Bloggrokker (Scott) 9/5

Whaddaya know, another celebrity death occurred this past week.
Or, more precisely, perhaps I should say another celebrity postmodern sayonara occurred this past week.
You know who I'm talkin' 'bout. Internationally beloved zoological maniac Steve Irwin, aka the Crocodile Hunter, bit it hard and, from the looks of things, rather painfully, a few days ago.
Before I say a few words regarding Irwin's postmodern-tinged big finish, let me just say that I consider myself a shameless admirer of the Crocodile Hunter's specific brand of "cable-ized" craziness. Anyone who mud-wrestles crocodiles, waltzes with mambas, and chases Komodo dragons around, all the while promoting conservationism and understanding for the world's cold-blooded creatures, is mighty fine with me.
Television alway benefits from nuthatches. It's kept Sam Donaldson on the air all these years, hasn't it?
Anyway, Irwin's death is, like just about every other celebrity death, a posmodern event. Specifically, his untimely end works on the levels of absurdity, simulacra, and the waning of effect.
Absurdity? For a guy who agitated the biggest and the baddest in the herpetological canon for a living, getting his heart pierced with a stingray's barb is a dizzying height of the absurd. I don't think there's been such an odd passing since Jayne Mansfield's automobile-inflicted decapitation--and if you know of Mansfield's supposed connection with Church of Satan head-beelzebub Anton LaVey, things get odder and odder still. Absurdity and Irwin's death? It nearly comes across like a Monty Python sketch, were it not for the sobering cliche claiming "you just can't make this stuff up."
Oh, but you can make it up. And they did make it up--him up. They made up Steve Irwin as a simulacrum. Irwin's tv image, for the great majority of us, is truly more real than the original--so real that the original might be considered a template. I believe this is true for all celebrities. Simulacra lend immortality. And television, along wih the Internet, is The Great Postmodern Immortalizer.
And the Great Postmodern Immortalizer of the Internet spews forth the waning of effect. I know there's online footage of Irwin's final moments, probably on YouTube, if my internal e-compass is correct. I refuse to click on it, just as I refused to click on the online grotesquerie of Daniel Pearl's beheading (beginning to see a morbid motif running here) by his Afghan killers. I don't want a reminder of po-mo desensiization. There are some things simulacra can't erase.
Then again, in the Postmodern Age, even the death of the simulacrum itself is a simulacrum. An afterlife is a paradise of bits and pixels.
RIP (Reel in Postmodernity?), Steve Irwin.
See you in the future, perhaps gracing the commodified billboard of a Wheaties box.