I finished reading America, by Jean Baudrillard published in 1986.  It is Baudrillard’s reflection upon his stay in this country, a rough parallel to the commentary by Alexis de Tocqueville in 1835.  A recurring theme for Baudrillard is a comparison between the desert and the cities, especially Los Angeles. The concluding chapter is entitled Desert Forever, is the French author’s effort in a final stroke to persuade that the difference between the American character and the European, and thus America’s future is inexorable, definitive.  His language is poetic, explosive metaphorical rhetoric.

This country is without hope.

Even its garbage is clean, its trade lubricated, its traffic lubricated,
its traffic pacified.
The latent, lacteal, the lethal – life is so liquid,
signs and messages are so liquid, the bodies and cars so fluid,
the hair so blond, and the soft technologies so luxuriant,
that a European dreams of death and murder, of suicide motels,
or orgies and cannibalism to counteract
the perfection of the ocean, of the light, of that insane ease of life,
to counteract the hyperreality of everything here…..

This country is without hope.

We fanatics of aesthetics and meaning, of culture,
of flavor and seduction,
we who see only what is profoundly moral as beautiful
and for whom the heroic distinction between nature and culture is exciting,
we who are unfailingly attached to the wonders of the critical sense
and transcendence
find it a mental shock and a unique release to discover
the fascination of nonsense of this vertiginous disconnection,
as sovereign in the cities as in the deserts.

To discover than one can exult
in the liquefaction of all culture
and rejoice in the consecration of in-difference.

I speak of the American deserts
and of the cities which are not cities.
No oases, no monuments;
infinite panning shots over mineral landscapes and freeways.
Everywhere: Los Angeles, or Twenty-Nine Palms,
Las Vegas or Borrego Springs….

No desire: the desert.
Desire is still something deeply natural,
we live off of its vestiges in Europe,
and off the vestiges of a moribund critical culture.
Here all cities are mobile deserts.
No monuments and no history: the exaltation of mobile deserts
and simulation.
There is the same wildness in the endless,
indifferent cities as in the intact silence of the Badlands.
Why is LA, why are the deserts so fascinating?
It is because you are delivered from all depth there
— a brilliant, mobile, superficial neutrality, a challenge to meaning and profundity,
a challenge to nature and culture, an outer hyperspace,
with no origin, no reference-points.

Excerpt, America by Jean Baudrillard p. 123 published 1986

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Thirty four years have passed since the description of America by the French sociologist and philosopher.  Are we now discovering the consequence of life in a society, in cities with no origin and no reference- points?  The pandemic spreads exponentially in the west and southern states in the absence of a national public health strategy to reduce it’s deadly effects until a vaccine is introduced.  Citizens are subjected to a fire hose of propaganda, of science denial, false information from Fox News, Breitbart, and other social media outlets.  Negotiations between the political parties and the White House have broken down on additional financial stimulus needed by citizens and towns and schools.  Without additional support, under pandemic fears for public safety, — endangered institutions, and households face financial ruin.

Indeed it appears we are in outer hyperspace, without origin, or reference-point.