I wrote a song years ago, or perhaps it was yesterday, time has that dissolving quality when you look back too long, of the Conservative Party taking their majority in Parliament. A triumph it was called. A majority. I imagined them with their new power as creatures drooling in plain sight, trembling at what was now theirs without opposition, without check or balance, an intoxication that breeds cruelty. Always the same, when men or women are given dominion without restraint. The mask slips. The face beneath is half-mad with delight. The song I named The Reform Party at Burning Man, because it amused me to set them down in that anarchic desert carnival. I pictured the suited ministers jumping into the dust among naked dancers, law and lawlessness, the parody of freedom. Yet almost immediately the backlash came. Not from the conservatives, but from another quarter entirely. An indignant Burner wrote to me with the venom of the betrayed, calling me asshole, calling me blind, insisting I did not “get” what Burning Man was, the “awesome” transcendence I had mocked. I was condemned not for cruelty but for the failure to worship correctly. The world folds in upon itself like a tent collapsing. I saw it then, and I see it now: stupidity is bottomless. A pit where bodies tumble, one after another, each insisting they are different and special. I merely lifted the veil for a moment, and the voices turned on me, as if the desert itself had opened its mouth.