If one were feeling charitable, one might assume that something essential to these profundities got lost in translation. I think it far more likely, however, that it did not survive translation into French. If Baudrillard had been obliged to live in Afghanistan under the Taliban, would he have thought that the horrible abridgment of his freedom were a matter of the United States's "effort always to be the unique world model" ? Would the peculiar halftime entertainment at every soccer match—where suspected fornicators, adulterers, and thieves were regularly butchered in the dirt at center field—have struck him as the first rumblings of a "terroristic situational transfer" ? We may be beyond politics, but we are not in the least "beyond ideology" now. Ideology is all that our enemies have .41