"Power itself has for along time produced nothing but the signs of its resemblance. And at the same time, another figure of power comes into play: that of a collective demand for signs of power - a holy union that is reconstructed around its disappearance. The whole world adheres to it more or less in terror of the collapse of the political. And in the end the game of power becomes nothing but the critical obsession with power-obsession with its death, obsession with its survival, which increases as it disappears. When it has totally disappeared, we will logically be under the total hallucination of power - a haunting memory that is already in evidence everywhere, expressing at once the compulsion to get rid of it (no one wants it anymore, everyone unloads it on everyone else) and the panicked nostalgia over its loss. The melancholy of societies without power: this has already stirred up fascism, that overdoes of a strong referential in a society that cannot terminate its mourning" p. 23"...power is in essence no longer present except to conceal that there is no more power." p.26
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George W. Bush is a thanksgiving dinner.
The central problem of this quote from Baudrillard is his conflation of politics with power. If politics does have something to do with power, then this image (of GW in the place of power) misses the mark, since GW has nothing to do with politics. He only ever was a thanksgiving dinner.
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