First & Last Postmortem on the Presidential Body 1
3
POSTMORTEM ON THE PRESIDENTIAL BODY
or, Where the Rest of Him Went
In a 1984 foreign policy media blitz across China, the 'Great Communicator'
evidenced an affinity for the 'Great Unifier,' Qin Shi Huangdi, the brutal First Emperor
of the unified Chinese state. Ronald Reagan found the Great Wall built by the Qin
Emperor "awe-inspiring." "Imagine carrying boulders up here," he said wistfully. Would
he like to have a Great Wall of his own? "Around the White House," he joked, drawing
circles in the air. He would later pose among the ranks of the terra cotta soldiers
protecting the Emperor's tomb, playfully substituting his own head for that of a
decapitated imperial guard. Reagan was never more serious than when he was
joking.1
The Reagan presidency reintroduced the body of the leader as an effective
mechanism in US politics. With it resurfaced reminders of a despotic past, attitudes
First & Last Postmortem on the Presidential Body 2
and images that would seem more at home in ancient China or Rome, or in the France
of Louis XIV, than in late-capitalist America. For all his archaism, Reagan worked. And
to a surprising extent, he worked through the vehicle of his body. It will be
maintained that he is still at work, even after his practical withdrawal from the
political scene; and that he will continue to be at work, even after his belated death.
United States policy under Bush has followed the political course set by Reagan blow
by blow, Panama for Grenada, Saddam Hussein for Khomeini. Bush staged an even
more crowd-pleasing Middle East hostage drama than his mentor had, escalating from
threats to open war as he merrily set about trying to bomb his way to the mother of
all reelections, in bloody one-upsmanship over the behind-the-scenes negotiations
with Iran that had crowned Reagan's first term inauguration [Gary Sick, "The Election
Story of the Decade," New York Time, 15 April 1991, A15]. The point is that Reagan's
ghost is in the patriotic machine. The goal of this chapter is to identify the remains.
Question: how can the evident archaism of Reagan's withdrawn body be reconciled
with the unfortunate fact of its contemporary functioning?
Reagan, like the First Emperor, made unification his political mission. In
Reagan's case, it was a reunification, of a 'spiritual' rather than territorial nature. The
1960s had torn America apart at the seams. Ronald Wilson Reagan would heal the
'wounds' of Vietnam.
Close-up to Infinity
First & Last Postmortem on the Presidential Body 3
"The story begins with a close-up of a bottom." That is the opening line of
Reagan's first autobiography, written in 1965 for use in his campaign for the
governorship of California. At the dawn of his political career, Reagan signposts the
body that would serve him so well. "My face was blue from screaming, my bottom was
red from whacking, and my father claimed afterward that he was white." [Reagan and
Hubler 1981:3] Reagan points to his body, and it is familial. His body is one with his
family, and both are one with the country. By virtue of their color scheme. Red,
white, and blue. Reagan habitually draped himself in the flag. It was a constant of his
career. One need only think of the decor at Republican conventions. Individual body,
family, and country are presented as having a common substance: the fabric of the
flag. Their combined strength is embodied in it. It is their sum. Their sum, plus some.
For there is a remainder to the equation. Body, family, country add up to a whole
greater than the sum of its parts, just as a pattern of stars and stripes adds up to
more than a cloth. The flag is not only a materialization of unity; it is the fabric of
greatness. In it, three are one. Not just any one: Number One: 'the greatest nation on
earth.' The flag is the repository of an excess attributed to terms in an equation.
Outside of the equation, the same terms would be noticeably lacking. They would
have only an incomplete, more or less brutish existence. The flag elevates and
animates them. It is the material embodiment of their 'spirit'--the 'American spirit'
incarnate. Those it enthralls attribute it almost magical powers to bring forth and
replenish. It is the objectified presence of the subjective essence shared by three
interrelated terms in the patriotic equation. As such, it is more precious than the
merely mortal terms it brings together. "I don't give a damn," said the veteran,
First & Last Postmortem on the Presidential Body 4
"whether it's the protester's civil right or not. I fought to protect the American flag,
not to protect him." [Newsweek, 3 July 1989, p. 18]
Body, family, country share a common substance that unites them but at the
same time seems to exist on a higher plane than they. The substance that unifies
paradoxically inhabits a world apart. One, two, three, plus unity makes four: body,
family, country, flag. Multiplicity is a stubborn thing. No problem. Four, and many
more, will be as one, in a second kind of unifying substance. "I have heard," Reagan's
autobiography continues, "more than one psychiatrist say that we imbibe our ideals
from our mother's milk. Then, I must say, my breast feeding was the home of the
brave baby and the free bosom." The motherland. Now body/family/country not only
have a common substance, but a shared energetic principle or generative fluid:
mother's milk (five). The flag brings forth and replenishes because mother's milk soaks
its fabric like blood flowing in the veins of the new-born baby. The nation's
procreative fluid is not seminal. It is maternal, and the maternal is presented as
sexless. Nations reproduce by non-sexual means.
