General Mills recently announced the launch of Baudrillard Crunch. This is a typically American choice. Had the French thought of it first, it certainly would have been Baudrillard Snaps. The snap is a clean gesture; immediate and unmistakable. The snap has a precision that even a Gambian could appreciate, but the American doesn't like his precision until after breakfast. A 9 AM board meeting should for the American begin with a snap, but as he dribbles his low-fat milk upon his synthetic flannel pajamas, he prefers a meal that goes crunch. Something he can sink his teeth into. To feel before the 9 AM board meeting that he has already taken a bite out of the world.

Then there's the Zhombi by Kia, a sporty little sedan priced well within the range of those who like their breakfast to crunch. It is possible I suppose that this car may have been named for the snuffed-out little beauty queen from Colorado, but if that were the case it should have been made as a concept car and stuck in a museum somewhere. A thing dead to the world, the concept car. But the Zhombi is functional, and like "Jean B." it can get you from A to B. You may not know where you are when you arrive, but the important part of driving there in a Zhombi is that you got there in style.

I could go on with further examples of the ubiquity of Baudrillard such as his ability to anchor three separate network news shows simultaneously or his facility for being both the pitch man for condoms and the browbeating voice that encourages youngsters to abstinence on Sundays. This fellow Baudrillard has absolutely no scruples about being all things to all people and simultaneously having absolutely no substance which one can ascribe to him definitively. The man is a thixotropic substance; a slime oozing from the very pores of everything to which he sets his deductive powers. Like his distant cousin, Savoir Faire, Baudrillard, a cartoon himself, "is everywhere." And because he is everywhere, he can be, in the end, nothing, and nowhere. Baudrillard's presence renders whatever he approaches a simulacra of itself, by the same method a ray of sunshine renders whatever it touches to be light.

I, on the other hand, will never be Jean Baudrillard. I do not adorn any product, or even set my mind to analyzing any of the spaces I inhabit. Instead when I park myself somewhere and settle upon some deportment and a countenance which illustrates it, I do so with my full intention and presence, which absolutely destroys any possibility of simulacra. I allow myself to be defined, and in so doing I deflect the possibility of a multiplicity of meanings. With no multiplicity of meanings there is nothing which can be devoid of meaning. What is not devoid of meaning intrinsically can not be or become Jean Baudrillard. Try as I might to be the post-modern phenom, to be the poster boy for slick packaging and media savvy, I have become an utter failure at being empty of semiotic valuations. Even my nom de plume has been exposed before ever I set pen to paper. Affixed to the world for all to see like a butterfly in a lepidopterist's display case or a man-God hybrid grounded by his Father forever.

Christ may be able to be Jean Baudrillard. He is the King of the Multiplicity of Meanings. (He? Which?) I, However, harbor no ambiguities of this sort, and that is why I will never be Jean Baudrillard.