FAR CRICHTON

Hard-hitting investigative journalist Michael Crichton has passed away. He opened the modern world's eyes to the variegated threats of reanimated dinosaurs, nano-terrorists, and foxy female bosses in works such as The Jurassic Strain, Congosphere, and Rising Prey. Though some of his claims would prove to be far-fetched (such as global warming being caused by time-traveling medieval knights), he was a principled voice against the rigorous lies of the everyday. Sources tell us his body is going to be rocketed into outer space, where he will serve as an orbiting beacon to young journalists everywhere.

SCHIRRA, PRINCE OF POWER

Continuing the aviation theme of this week’s posts, we regret to announce the passing away of Apollo astronaut Walter Schirra. Though he never technically flew in space (all pre-shuttle U.S. space missions were executed by robot facsimiles implanted with the astronauts’ brains while their bodies were kept frozen in suspended animation at the National Cooling Chamber in Los Aburres, NV), he will always remain a beloved historical figure, portrayed by Lance “Pumpkinhead” Henrikson in the immortal 1983 astronaut film, All the Right Moves.

There is nothing more to add about Schirra that hasn’t been stated in any of the official obituaries (except for that bit about the robots). With his passing, only two astronauts from the historic Mercury Seven flight remain – John Glenn and Scott Carpenter. With the final survivor standing to take possession of the wives and property of all of his deceased fellows (in addition to the indisputable title of Best Astronaut Ever), you can expect some brutal, Renaissance-style backstabbing between these elderly American flyboys over the coming months.

Throughout this melancholy moment, it is important to remember that outer space will never be out of style. It’s where we came from, after all, and it’s where we’ll be going when the earth explodes in a fiery, psychedelic blast. We salute Wally Schirra, a true hero of the brief period in human history where space travel was actually a novelty.

GONNEGUT

Yesterday newspapers and websites around the globe reported the sad news of the passing of one of the finest investigative journalists of the Twentieth Century, Kurt Vonnegut. Though he never won the Pulitzer Prize, his insightful reporting about the curious byways of the postmodern world shaped the minds and thoughts of a generation, and then some.

A humble Indiana farmboy, he was an undistinguished Pontiac dealer until he was taken prisoner as an American soldier in Germany during World War II, at which time he was forced to aid Werner Heisenberg in his time-travel experiments for the Third Reich. Though ultimately aborted as “too freaky and evil even for Nazis,” the experiments left an indelible mark on young Vonnegut, who returned to America determined to write about the world’s weirder ills.

Following in the footsteps of Sinclair Lewis’s The Jungle, Vonnegut blazed forth on the literary scene with his unblinking expose on the meatpacking industry, Slaughterhouse-Five. But important work both preceded and followed this achievement, including his coverage of the invention of ice-nine, his interviews with literature Nobelist Kilgore Trout, and a biography of WWII-era double agent Howard W. Campbell, Jr.

Though many refer to his books as “novels,” this is merely a matter of style – it’s difficult to deny the bedrock of cold, hard fact upon which they were built. Even when his subjects were as outré as Tralfamadorian race, the fringe religion of Bokononism, or the mythical islands of the Galapagos, he applied the same wry wit and humanist viewpoint that made him a star of the counterculture and a bane of the mainstream media. Though his output slowed in later years, his fiercely independent viewpoint remained strong, even as he began to focus his talents on such fiction offerings as his final book, 2005’s Man Without a Country.

Few voices today dare to tell the truth in terms as brisk and bold as those employed by Vonnegut. Without him, reality will be much harder to come by.

POST MO(DERN)RTEM

The possibility exists that at least one person out there had some form of thought, sentiment, opinion, position or brief, peripheral moment of awareness regarding the death Tuesday of French philosopher Jean Baudrillard. However, since “French” and “philosopher” have been voted the two words most likely to put an American citizen to sleep immediately upon utterance, it’s unlikely that many have taken the time and effort to untangle the various ontological knots that are his legacy.

