Jean Baudrillard dies at 77

Jean Baudrillard, famous for calling our reality a "simulacrum of a simulacrum," has passed away.  I haven’t read anything of Baudrillard’s in quite a long time, but I tend to lump him in the camp who have taken the phenomenal question of authenticity in relatively fruitless directions.  But, reflecting on Baudrillard’s passing, I am trying to appreciate that which has stayed in my brain since my first year of grad. school class on "Modernity and its Critics."  Baudrillard once said that the First Gulf War never really happened…  a lot of people, of course, died as a result of this "unreal" war.  This is not to say that Baudrillard was playing word games with the significance of these people’s lives, that would be unfair… he was playing word games with our understanding of "reality," and to some extent, he was pointing out that we play word games with the deaths of people we will never take in with our own senses, and we do this all of the time…  So this leaves us with an interesting question… facing the death of Baudrillard himself, what can we do that’s so different?