2/11/2005

Lincoln and Baudrillard, together again

Apropos of the childish rhetoric highlighted in yesterday's post, can you believe this headline: "Historic (and Sacred) Landmark to be Restored"? It refers to a modern replica of Lincoln's early home.

"I feel as if the Lord was in this place," commented former slave J.H. Coates at the Lincoln Log Cabin in Milton. Since that day in the 1920s, thousands have made the pilgrimage to this replica of Lincoln's symbolic birthplace commissioned by Mary Bowditch Forbes in 1923 and erected in the backyard of the Forbes mansion, now the Forbes House Museum, a national historic landmark, at 215 Adams St., Milton.

Pure Baudrillard. The representation of the thing has displaced the thing it is representing. It even exists in the shadow of a meaning (a mansion) that renders it visibly absurd. That's hyper-reality.

Meanwhile in an alternate universe that sometimes does hyper-reality one better, it seems that Lincoln, NE, was actually named "Lincoln" to spite Democrats pushing for a new capital of Nebraska, as a kind of poisoning of legislation - which means that the representation of the the thing (the honor) has nothing to do with the act (the naming).

You take the names of state capitals at face value and where does it get you?