ABSTRACT
Members of the Bush administration wanted a war without American death or at least a war where visual evidence of death was made difficult to see. Yet when the inevitable dead bodies produced by warfare began to accumulate, the stockpile of images became too hard to hide and the battle over the reality of war, as Baudrillard suggests, took hold. Baudrillard's key insight seems even more pertinent when applied to the dignified transfer ban: it is not a question of being for or against the war. It is a question of being for or against the reality of war. The war for the general public becomes a war without death and a war without any definition, a kind of real-time Civil War re-enactment being fought in distant lands which creates protest opportunities for extreme right Christian groups. The referencing of the bodies forced funeral goers to negotiate the Bush administration's policy decisions about both the war and the dignified transfers.
