post class

“What's it gonna be? Are you real to me? Or are you non-dairy... creamer?” Listening to this Third eye blind song trough mw back right into CMC 100 and Rolland Barthes text “Operation Margarine” came back to my mind right away. This added to the Baudrillard and Zizek reading I knew that we were going to start talking about the cool stuff that makes me so exited and so depressed at the same time to be aware of it. When Baudrillard introduces the idea of simulacra, he speaks first of simulation: “To simulate is to feign to have what one doesn’t have. It implies absence”. Reading this is not scary yet, BUT it’s realizing as we read further and as we discuss in class that much of everything around us now is a simulacra. We live in a “non-dairy creamer world” where all that is handed to us, shown to us, around us is not real anymore but just a representation of it. This is getting so bad that we no longer seem to know the difference between real and simulation. What saddens me is as we in Baudrillard’s text, simulation implies an absence, that means that because we don’t have “the real thing” we replace them with something “fake”, But I don’t want margarine on my toast! I want butter, and I don’t want advertisements’ telling me margarine is just like butter, it’s not!

This brings me to our discussion on Disney and Epcot. I have been to both and enjoyed those places as a child but I can’t say that now I do not see an issue with those theme parks. Someone in class today said that a place like Epcot is great because it can to a certain extent educate kids on the world, as they’re not going to open an atlas. Well for me that’s a huge problem. Because if a kid has no clue about it (which I think that’s what school is for, educating us) well, going to Epcot will probably make him or her think that that is the real thing or at least close to it when it is not at all but just a doll world of fantasies. We as CMC majors may go there for fun and entertainment realizing that it is a simulacrum, but what about other people who are not aware of this? They take in all the information but not realize there is, as R.Barthes would put it a huge privation of history. I don’t want people to see the pavilion of France next to the one of England and Germany and not realize that not everything was always at peace in lalaland like this. Another issue that it touches is metonymy. Since when does Venice engulf all of Italy, or the Eiffel tower all of France? We need to be more aware of what is around us and question if we believe things because we think the source is valid or because we thought about it.