First, I would like to compliment Luke Bailey’s ongoing commitment to his conservative values. He always represents a position that favors precedence, tradition and hesitance. For him, truly the past is a lost treasure.
I find it particularly ironic, then, that Bailey’s latest column, “Modern world has become one of ‘fakery,’” tends toward rather postmodern philosophical methods. Bailey’s opening conceit invokes the imaginary apparatus that is Disney World against the proper, historical castle, in order to illustrate the “real gilded society” in which we now live as “faux-people.” In some ways, Bailey is quite correct. The Disney World he describes is similar to the “hyper-real” Disneyland Jean Baudrillard references in “Simulation and Simulacra.” It is a state of consciousness in which reality cannot be separated from simulations of reality.
Nor is this necessarily problematic. If, in hyperreality, the simulation overtakes the real, eventually the simulation is reality. I do not intend on Disney World or consumerism to be the simulated reality of the future. It is possible, instead, for a new program to arise.
In this sense, I depart fully from Bailey. He vests in the past far too romantic a notion: nostalgia for a time he’s never experienced. He selects the symbol of the authentic past as a castle. Is there a more perfect image of hierarchy, patriarchy, undemocratic principles and imperial solitude? The castle, after all, requires a king.
Furthermore, Bailey says we are a people that do asinine things in the eyes of our ancestors. Indeed, flight, let alone space flight, would have been truly asinine to our forebears. Fire, too, was once cutting-edge technology.
Beyond Bailey’s Luddite principles, I find it most interesting that he himself, the one who so clearly judges authenticity and propriety, falls victim to hyperreality. In order to demonstrate, as the hoary Bailey patriarch puts it, “real life,” we are directed to a contemporary film. I cannot help but think Bailey’s perceived sense of the past is as simulated as the theme park he rails against.
Ryan Fenton
UF alumnus
