May 042011
 

 
St. James’s Palace released the details of the dress just as Miss Middleton stepped out of a royal Rolls-Royce with her father, Michael, to walk down the aisle at Westminster Abbey.”  – New York Times, April 29th, 2011

Osama bin Laden, the mastermind of the most devastating attack on American soil in modern times and the most hunted man in the world, was killed in a firefight with United States forces in Pakistan on Sunday, President Obama announced.” –New York Times, May 1st, 2011

For the better part of the last two weeks I’ve been reading and rereading Jean Baudrillard’s essay “The Precession of Simulacra,” trying to make some sense of it and figure out something to say.  I want to keep my thoughts under a thousand words, but it’s an elusive essay.  How I think about it keeps changing.  Baudrillard critiques contemporary Western culture—from religion to politics, from Egyptology to molecular science, from the Pirates of the Caribbean ride at Disneyland to the discovery and subsequent ‘replacement’ of Tasaday Indians in the Philippine jungles—as being based on “models of a real without origin or reality.” In short, he says that we no longer have a tangible relationship with reality, that we’ve mistaken the simulacra for the authentic. The myth, the model of reality since civilization began, now (and for the first time) precedes the objective fact, a situation he calls “hyperreality.”

I needed examples, one or two snapshots of so-called origin-less reality, of models without an authentic reference.  Providence smiled upon me, offering up two perfect media bookends in a hyperreal world.  On Friday, the world watched the choreographed celebration of a royal wedding in London.  And then, as if on cue, on Sunday night with  symmetry too sublime to craft, came the strange, jingoistic jubilation after the announcement of the death of Osama bin Laden.

The gods of the absurd had granted my wish.

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