Jean Baudrillard's 'America'

[lsvhwow]

Another strong effort, we are lucky to have you

[sgspecialfaded]

There is no contradiction between saying Americans smile a lot and saying they don't look at each other. We smile in highly prescribed situations-- at the store counter, at introductions, etc--, but those are relatively infrequent. Most of the time people studiously avoid recognition of others (at least in urban and suburban Yankee America, the South or small towns or wherever might be different).

[lsvhwow]

I re-listened to this a few times, I really like your perspective on it. I wanted to talk about the quote at 41:00, I had a completely different reading of it. It seems to me that you are saying "look at all the blaming going on, people are always pointing out others flaws", which is literally true, but I have a couple thoughts.

1) He is describing America of something-like 30 years ago. If we describe America as a concept, it has clearly been going through a type of formative change, before then, during that time, and certainly since then. It has been in flux in my opinion, even if one would argue it is a "surface-level" flux and maybe the same issues we have wrestled with for a while.
2) That said, I do think something is changing. For example, Howard Dean's "yelp" was a moment that stood out as singular, Jon Edwards affair, etc, something of a dichotomy where "nothing matters" on the right (they ran an accused pedophile and Donald Trump, who is a verifiable fraud) and somehow simultaneously even the left (Monica lewinsky was kind of hyperreal, that kind of stuff happens all the time, fake outrage). I think we saw a sort of hyperreal response to things in the years-long wake of Baudrillard making that comment, which still doesn't give credit to the point -- about "caring". It was more like people kind of saying "hey wait, shouldn't THIS matter?" This being X political outrage. You can substitute Abu Ghraib etc, anything in there. None of it seems to matter. Except things that 'directly' affect constituents, ostensibly. Women I know seem to vote in large part on reproductive rights, either for or against. But they aren't factoring in Abu Ghraib or the Financial Crisis except in some kind of out-lier. And even if you are, which party does one vote for to avoid sanctioning war crimes, deregulation and fraud? We can't even blame these guys anymore, there is no alternative, we are more like "hostages" to this new hyperreality.
3) So making the point that we kind of pushed the limit of trying to "care" about things (ecological crisis - which was really pushed as 1 part "the world could end" and 2 parts "Al Gore crying about losing the election", so no surprise people failed to buy into it. The most impact we are seeing there is to add a new option for corporations to market themselves as "green" and charge more accordingly. Or to market new changes to existing product lines as "green" or more recyclable. etc. It is like a corporate ecological ethos, not one from and by the people. It is one to make you feel good about the excess purchased at the cash register (but not even that good -- just a hyperreal "good" feeling), after making the point that we've pretended to "care" about all these things we've done (I'd say that isn't possible), I'd say people are kind of acknowledging that they don't care now. How many scandals and disasters of the Trump administration ostensibly would have taken down past world leaders. Financial fraud, still ongoing, basically the raison-d'etre for this regime, and people are still acting like things are relatively normal. The cracks are beginning to show but this "blame" we see at trump et al, I'd posit it is pretty hyperreal. The more of this blaming we see the less change will come from it, since it has proliferated into the open, and we can't even try or pretend to keep up with it anymore, it all just seems disingenuous somehow.
4) Basically I'm saying it went from "no one seems to care about the mistakes by these world leaders" to some people sort of loudly pseudo-trying to prove they do care, but many of those efforts proving plastic and futile, we end up back at square 1, today, when scandal after scandal occur yet we see less and less protests. Protesting seems kind of banal now. What do you even begin to protest? So people just admit, they don't really care about these mistakes, except so much as they can laugh at the people making them, and feel better about themselves/the whole masquerade?
5) To put a positive spin on it, I don't think we can possibly "go right back to square 1", I think today actually just looks a lot more similar to what Baudrillard understood intuitively. It is possible we are shedding our belief in these systems of government, even if not openly or on the superficial level, through the election of people like Trump, who incidentally destroy the respect in their institutions simply by "functioning" within them. So what comes after that? Radical change? probably not. Hopefully some sort of new understanding of what we are dealing with, rather than this accursed share-type situation where we are destined to allow a super-elite class waste us away. People forget how many aren't voting, how many people "just don't care", in the background of all these loud people that claim to. The other thing I remember Baudrillard decrying was that bankers who are openly greedy, (similarly, politicians who are openly liars/frauds) steal away our power of denunciation. I think that is an important idea here, because he would make the argument often that even if something is taken away that doesn't mean it is gone, it will just take a new form. Maybe something like a shared denunciation, where everyone can acknowledge their blame in the process after the fact.

[briankoontz]

We live in the aftermath of the failed quest of Modernity, to maximize the speed of technological development and escape Earth. In 1968 the Manabe/Wetherald atmospheric model was popularized which ended Modernity (already having been greatly weakened by the perpetual threat of nuclear annihilation).

The culture that Baudrillard describes is both a parody of Modernity and a desperate unwillingness to accept defeat. 1968 initiated the delusion that capitalism still mattered, a delusion welcomed because there's little purpose to socialism in a dying world - it would just give the world's population a bigger pile of owned goods to turn into ash as human extinction approaches.

The world's population is meaningless, living in order to perpetuate life and nothing more (since 1968), but the emotional impact of the death of Modernity is overwhelmingly felt in the United States, which was its torchbearer after WWII, and in Europe, which initiated and led Modernity's quest to transport some portion of the human population away from Earth for most of its development.

Much as a child destroys the sand castle after he's done building it, the Earth was never intended to survive industrialization. The goal was to move toward the new center of the universe, at first the Sun, and then an unknown location far from Earth. A destroyed Earth was perfectly fine - the humans who mattered weren't going to be living there for long anyway.

[myguitardidyermom]

the passage on Reagan's smile still gives me the heeby jeebies.