RIP: Jean Baudrillard and Captain America

Captain America's last moments, from Captain America #25

So, it's Friday evening and pretty soon I'll be going out to eat with friends. Just enough time for two maudlin pour-a-40-on-the-cerb obituaries: Jean Baudrillard (1929-2007) and Steve Rogers, AKA Captain America (1941-2007). You can guess who got more press coverage, but then something tells me Baudrillard would have appreciated the irony of his death being outshone by the possibly faked and certainly reversible (it's comics after all) death of a fictional character.

If one is to accept the rules of our (post)contemporary language game then perhaps we may say that the above simulacra (de)refers to Jean Baudrillard

Jean Baudrillard's life and work may not have been as viscerally exciting as Cap's but it was real, right? He may have never punched Hitler or been into space or fought in a Superhero Civil War, but he had friends, lovers, critics, interests. Jean Baudrillard breathed, pissed, got drunk and threw up, walked into rooms in and forgot what he was doing, ate too much cake and danced (perhaps badly, perhaps not), just like you and me, right? Because surely there's a clear line between what's real and what isn't, right?
Well, Baudrillard had some interesting things to say about reality and more importantly, hyperreality- the state we're in when Variety, USA Today, The Scotsman and The New York Times can run articles that read like obituaries for a superhero killed in a comic book. Cap', on the other hand, defender of the the nation where hyperreality was born, is a useful guy to have around when discussing the world's sole hyperpower.
To honor them both I'm making the next week The Baudrillard and Captain America Simulated Super-week '07.
So, to kick things off here's Stephen Colbert's reaction to Cap's death, echoing Michael Medved's sentiments (which were in turn borrowed from J. Jonah Jameson, and which I'll address sometime during TB&CASS-w '07)