Best known for devising the concept of the simulacrum and inventing the geodesic dome, Baudrillard spent years building a reputation as one of the densest and most paradoxical of modern thinkers. His theory that the world as we know it has been replaced with a false reality of manufactured image was simplified and adopted by such popular science-fiction films as Soylent Green and The Wedding Singer. But by far the most surprising detail about this man’s life and work is the fact that, like Jesus, he never actually walked the earth.

It’s long been known in the most concentric of literary circles that Baudrillard was a fictional character created by French deconstructionist Jacques Derrida (1930-2004), as the result of a drunken bet that he couldn’t come up with a writer capable of spewing even more garbled theory than himself. This would ordinarily be nothing more than an amusing anecdote in the history of bullshit, but for that the fact that Derrida himself was an invention of French post-structuralist Michel Foucault (1926-1984). As no one else during his lifetime was capable of following his circuitous prose, Foucault concocted Derrida as an imaginary friend, colleague, and occasional gay lover. The conceit stuck, however, and Derrida – like Baudrillard after him – became a notable public figure in his own right.

Foucault himself was the great-grandson of the Marquis de Follard, a 19th-century pedant who appeared throughout the French countryside dispensing phrases of mock wisdom filled with English malapropisms. Little biographical information exists concerning the Marquis, since he was a minor character in Charles Dickens’s little-read 1852 novel A Common Whimmletucket, which followed the adventures of young Horace Whimmletucket as he traversed the Continent pursuing the secret of his mysterious parentage. And since Dickens himself was a speculative creation of the ancient Athenian playwright Aristophanes, well, there you have it.

All of this was not so much predicted by Baudrillard's corpus of learned obfuscation as accurately described after the fact. It takes a simulacrum to know a simulacrum, as the saying may or may not go, and Baudrillard was definitely maybe or maybe not one of them. Rest in peace, man who never was.

ARTHUR TOO: ON THE COCKS

That the mainstream obituaries for Presidential historian Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr. have consistently and shamelessly bollocksed up the facts should come as no surprise. This is because these facts have been largely unavailable, kept under lock and key for decades by the notoriously paranoid, secretive man himself.

In his writings and his life he presented the perfect profile of the genial liberal intellectual, citing the New Deal and John F. Kennedy as avatars of ideal government. But in reality, Schlesinger had no interest in politics whatsoever. His prolific literary and journalistic output was little more than a smokescreen obscuring his true passion: cockfighting.

Now that he is deceased, his story can finally be told – the story of a good farm boy from Indiana who loved nothing more than to watch roosters with blades attached to their feet fight each other to the bloody death. Though on the plains of Indiana such activity was considered socially acceptable, even mandatory in certain parishes, young Schlesinger’s aptitude for raising and training avian carnage machines was so pronounced that wider pastures awaited him. Unfortunately, this activity being illegal, he needed something else to fall back on; this something turned out to be American history.

Rising in the morning, Schlesinger would knock off 5,000 words of whatever historical text he was working on before breakfast, which generally consisted of eggs laid by the hens of defeated roosters. In private interviews with friends, he claimed that writing incisive reportage and analysis was as easy and boring as breathing – though approximately a million times more lucrative. Whether the subject was Andrew Jackson, the rise of multiculturalism in America, or his good friend Kennedy (with whom he shared the bond of bloodlust), his effortlessly analytical left brain did all the work, freeing his right brain for contemplation of the day’s more substantial matter.

In the shadow world of cockfighting, there was no name more respected than that of “El Historiador,” as he was known to his foes. His charges rose through the ranks of the American Bellicose Poultry Association, taking in Top Three titles every year from 1947 through 2002, when he retired from the sport to write a pseudonymous history of its parallel development with American governance. But despite his success, he was no sore winner; among other philanthropical efforts, he anonymously endowed a permanent Cock Bed at Beth Israel Veterinary Center, for the recuperation of his rivals.

The cockfighting world mourns its unsung patriarch equally as much as the three or four people who have read his books. The beak of history has finally impaled Schlesinger and called him home.

BONUS APOCRYPHA: Schlesinger and his son, filmmaker John Schlesinger, fought a pistol duel in 1977 over John’s outspoken repugnance towards his father’s life’s work. They both lost an eye.