself shaking my head almost as often as I would at a White House prayer breakfast.

I felt as if I were watching the best minds of the next several generations blowing themselves into starry oblivions as deep as the desert night, pushing the envelope of strangeness into near-psychosis at a time when the world beyond The Playa seems to have gone quite mad enough already.

If someone like Karl Rove had wanted to neutralize the most creative, intelligent, and passionate members of his opposition, he'd have a hard time coming up with a better tool than Burning Man. Exile them to the wilderness, give them a culture in which alpha status requires months of focus and resource-consumptive preparation, provide them with metric tons of psychotropic confusicants, and then... ignore them. It's a pretty safe bet that they won't be out registering voters, or doing anything that might actually threaten electoral change, when they have an art car to build.

Indeed, Burning Man strikes me as only one of many reality distortion fields within which the counter-culture, myself totally included, has sought self-ghettoizing refuge. On reflection, I realized that I felt much the same about the massive protest marches that failed to impede in any way the Administration's unprovoked assault on Iraq. We all had a grand time gathering ourselves by the millions, but we were up against opponents far more practical and smart than Dick Nixon or Spiro Agnew. The current Dick knows that the best way to deal with dissent is give it a spectacle to exhaust its energies on. He knows that we're suckers for a good show, especially one where we get a starring role, so he gives us unmolested stages upon which to mount our extravaganzas and goes on about his corporate affairs.

Also, as I watched the enormously inventive and sweet-hearted burners duct-taping together their creations, I felt a sinking sense of ineffectiveness. We're up against an opposition that can get their machines to fly twice the speed of sound and do so reliably. Granted they do stupid and terrible things with those machines, but at least they get them to work. And yes, ours would probably work too with that kind of funding, but with our disdain for both wealth and the tedious processes of democracy, we have conceded those resources to the thin-lipped monotheists.

Of course, my pal and Mondo 2000 editor R.U. Sirius made a solid point when he said, "It stands to reason that self-righteous, inflexible, single-minded, authoritarian true believers are politically organized. Open-minded, flexible, complex, ambiguous, anti-authoritarian people would just as soon be left to mind their own fucking business."

You bet we would, but can we afford to any longer? And, if not, how can we shake off the confusion, poverty, disarray, willed hallucination, paralysis, denial, and cultural isolation we've created over the last half century and run these overgrown hall monitors and out of office?

While I was having these meditations at Burning Man, I was still thinking that the answer was simply getting a genuinely representative sample of the populace to vote. I retained enough faith in The Wisdom of The People that I assumed that if the real electorate turned out - and not just the 29% who bothered with the last national elections - we would see a government with real American values: one that valued individual liberty, fiscal restraint, and a profound wariness of foreign military adventures. (Actually, I remember a time when it was thought these were Republican values as well, but maybe I was kidding myself, as we old hippies often do.)

In any event, my childlike faith in democracy was seriously challenged when California voters turned out in record numbers and elected an action figure as their new leader. What were they thinking? I mean, I've met Governor Schwartzenegger - that's right, Governor Schwartzenegger - and, while he's smarter and funnier than he seems on television, there is absolutely nothing in his experience or temperament that would qualify him to manage the world's sixth largest economy.

Ronald Reagan and Jesse Ventura, to whom he's compared, both had plenty of political and managerial experience when they entered office. They arrived with detailed programs for what they wanted to accomplish and they were paragons of balance and humility compared with the Governorator. I mean, seriously folks, this is a man who owns 9 Humvees and thinks he's an environmentalist.

Hey, maybe he'll turn out to be a terrific Governor. Weirder things have happened, and lately in abundance. Maybe he will demonstrate such administrative genius that he will surgically remove 9 billion dollars of fatty deposits from California's budget without devastating public services. Maybe he will get the state back on track without either raising taxes or holding Enron accountable for the billions they swindled from his state.