First & Last Postmortem on the Presidential Body 5
More than four: the flag is not the only common substance pumped with
procreative fluid. The motherland got a 'facelift' for American Independence Day in
1986: school children across the country were asked to contribute their lunch money
to scrub and refurbish another spirit of America, chaste 'Miss Liberty.' The unveiling of
the new and improved Statue of Liberty coincided with one of the peaks in Reagan's
popularity. Reagan himself was the prime-time master of ceremonies for one of the
most expensive and self-indulgent displays of patriotic fervor in living memory.
"WOW!," ran a cover of Newsweek announcing a "Portrait of Miss Liberty on Her
Birthday Bash" [14 July 1986]. In this and countless other exultant press stories, every
alleged American virtue and victory was described as Miss Liberty's personal
accomplishment. Reagan, a kind of spiritual bridegroom bathed in a fountain of youth
of floodlights and fireworks, stood faithfully by her side--when he wasn't standing on
First & Last Postmortem on the Presidential Body 6
her pedestal. A New York Times illustration of a statuesque Reagan wearing Miss
Liberty's crown was a typical image of the period.2
What at first seemed to be a simple, stable structure of three homologous
terms turns out to be much more complicated. The would-be substance of unity takes
its place in a proliferating series. It is as though the structure were undermined by an
imbalance it could not permanently correct. A lack in the brute materiality of the
three base terms is compensated for by a supplementary term operating in a higher
dimension. The supplementary term succeeds in filling the lack; but it overfills it,
turning it into an excess. The imbalance is still there, but has changed signs, from a
negative to a positive.3 There is always a remainder of spirit that cannot be contained
in a given substance of unity, and must therefore be absorbed by another: from flag
to statue. The excess haunts the reunification series, turning up again at each
successive term. Its omnipresence is acknowledged in an image of a life-giving fluid
suffusing all solid states of unity, acting as the energetic principle of their serial
progression. The minus sign of brute human existence has become a series of pluses
embodying the flow of the American spirit in fateful progress toward the pinnacle of
history. Progress as a serialized redundancy of Number Ones. Plus, double plus.
Triple plus. Reagan's own body functioned as a substance of unity. He was not
content to take his place as one in the multiplying series. He would be the
preeminent term. Simply by virtue of his greater mobility. A man can stand on a
statue's pedestal, but a statue can never fill a man's shoes. If Reagan stood on every
pedestal presented, and draped himself in every flag in sight, the entire series of
national icons would converge toward him. He would be catapulted out of their
already elevated plane to an even higher one: he would be the substance of the
First & Last Postmortem on the Presidential Body 7
substance of unity, the essence of the essence of subjectivity. He would be what
made mother's milk wet. All he had to do was remain in perpetual motion, circulating
from one hallowed site to another, not just arrogating to himself their life-giving
powers but raising them to a higher power. Now it is no longer one substance of unity
being added to another; they begin to multiply exponentially.
The foundation provided by embodiment of the national spirit is in continual
slippage. It begins to recede from the three material terms it purports to ground into
loftier and loftier dimensions. The substance of unity becomes a substance of the
substance of unity, in a potentially infinite regress that can be controlled only by
transforming the process of exponential multiplication back into one of simple
addition: in other words by finding a way of managing the ever-excessive virtue of the
American spirit by continuing to move laterally between terms on the same level
instead of moving up into ever higher powers or dimensions. Above Reagan, the only
personifiable unifying substance left to appeal to is God, and He rarely gives photo
opportunities. Once Reagan's body had circulated long enough for the magic of all
earthly national icons to rub off on him one after the other, after he had become
their subjective sum, he had only two choices: ascend to the heavens, or begin
circulating among himself. The asexual reproduction of the country culminates in the
mechanical reproduction of the image of its leader.
