I think it started with the first actor President.
I should re-read _America_, 1988, Jean Baudrillard.
"You have the same difficulty today distinguishing between a process and its simulation, for example between a flight and a flight simulation. America, too, has entered this era of undecidability: is it still really powerful or merely simulating power?"
"Can Reagan be considered the symbol of present-day American society - a society which, having once possessed the original features of power, is now perhaps at the face-lift stage?
Give your emptiness and indifference to others, light up your face with the zero degree of joy and pleasure, smile, smile, smile. . . Americans may have no identity, but they do have wonderful teeth. And it works."
The simulation, the movie, is greater than the dispossessed actuality, whatever that may be. A movie is visceral, gut thinking, truth. Why fight it, as long as there is a chicken in every pot.
