In the early ’70s, John van der Zee, a San Francisco writer, got himself a job at the Bohemian Grove, posing as a waiter. He then wrote the book, The Greatest Men’s Party on Earth, about the Grove and its wierd right-wing shenanigans. Now he has written this article, comparing it to Burning Man:
Why Burning Man is like the Bohemian Grove
It is a kind of annual human migration from opposite poles.
Each year, in midsummer, significant numbers of people abandon their homes, jobs, partners and families and travel, sometimes hundreds or thousands of miles, to take up residence in a distant, intentionally remote corner of the American West, where they reconstitute a self-contained society, a retreat from, and in many ways a critique of the larger society they have fled.
One destination is wooded, arboreal, druidic, the other desertine, hermitic. Yet both involve at their core, the shedding like an outer skin one’s routine response to the outside world’s demands and constraints. Both involve the celebratory cremation in a fiery spectacle of a totemic figure. Both form communities, divided into tribal camps, under a nominal devotion to the arts that are as brief, fleeting and ephemeral as frontier boomtowns, yet have had profound influence on the society at large.
Both have influenced our lives, whether we choose to admit it or not.