But I kind of doubt it. This is a man who wanted to be adored just like Hitler, as he himself put it. This is a man whose record of boorish sexual impositions would bar him from employment in any Fortune 500 company. Not only is he macho, he *is* macho. He is arrogant, distorted, and possibly the most narcissistic person in Hollywood. (Which would make him, I guess, just about the most narcissistic person in the Milky Way galaxy.) His primary assets are good bones, great teeth, killer name recognition, and a wife whose loyalty exceeds even Hillary Clinton's. Yet the people of California turned out in record numbers a couple of Tuesdays ago and gave him everything but a blowjob.

Why? I don't know. I suspect they landslid him into Sacramento for the sheer hell of it, for the spectacle, for sport, and because they fancy he will be a lot more entertaining on the evening news than Gray Davis ever was. It's all just television, anyway. It's Joe Millionaire, but with flags. And Kennedys.

Choosing a governor this way makes as much sense as looking for your next girlfriend on men's room walls. "For a good time, vote for Arnold..." This event demonstrates that it's going to take more than just getting out the vote to restore common sense to the American political process. When the voters start hallucinating, democracy fails. You end up with junk politics, as the current issue of Harper's puts it. Twinkie democracy. It now seems incumbent on those of us who have been hallucinating intentionally to throttle it back a bit and get our shit together.

It's time for the experientialists - those of us who don't get our reality from television, who actually read about what what we can't experience directly - to emerge from our psychic sanctuaries and become seriously involved in the ugly business of politics. If we don't, it's only a matter of time before the dominant culture quits ignoring us and starts actively locking us up in even greater numbers. Indeed, the means to accomplish this are already in place, as I can personally assure you. (More of this as soon as I'm legally free to discuss it...)

Lest there be any misunderstanding, I have not become anti-Burning Man. It will probably remain on my liturgical calendar next year, as will a few other counter-cultural hoedowns. As I've said before, I'm with Emma Goldman who said, "If I can't dance, I want no part of your revolution." But while I believe that dancing is a revolutionary act, it is clear to me that we can't simply dance this darkness out of office.

Nor have I decided to turn straight. I've turned straighter, but I expect I'm as wedded to my cultural principles and practices as Pat Robertson is to his. Still, this is a critical moment in history. If we beleaguered bohemians really care about the moments to come that our children will inhabit, we'd better show up for it. This means that, painful as it sounds, we're probably going to have to act like grown-ups some of the time until things quit being so weird. If the world isn't going to make sense, we'd better.

Or at least that's what I've been telling myself lately.

I have more to say about the personal dimensions all these considerations. And will. But this much has been moldering on my hard disk since the California election, so out it goes.

Love and fishes,

Barlow

P.S. Please note my current .sig quote from George I's memoirs. If only children would listen to their parents, the world would be a better place.
--
John Perry Barlow, Cognitive Dissident
Co-Founder & Vice Chairman, Electronic Frontier Foundation
Berkman Fellow, Harvard Law School

Home(stead) Page: http://www.eff.org/~barlow

Call me anywhere, anytime: 800/654-4322

Fax me anywhere, anytime: 603/215-1529

Current Cell Phone: 917/963-2037 (AT&T)

Alternative Cell Phone: 646/286-8176 (GSM)

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Barlow in Meatspace Now: Naples, Florida (Until 10/21)

(Projected) Trajectory from here: Salt Lake City, Utah (10/22-25) -> Steamboat Springs, Colorado ((10/24-26) -> Loveland, Colorado (10/26-29) -> Salt Lake City (10/29-30) -> Las Vegas (10/30-11/1) -> Chicago (11/1-11/4) -> Salt Lake City...

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Trying to eliminate Saddam...would have incurred incalculable human and political costs. Apprehending him was probably impossible.... We would have been forced to occupy Baghdad and, in effect, rule Iraq.... there was no viable "exit strategy" we could see, violating another of our principles. Furthermore, we had been self-consciously trying to set a pattern for handling aggression in the post-Cold War world. Going in and occupying Iraq, thus unilaterally exceeding the United Nations' mandate, would have destroyed the precedent of international response to aggression that we hoped to establish. Had we gone the invasion route, the United States could conceivably still be an occupying power in a bitterly hostile land.

-- George Herbert Walker Bush, from his memoir, "A World Transformed" (1998)

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