Pope's health troubles continue. I wonder, watching the stock footage of audiences, if all famous people are essentially vanishing into the same template within the mediated hyperreality. Is there any qualitative difference in seeing the Pope struggle with mortality, compared to the same case with another famous person or politician? Or has the television inured us to the ideal dimensions of the event, and there is now no difference between these figures qualitatively, in terms of the idea of who it is that we are seeing a video of. (News these days comes from the UK newspaper sites and YouTube.)
It seems the idea no longer governs, and the representation, albeit in millions of reproductions, makes us think of everyone as basically the same entity in relation to us. After Joyce's newspaper report "the snow was general over Ireland," we have the ongoing television coverage of mortality, general over the species.