Tea at Trianon: Burning Man is a Capitalist Lie

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Sunday, September 10, 2023

Burning Man is a Capitalist Lie

I love Mary Harrington's writings, but I disagree with the comparison of our rich Wokesters to Marie-Antoinette. When the Queen visited her farm at Trianon she abandoned court dress for simple attire. which is not the same as dressing like a peasant or milkmaid. She dressed like a peasant if she was portraying one in a play, and she put on frequent plays at her miniature theater, but she did not run about pretending to be a milkmaid like an escaped lunatic. Furthermore, her village at Trianon housed genuine peasants who had been homeless people. Unlike our elites, the Queen and her husband had many practical ways for directly assisting the needy. It was not the peasants who rose up against them, but the nobles who wanted to keep their privileges. Mary is buying into a Communist lie about Marie-Antoinette. From UnHerd:

Last week, torrential rain transformed Burning Man from Mad-Max-meets-Magic-Roundabout party week to a dystopian-looking mud-pan filled with three-eyed “dinosaur shrimp”. The downpour, and resulting delay in campers being permitted to leave, spawned a host of increasingly baroque rumours, including an online effort (complete with fake CDC notices) to persuade the world of an ebola outbreak.

Photos from summer festivals are a staple of the silly-season news cycle. But I doubt many images from Reading Festival make the LA Times. Burning Man, meanwhile, is an object of fascination well beyond the Land of the Free, thanks to the paradoxical quality of the American empire.

This nation has done more than any other, from Woodrow Wilson on, to enshrine the notion of “national self-determination” in international law and parlance, while also evacuating other nations and cultures of their culturally distinct lifeways and replacing them with American ones. Having terraformed many nominally non-American nations with American practices and ideals, inevitably the elites from whom this terraforming emanates have also become influential well beyond America’s nominal boundaries.

In the 20th century, this phenomenon was largely confined to Hollywood and the music industry. More recently, though, the cultural centre of gravity has drifted toward Silicon Valley’s tech elite: a group heavily represented at Burning Man. And the schadenfreude that’s accompanied this year’s Burning Man rumour-mongering speaks to a growing ambivalence both about this elite, about the culture machine they command, and about the American promise it mythologises and enacts: the fantasy of perfect individual freedom, on a blank cultural slate, underwritten by universal material abundance. (Read more.)