...he is just simulated that way.
The Guardian has one of the more informative obituaries. The Times of London gives a bit more detail. As for the New York Times, Baudrillard's most significant achievement was having the cover of his book, "Simulations and Simulacrum," featured in the film Matrix. Baudrillard claimed that the filmmakers misunderstood his work, and I probably do as well, but I am sure he would have made something out of how the obituary writer internalized the replacement of reality with media simulations.
The title of this diary is an obvious play on the title of one of his works, "The Gulf War Did Not Take Place" about how the first Gulf War was more of a media event than an actual war, with Saddam simply sacrificing his troops to stay in power while the US just bombed away more for show than to achieve any strategic objective, leaving the power structure on the ground intact.
The title is also making fun of how close he came to seriously arguing that reality is an illusion. He was one of those postmodernists that Alan Sokal had in mind for his infamous hoax in Social Text. Sokal was an old-school physicist who insisted that reality exists, as well as an old-school leftist who insisted that social problems and class oppression also really exist.
Just as simulacra were, for Baudrillard, the truths that covered for the absence of any truth, the impenetrably dense jargon-studded prose of the postmodernists, poorly translated from French, concealed the absence of any intelligible argument. It is easy, perhaps too easy, to poke fun at them. The 'real' left tried to do so when graduate students and book publishers switched from serious social analyses to this pompous babble. Many of them were so put off by this blatant pretentiousness that they were slow to grasp the significance and relevance of scholars of the same generation, such as Foucault or Bourdieu, who were also difficult and French.
Rightwingers such as Horowitz took full advantage of this hollowness in Academia to launch their war to subordinate universities to the agendas of conservative politicians but attacked genuine scholarship along with the fluff. Postmodernists lumped all their critics in with conservative culture warriors and refused to acknowledge that some of them had a serious case to make.
I am tempted to join in the mocking of Baudrillard, but amidst all his posing and pomposity there were some real, insightful observations such as the following from Simulations and Simulacra:
Is any given bombing in Italy the work of leftist extremists, or extreme-right provocation, or a centrist mis-en-scène to discredit all extreme terrorists and to shore up its own failing power, or again, is it a police-inspired scenario and a form of blackmail to public security? All of this is simultaneously true, and the search for proof, indeed the objectivity of the facts does not put an end to this vertigo of interpretation.
Such a "vertigo of interpretation" might be the kernel of truth in all those silly 9/11 conspiracy theories. While we insist on a reality-based political perspective, Baudrillard's attention to the blurring of that reality by representations of representations in the media does give us a few tools for coping with the present political climate.
Do I even need to mention here the constellation of Bush, the denial of evolution and global warming, Norquist, and Fox news? Do I even need to point out that it is people like Rove who made the best use of Baudrillard's insights, whether they knew it or not, rather that the oppressed that the posties claimed would be liberated?