The 2006 Burning Man festival kicked off last night in Nevada’s Black Rock desert. In a story today, ABC News described the event variously as “the Woodstock of Generation X,” a “weeklong party for iPod nerds and punk-rock pixies,” and “a massive drug-fueled orgy of the senses.” (Click here for story.)

For the record, Burning Man is not a rock concert, a gathering of techies or punk-rockers, or even a drug fest. That said, Bede Moore, the writer of the ABC story, got much of it right. I’m quoted at one point in the article saying that Larry Harvey and the other founders based the event on a very enlightened set of values. Even though the festival has grown exponentially over the past 20 years, they have stayed true to those values. For many of us, it’s the thing that keeps us coming back year after year.

Cultural critic Todd Gitlin’s latest essay collection, Intellectuals and the Flag, takes the attacks of September 11 as a point of departure for raising difficult questions about political authority, patriotism, civic engagement, and the role of intellectuals in American public life. My review of the book appears in the new issue of the Journal of Politics.

An excerpt:

Todd Gitlin has written a number of fine books over the past two decades, among them The Sixties: Years of Hope, Days of Rage and The Twilight of Common Dreams, and his occasional pieces in the New York Times Book Review, Mother Jones, Harper’s and elsewhere are always intelligent and engaging, often eloquent, occasionally brilliant. But perhaps his most memorable work remains a series of short essays that have never, technically speaking, appeared in print.

In the immediate aftermath of September 11, 2001, Gitlin wrote a string of commentaries combining first-hand accounts of living in Manhattan, about a mile downwind of Ground Zero, with incisive analysis of the responses to the attacks by politicians and other public figures. The essays were posted on the openDemocracy website, the first one within 24 hours of the twin towers’ collapse. Gitlin’s dispatches from the front quickly made the rounds on the Internet, circulating via listservs and forwarded e-mails. For many of us, they were a bracing antidote for that “perverse abuse of language in play from Washington officials,” as he put it, and the “overwrought metaphors” endlessly circulated and amplified through the media.

Several key passages from the 9/11 commentaries reappear in “The Intellectuals and the Flag,” the centerpiece of Gitlin’s new essay collection by the same name. […] What Gitlin sets out to do in these essays, he says, is to lay the foundation for a recovery of the left, to point the way to a renewed sense of patriotism —

not the patriotism of symbolic display and empty ritual, he insists, but of self-sacrifice, tough-minded criticism, vigorous ideas, and an active engagement with the difficult issues of our time.