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Thursday, March 8, 2007 |
NYTimes: "The French critic and provocateur [sic] Jean Baudrillard, whose theories about consumer culture and the manufactured nature of reality were intensely discussed both in rarefied philosophical circles and in blockbuster movies like 'The Matrix', died yesterday in Paris. He was 77."
Critic and provocateur? Americans seem to see enemies everywhere.
No, Baudrillard was a philosopher, sociologist and writer. If you want to understand our life and times, you have to read Baudrillard.
L'Express: "Issu du mouvement soixante-huitard, ce penseur de renommée internationale, probablement l'intellectuel français le plus connu aux Etats-Unis, également photographe à l'oeuvre reconnue, a élaboré une critique radicale des médias, baignée d'humour noir et de pessimisme, qu'il a instillé dans une cinquantaine de ses livres."
Jean Baudrillard: "Disneyland is a perfect model of all the entangled orders of simulation. To begin with it is a play of illusions and phantasms: pirates, the frontier, future world, etc. This imaginary world is supposed to be what makes the operation successful. But, what draws the crowds is undoubtedly much more the social microcosm, the miniaturized and religious revelling in real America, in its delights and drawbacks. You park outside, queue up inside, and are totally abandoned at the exit. In this imaginary world the only phantasmagoria is in the inherent warmth and affection of the crowd, and in that sufficiently excessive number of gadgets used there to specifically maintain the multitudinous affect. The contrast with the absolute solitude of the parking lot - a veritable concentration camp - is total. Or rather: inside, a whole range of gadgets magnetize the crowd into direct flows; outside, solitude is directed onto a single gadget: the automobile. By an extraordinary coincidence (one that undoubtedly belongs to the peculiar enchantment of this universe), this deep-frozen infantile world happens to have been conceived and realized by a man who is himself now cryogenized; Walt Disney, who awaits his resurrection at minus 180 degrees centigrade.
The objective profile of the United States, then, may be traced throughout Disneyland, even down to the morphology of individuals and the crowd. All its values are exalted here, in miniature and comic-strip form. Embalmed and pacified. Whence the possibility of an ideological analysis of Disneyland (L. Marin does it well in Utopies, jeux d'espaces): digest of the American way of life, panegyric to American values, idealized transposition of a contradictory reality. To be sure. But this conceals something else, and that 'ideological' blanket exactly serves to cover over a third-order simulation: Disneyland is there to conceal the fact that it is the 'real' country, all of 'real' America, which is Disneyland (just as prisons are there to conceal the fact that it is the social in its entirety, in its banal omnipresence, which is carceral). Disneyland is presented as imaginary in order to make us believe that the rest is real, when in fact all of Los Angeles and the America surrounding it are no longer real, but of the order of the hyperreal and of simulation. It is no longer a question of a false representation of reality (ideology), but of concealing the fact that the real is no longer real, and thus of saving the reality principle."
It's not the Bill of Rights that is important or its impact on the everyday life of Americans, but the copy of it in a theme park that (re)creates an innocuous view of history. History is rewritten first and foremost in America. And the media present us with a reality that hides more than it reveals. Fiction is to replace reality. But don't worry, Dubya knows that reality exists, don't misunderestimate him. When he is losing the battle he tells you he is winning and, please, believe him or you're unAmerican.
Faux News: "Scooter Libby Found Not Guilty of Lying to FBI Investigators".
And instead of Wikipedia we will soon be able to consult the Conservapedia, which will replace the ugly truth with a certified outlook that you can trust will paint the world in old rose, and let you know "that the stars are God's daisy chain, that rabbits are gnomes in attendance on the Fairy Queen, and that every time a fairy blows its wee nose a baby is born".
12:24:57 PM 
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ThisIsLondon: "A hijack-proof piloting system for airliners is being developed to prevent terrorists repeating the 9/11 outrages.
The mechanism is designed to make it impossible to crash the aircraft into air or land targets - and enable the plane to be flown by remote control from the ground in the event of an emergency."
Eh... isn't this exactly what made 9/11 possible? It seems to me that the precision with which the three 'hijacked' planes were driven into the WTC and in particular the Pentagon would be impossible to attain by amateur pilots who even had trouble flying a Cessna. They certainly would either have crashed the plane in front of the Pentagon or skimmed and overflewn it.
And would you trust a US government that would have remote control of the planes you flew in? Not me!
11:09:49 AM
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RawStory: "The CIA operated an interrogation and short-term detention facility for suspected terrorists within a Polish intelligence training school with the explicit approval of British and US authorities, according to British and Polish intelligence officials familiar with the arrangements.
Intelligence officials identify the site as a component of a Polish intelligence training school outside the northern Polish village of Stare Kiejkuty. While previously suspected, the facility has never been conclusively identified as being part of the CIA's secret rendition and detention program.
According to a confidential British intelligence memo shown to Raw Story, Prime Minister Tony Blair told Poland's then-Prime Minister Leszek Miller to keep the information secret, even from his own government."
10:49:30 AM
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CommonDreams: "Voters in three dozen Vermont towns want Congress to begin an impeachment probe of Pres. George W. Bush and Vice Pres. Dick Cheney.
'This is clearly not a cry of protest, but the start of action - an impeachment insurrection that will lead to the reclamation of our Constitution,' said DeWalt. 'Vermonters are angry and energized. We are taking the power that is sovereign in us and will use it to restore the Constitution. We will show the world that America has not sunk to the depths of violent madness that is the Bush administration.'"
GregPalast: "There's only one thing worse than sacking an honest prosecutor. That's replacing an honest prosecutor with a criminal.
There was one big hoohah in Washington yesterday as House Judiciary Chairman John Conyers pulled down the pants on George Bush's firing of US Attorneys to expose a scheme to punish prosecutors who wouldn't bend to political pressure.
But the Committee missed a big one: Timothy Griffin, Karl Rove's assistant, the President's pick as US Attorney for the Eastern District of Arkansas. Griffin, according to BBC Television, was the hidden hand behind a scheme to wipe out the voting rights of 70,000 citizens prior to the 2004 election."
10:41:16 AM
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