First & Last Postmortem on the Presidential Body 8
The most striking instance of this process was Reagan's legendary acceptance of
the presidential nomination at the 1984 Republican Convention. His image was piped
in larger-than-life on a huge video screen suspended above the podium. The imposing
screen presence created a feeling of imperial aloofness that only highlighted Reagan's
bodily absence. A heroic Nancy tried to compensate by hailing his talking head as if he
could see her--as if they occupied they same space and level of reality. The image on
the screen was repeated countless times around the red-white-and-blue bedecked
convention hall in portraits held aloft by the adoring crowd. The giant screen, Nancy,
and the proliferating close-up of the leader were united on the surface of the home
viewer's TV screen. So there is a unifying substance higher than Reagan but not quite
God: TV. But the TV promised land is nowhere. It is everywhere. The screen unifies
incommensurable dimensions--portraits, Nancys and delegates, other screens with
giant talking heads, political discourse, advertising. But it does it by the millions. In
his moment of triumph, at the height of his unifying powers, Reagan is diffused to
infinity. He disappears into an infinitely fragmenting video relay.
First & Last Postmortem on the Presidential Body 9
Stumped
Reagan's body is struck with the same inescapable contradiction as that of the
First Emperor. It is trapped in a dialectic of immanence and transcendence that can
have no synthesis. The closer the nation comes to embodying its own unifying
subjective substance, the farther that substance recedes into another dimension,
until it approaches the vanishing point. The more exalted the unifying substance, the
more ethereal it is; the more ethereal it is, the more painfully inadequate it proves
in unifying the heterogeneous material terms for which it strives to provide a common
substance. The unification drive leads only to disappearance and fragmentation: the
physicality of the unifying body disappears, leaving only its image, which is then
relayed to infinity, composed, decomposed, re-membered, and dismembered.
Each move to a higher unifying substance requires the new Number One to
subsume all preceding terms. That substance must therefore subsume in one way or
another its own conditions of emergence. Every image of unity contains within it a
trace of the dialectic of immanence and transcendence that produced it. Since the
dialectic takes the form of an alternation between a lack and an excess inscribed in
the unifying substance, images of that substance will also alternate between those
two poles.
Reagan's body was lacking in a big way. Reagan was a walking amputation. A
preamputation. He was always already lame. It is interesting, and more than a bit
worrying, to find that the First Emperor's preoccupation with feet recurs in Reagan's
First & Last Postmortem on the Presidential Body 10
first autobiography. The title was taken from the movie King's Row. In Reagan's words,
he played the part of a "gay blade" named Drake "who cut a swathe among the ladies."
Drake, it seems, took to dating the daughter of a prominent doctor, who was not at
all pleased with the arrangement. One day Drake was injured in a railroad accident.
When he regained consciousness his legs were gone. The father of the woman he was
dating had been the doctor assigned to treat him. "Where's the rest of me?" Drake
cries.
Reagan presents this scene as his most challenging role and the acme of his
acting career. "A whole actor would find such a scene difficult; giving it the necessary
dramatic impact as half an actor was murderous. I felt I had neither the experience
nor the talent to fake it. I simply had to find out how it really felt, short of actual
amputation." So he consulted physicians and commiserated with cripples. But, he
says, "I was stumped." In the end, he manages. "I had put myself, as best I could, in
the body of another fellow;" in becoming a good actor "I had become a semiautomaton." He is now a real-life amputee. And at that point he realizes that half of
First & Last Postmortem on the Presidential Body 11
him has always been missing, he was always just limping along through life repeating
his lines. He finds the rest of him in the mother's milk of patriotism and conservative
ideals. What he does not say is that for the analogy to be complete this second, reallife healing would logically take the same form as the first: he would become whole
by taking over "the body of another fellow." Now the other body a president would
have take over to make himself whole is--every body. The body politic. Reagan verges
on saying outright that the political magic he would work is akin to national
possession: countless bodies unified by the same American spirit, one glorious body
politic repeating in unison an old actor's favorite lines. Instead, he reminisces about
his father, a shoe salesman who "spent hours analyzing the bones of the foot." It
comes as little surprise later on when we learn that after being delivered with divorce
papers by his first wife, Reagan went out and promptly broke a leg. And that what
attracted him to his second wife, Nancy, was hearing that her father was a prominent
surgeon. Years later, the most positive thing biographer Kitty Kelly would find to say
about Nancy was that she had the "ability to embrace physical deformity." [Kelly
1990:358] Where Is the Rest of Me? ends with a quote from Clark Gable:
The most important thing a man can know is that, as he approaches his
own door, someone on the other side is listening for the sound of his
footsteps."4
His better half. Nancy would keep Reagan whole ["Mrs. Reagan Defends her Role As
the President's Protector," San Francisco Chronicle, 10 June 1988].
