Well, @OtherMichael, we could compare and contrast this rightness of the use of the playa by showy fairly-advantaged moderns, to the rightness of use other totally theoretical national lands by an unrelated group of showy fairly-advantaged moderns. And why it’s okay to party on former Paiute land when you pay the man, but not so okay when you don’t.
I bet some people would have some uncomfortable truths to approach if they went down that rabbit hole. Good thing we have the other 51 weeks of the year to keep all this stuff from intersecting, and good thing the Paiute are a prosperous people in modern times, with a standard of living totally above people, say, currently displaced by wars of expansion and resource extraction,and also and that they get fair recompense for their land from that man as he collects it today.
Thank FSM the Bundy’s are total maroons or I could support a little of their overall point.
I think that the perceived “fairly-advantaged moderns” are a product of western-imperialist perceptions.
Paying the local indigenous people seems entirely fair. But it is more empowering to them if they are paid in something of more value than US dollars.
The whole pay-to-play ethic of the US BLM and LEOs serves mostly to try normalizing decentralized non-commercial festivals to the very kinds of ethics they oppose, to draw them into that system. It is worth resisting and opposing.
But am I really something separate which owns those perceptions? Perhaps I am both this perceptual apparatus and its content! The more pressing question might really be, then - where to best define this boundary of self/not-self?
