In celebration of the Fourth of July, Artforum revisits Jean Baudrillard’s “Astral America,” the French philosopher’s disquisition-cum-travelogue chronicling a journey across the United States. Shifting between giddy wonder and sputtering spleen, the onetime Artforum contributing editor meditates on such ur-American phenomena as Halloween (a “sarcastic holiday”), the New York Marathon (“an end-of-the-world spectacle”), and the eastern gray squirrel (“a fierce and frozen being whose fear lies in wait for you”). “This American universe,” he concludes, “rotten with wealth, with power, with senility, with indifference, with puritanism and mental hygiene, with misery and waste, with technological vanity and useless violence—I cannot stop myself from seeing in it the morning of the world.”  —The editors