The Deaths of Ernest Gallo, Jean
Baudrillard, and Captain America1
Raincoaster.com website
Captain America
According to
legend, Ernest and Julio Gallo started their first winery in 1933. Using a
$5,000 loan from Ernest’s mother-in-law and Julio’s savings of $900 the two
brothers rented a cement warehouse in their home town of Modesto, California,
and began making wines. With the help of a recipe they found in some
prohibition-era leaflets in the basement of the Modesto library they made
ordinary wines for the bargain price of 50 cents a gallon – half the going
rate. In their first year in business, they made $30,000 and an empire was
born.
Pause, for a moment, to
contemplate the meaninglessness of the so-called death of the irritatingly
dense and famously obscure French intellectual Jean Baudrillard. In the Guardian
we read:
Jean Baudrillard’s death did not take
place. “Dying is pointless,” he once wrote, “you have to know how to
disappear.” The New Yorker reported a reading the French sociologist
gave in a New York gallery in 2005. A man from the audience, with the recent
death of Jacques Derrida in mind, mentioned obituaries, and asked Baudrillard:
“What would you like to be said about you? In other words, who are you?”
Baudrillard replied: “What I am, I don’t know. I am the simulacrum of myself.”2
Baudrillard, whose simulacrum has
departed at the age of 77, attracted widespread notoriety for predicting that
the first Gulf war, of 1991, would not take place. During the war, he said it
was not really taking place. After its conclusion, he announced that it had not
taken place. This prompted some to characterize him as yet another continental
philosopher who reveled in a disreputable contempt for truth and reality.
Finally, we have
America’s answer to the French Intellectual: the costumed superhero. Remove
your cowl, clutch your cape to your heart, and stand with me, united in
grief, over the senseless slaughter of Captain America. As a symbol of waning imperial
power, it is unmistakable. Captain America, the stars-and-stripes wearing,
blond and blue-eyed “pinnacle of human physical perfection”, is dead. The Marvel
Comics superhero, aka Steve Rogers, was gunned down by a sniper in the
latest installment of the comic.
The death of the man
who was rejected by the army because he was too scrawny, but went on to take a
“super soldier serum” to turn him into the ultimate warrior, came as a blow to
his creator, 93-year-old Joe Simon. “We really need him now,” Simon told the
Associated Press on learning of the death of his creation. I’m wondering if
they’ve checked alibis for the Justice League.
© Raincoaster.com
Endnotes
]