Jean Baudrillard, the windblown oracle of postmodern drift,
has shuffled off this mortal coil—as lifeless as the concepts he once spun like
a carousel at a county fair. Baudrillard’s theoretical acrobatics, for all
their labyrinthine flourish, grew predictable the deeper you burrowed, each
page another loop-de-loop in the intellectual funhouse. Compare him to Umberto
Eco, who, in “Travels in Hyper Reality,” tiptoed through the wax museums and
Vegas mirages with a wry wink—a nimbleness that left Baudrillard’s prose
looking like a clanging suit of armor at a mime convention. Let’s not sugarcoat
it: the man’s bibliography is as practically useful as a boxed set of Donald
Rumsfeld’s greatest hits. At his most dazzling, Baudrillard’s words formed a
lush tapestry—riddling, evasive, forever pirouetting just out of reach,
seducing you with the promise of revelation that never quite landed. You didn’t
so much understand what he said as enjoy the bravura performance, the sound and
the fury, signifying… well, you decide. At his worst, he’s a cousin to Walter
Benjamin: entrenched in labyrinthine jargon, afraid to be understood lest the
emperor’s new clothes be exposed to daylight. What did Baudrillard really say,
in all keys and registers? Only that the authentic, the natural, the solid
ground we ache to reclaim is a mirage—if it ever existed at all—and that our
attempts to resist, rebel, or reform are but shadow-boxing in an endless hall
of mirrors. All is replication, echoes chasing echoes, history’s finale
replayed in infinite rerun. Nothing to be done. So, the show goes on—consume
the spectacle, play your assigned bit part, and let the powerbrokers with their
microphones, their military props, their media marionettes, script the
proceedings. Give Baudrillard credit: he was a virtuoso at dissecting paradox,
at cataloguing the perverse, the counterfeit, the blatantly bogus. But as for
actual solutions? Not a sausage. My take? Baudrillard was a high priest of
nihilism, and postmodernism’s slickest trick is to seduce us into paralysis, to
cash in our chips for a round of cultivated ennui. His prose chases its own
tail, each argument canceling itself, leaving only the hum of unresolved
ambiguity. In the end, his vaunted “liberation” is a smoke ring: after the
evasions are spent, those on the margins—the criminal, the student, the LGBTQ
dissidents, the perpetually othered—are left with a poetry of entropy as the
powerful pocket the winnings. The prescription? Exactly what the neocons crave:
tuck yourself in, shut your eyes, and let the grownups manage the machinery
while you dream of authenticity that never was.
