Welcome to the Desert of the Real

The poststructuralist philosopher Jean Baudrillard used the phrase to describe the hyperreal condition. Professor Larry McCaffery used it to help popularize the technocultural narrative that William Gibson made popular in his seminal novel Neuromancer. Actor Laurence Fishburne, known more popularly as Morpheus to fans of The Matrix, offered the same welcome to Keanu Reeves' character Neo -- the hyperreal Everyman -- as he unplugged from an immersive program broadcasting the end of the Earth. But the mainstream, whether in academia or media, considered all of them to be overtheorized asshats.

But as the United States awakes from its own addictive simulations, injected daily by the draconian Bush administration and its Republican enablers, it has walked blinking into that very desert of the real. And what a desert: From a violent Iraqmire and a parched Darfur to a planet slowly melting, the real world's emergent desert is nothing like the hyperreal Oz gifted to the rich, courtesy of not just President Bush's hideous tax cuts but also the Republican party's constant grifting. But it is a desert of our making, literally and metaphorically, and America has decided finally to unplug from the matrix and embrace the real. At least for now.

And so it is the the Republicans lost the House in a tide of public turnout, and barely saved the Senate. (Let's wait until the recounts are sorted out before we all start hugging.) To be sure, that's nothing to crow about, as the Bush administration has fortified itself against the type of political power that the legislative branch can muster. That's why it spent its reign immunizing itself against war crimes and stocking the Supreme Court with supporters like Samuel Alito and John Roberts.

And the strategic implementation of hyperreality has not waned, and the Democrats are part of the problem. In his victory speech, Rahm Emanuel said that his party's victorious night was due to those who wanted "real reform," not a good thing to cheer about when reform would have done just fine, thanks. Because it is reform itself, not a hyperreal "real reform" that plays nicely as rhetoric but awful as an index of competence, that people want, now more than ever. And they have elected Democrats to the House to start the process and produce results. Ones that can be corroborated in the real world, not the Real World.