First & Last Postmortem on the Presidential Body 12
But the series of minuses proliferates at a pace with the pluses. Any antiamputation device is no more than a stop-gap measure. The Reagan era was a theater
of bumbling and ill-health punctuated by his prostate gland and polyp-beseiged
rectum. Being shot got him one of the highest ratings in the polls he ever achieved.5
The most visible press coverage given him in the months after he left office was for
having hand surgery [January 1989], falling off a horse [July 1989], and having water
drained from his brain [September 1989]. Even in the best of times, any inadequately
planned close-up revealed that his supposedly ageless face looked like it was rotting
on its bones, a fact not lost on the manufacturers of a hideous Reagan squeeze doll
[copyright 1984, Spitting Image Productions].
First & Last Postmortem on the Presidential Body 13
Reagan, like the First Emperor,
manifested his amputational nature by
disappearing into his ceremonial residence. His mode of being in the White House
mimicked the transcendental nature of the substance of unity he continued to be
despite his tendency to lose bits and pieces of himself. His comment about building a
Great Wall around the White House was directed at the press corps, which he was
likening to invading Asian hordes--bothersome 'lice.' But it could just as well have
referred to the ground-to-air missiles and elite combat units ringing the White House
to ward off attacks by terrorist lice. Or to his increasing deafness ["Reagan's New
Hearing Aid Has a Remote Control," San Francisco Chronicle, 11 February 1988] and
the hearing aid he would shut off to avoid reporters' questions (as much a
technological cure for hypochondria as a political ploy: "Reagan Feigns Laryngitis to
Avoid Query" ran a pre-hearing aid headline, New York Times, 3 March 1985). Or to his
overall lack of accessibility to the press--despite his reputation for being a media
president, he had fewer press conferences than any president since the advent of
First & Last Postmortem on the Presidential Body 14
radio. ["The Disappearing Presidential News Conference," New York Times, 17 October
1988, A20] Or to his ever-increasing aloofness and lack of engagement in the everyday
running of the country ["President 'Strangely Passive,'" The Australian, 10 May 1988;
"Memo Suggested 'Inattentive' Reagan Be Removed: Book," Montreal Gazette, 16
September 1988, A10]. Or his tragi-comic propensity to nap during meetings and
international crises and his growing inability to distinguish politics from film scripts.6
When the body of unification is not being cut up, it is cut off, separating itself from
that which it unifies.
Reagan repeatedly drew attention to a structural homology between his body
and the body politic ["Reagan's Nose Could Change the Whole Face of the World,"
International Herald Tribune, 10 August 1987]. Any difficulty he encountered was apt
to be expressed in somatic terms. His triumphant first address after his assassination
centered on a metaphor linking his recovery to that of the economy ["Reagan Appeals
to Congress for His Economic Plan, Saying He Is Recovered but US Isn't," New York
Times, 29 April 1981]. Criticism struck him physically, with hysterical regularity if not
anatomical accuracy ["Reagan Lashes Out: 'There Is Bitter Bile in My Throat,'" Time, 8
December 1986, cover].
A consequence of the structural homology between the body of the unifier and
the body politic it unifies is that the country sets up a defensive self-other boundary
analogous to the skin. Any uncooperative element appears in one of two ways: as a
rival body attacking boldly from without, threatening to pierce the body's protective
shield; or as a disease that slips in through the pores to enter the country's
bloodstream and sap its strength from within. The military-industrial complex under
First & Last Postmortem on the Presidential Body 15
Reagan strove to produce a technological skin. Star Wars was to be a skin prosthesis
made of lasers.
The concept of subversion so central to Reagan's thinking acts as a kind of
somatic threat converter. Through subversion, the rival body that attacks from
without becomes a disease that saps from within. Perhaps it's not Nancy on the other
side of the door. Maybe it's a communist, or an illegal immigrant who got in through
the 'back yard.' Reagan droned an unending litany of modern-day lice. Communists,
illegal immigrants, drug users, gays, feminists, '60s die-hards, computer hackers, and
welfare cheats. Reagan lice came in an astounding variety of forms. But their
dominant mode was less parasitic than viral. It was the age of AIDS.
