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.
[...]

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.
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  thanks to wood s lot