National unity oscillates between paranoia and hypochondria. It is in any case a
sickness. The hypochondria is written into the paradox of the substance of unity
described earlier. A seamless whole has to have parts, otherwise it would have
nothing to totalize; but it cannot have them, otherwise it would not be a seamless
whole. The whole is continually undermined by its parts. The body politic is always
under attack by its own organs in one form or another. That is why it has such a
pronounced tendency to want to cut them off.
Patchwork President
It was a common assertion that Reagan owed his influence to his appearance
of youth and vitality. But Reagan was in fact so closely associated with illness and
First & Last Postmortem on the Presidential Body 16
injury that one of the favorite ways his detractors found to parody him was to depict
him as he was supposed to appear: young and strong.7
A vulgar-Freudian corollary to the "youth and vitality" theory had it that Reagan
was a charismatic leader who presented the nation with an image of self-assurance,
wholeness, and health: the perfect ego ideal.8 It is difficult to see, on close
inspection, what there was to identify with.
Sometimes Reagan seemed to beg for psychoanalysis. "I was the hungriest
person in the house," he writes in Where Is the Rest of Me?, "but I only got chubby
when I exercised in the crib; any time I wasn't gnawing on the bars, I was worrying my
thumb in my mouth--habits which have symbolically persisted throughout my life."
Identify with that, and you get a nation of thumb-suckers. Hardly a worthy adversary
for the "Evil Empire."
But then there was always the anal option.
On the foreign policy front,
Reagan's libidinal economy was on a permanent war footing that could be described as
anal-aggressive. His body, like that of the First Emperor, sucked attention and
First & Last Postmortem on the Presidential Body 17
energies inward toward the government and its architectural seat, then redirected
them outward at the enemy. When Reagan disappeared into an increasingly retentive
White House, he was disappearing into the black hole of his own anus. Never was he
closer to that ultimate immaterial state of godlike transcendence than in his role as
Prime Sphincter.9
His phallus was fuzzy. Reagan could play the role of a father figure. But when
he did, he was more like everybody's uncle than a mighty patriarch. And as we saw at
his home birth, he had a propensity to embody the motherland. As a matter of fact,
he did not customarily have a penis. During his prostate saga, the New York Times
published an anatomical chart of the presidential body [18 December 1986]. Despite
the proximity of that gland to his alleged genital apparatus, the executive organ fails
to appear. Reagan does get both an anus and a rectum, suggesting a tendency of the
phallic to disappear into the anal. Reagan agenitality, however, just as often veered
toward the vestal virgin roles of the Statue of Liberty genre. In anti-genital mode, he
did not even tolerate the sexual activity of others ["Ardent Dogs Killed as Risk to
Reagan," San Francisco Examiner, 19 October 1987].
First & Last Postmortem on the Presidential Body 18
If the citizenry indulged in phallic phantasies in relation to Reagan's body, it
was not likely to take the form of them imagining him having what they wanted.
Rather, they became what he lacked. Whenever his anthem played, they would pop
up proudly erect and pledge allegiance to his magic fabric. If dangerous marauders
(like Grenada) loomed on the horizon, they would shoot off their missiles in eager
defense of Miss Liberty. Reagan's followers, like Hitler's, stood in for his phallus,
which was detached from his body and multiplied, as scattered as his TV image.
Reagan's vital body parts were distributed across the social field, as were the
First Emperor's. But his were in different, always changing, constellations. His body
was infinitely decomposable and recomposable. It could not only bridge the gap
between the individual and the collective; it could travel across age and gender
boundaries with postmodern ease. A postcard marketed at the beginning of the first
term shows Ronnie and Nancy wearing each other's heads, and looking eerily
comfortable in them.
First & Last Postmortem on the Presidential Body 19
Reagan could be the virile father of the nation, as when he bombed Libya; but
he could just as easily be its favorite daughter (despite having killed Khadafy's). His
political effectiveness did not depend on sustaining any particular symbolic
configuration. Any one would do--as long as attention remained focused on his body.
That was the bottom line. It didn't matter what symbolic connections were made to
his body--only that some connection to it be made. CBS News correspondent Lesley
Stahl recalled receiving a phone call from the White House press secretary thanking
her for doing a highly negative story about Reagan. It didn't matter what the content
was, he said; broadcasting images of Reagan, any images, could only help him.10 The
White House press corps itself seems to argue against any theory of Reagan's political
success being based on citizen identification with positive qualities associated with his
visual image.
Reagan's body functioned as a surface. There was no depth to it for an
unconscious to hide in. The 'teflon president': all shimmering surface. As we have
seen, a substance of unity functions by combining in a homogeneous medium
heterogeneous terms drawn from a multiplicity of levels. It does that by extracting or
abstracting certain qualities and not others, and projecting them onto a single
surface. In Reagan's case, the qualities were predominantly visual, and the ultimate
surface was the TV screen. That particular surface is almost omnipotent in its
combinatory
powers.
Logical
and
symbolic
associations
pertaining
to
what
psychoanalysis calls the secondary processes get equal billing with what normally
would be considered primary processes. The primary processes become visible.
Reagan's public pronouncements consistently displayed distortions characteristic of
the dream-work. Nicaragua, for example, was displaced to a threatening position just
First & Last Postmortem on the Presidential Body 20
south of the Texas border. Film and TV residue from past viewings were condensed
into present perceptions, such as when Reagan called his dog Lucky 'Lassie,' or when
he told a story about a heroic fighter pilot drawn from a movie he had seen as though
it were a true story. In Reagan's America, the psychoanalytic distinction between the
unconscious and the conscious, and the ideological distinction between the fake and
the real, ceased to be pertinent.
The plasticity and manifestness of Reagan's body unbalances not only a
traditional Freudian approach, but more recent paradigms as well. It is difficult to see
him, following the suggestion of a Baudrillardian critic, as a hyperreal male who
"could always satisfy our iconic interests." He can only be perceived as a "satisfying"
simulation of masculinity (a "hologram" of the American male) if vast stretches of his
image production are ignored.11 A Lacanian analysis might find him the embodiment
of the phallus, constituting subjectivities by distributing plenitude and lack, all the
while remaining tragically absent to itself. This interpretation would privilege his
amputational aptitudes, placing them under the sign of castration. But the cut of the
scalpel can as easily be seen a positive power of plasticity as the playing out of a
primordial lack. Given Reagan's organs' ability to regenerate and mutate, amputation
could actually be considered an enablement: a precondition for migration and
reconnection on a surface of variation.
It is perhaps less useful to say that Reagan was neither a father figure, a
phallus, nor a simulation, than to recognize that he was all of these things. He was
not fundamentally an actor in a family romance projected on a nation, nor the
constitutive agent of an intersubjective structure of lack-in-being, nor a hyperreal
optical effect. He was a surface on which all of these processes had equal play, like
First & Last Postmortem on the Presidential Body 21
different channels to which a viewer's brain could turn as at a press of the remote
control. His screen-body was the interface in a many-dimensioned interactive
medium.
The Kinetic Geography of the Quasi-corporeal
For all the fluidity, there was one constant. "Unity." Unity in neutral, in itself
non-psychoanalytic, non-ideological, non-simulatory. More abstract than any of these
modes. Simply topological.
But if, as was asserted earlier, a unity always exists in addition to and
alongside the multiplicity it unifies, then it stands to reason that there is something
more inclusive than unity, and more abstract than the simply topological: an
interconnecting mechanism that defines the relation between the unifying substance
and what it unifies. Subtending and surrounding the body and body image of the
national unifier and the bodies and images they bring together, there is another kind
of body that has no image--that can never have one because it is only ever inbetween. There is a body without an image that inhabits the gaps. It occupies the
spaces under, above, and between bodies and images, residing in the interrelation of
all that is. It does not extract (dismember) or abstract (unify). It is effectively allinclusive. The interactive medium: the 'body politic' in its fullest extension, at once
infra-concrete and super-abstract. A void where no anus can go. But where the proper
name "Reagan" can, and does.
It has taken me many years to get used to seeing myself as others see
me, and also seeing myself instead of my mental picture of the
First & Last Postmortem on the Presidential Body 22
character I'm playing. First, very few of us ever see ourselves except as
how we look directly at ourselves in a mirror. Thus we don't know how
we look from behind, from the side, walking, standing, moving normally
through a room. It's quite a jolt. [Reagan and Hubler 1981:79]
To see yourself as others see you. But not as in a mirror. Not an inversion or
reversal. A surrounding--of the body in motion. From all angles simultaneously, and in
all qualities of movement, front, back, walking, standing. To leave "my" selfperspective, but not for "yours." Not for the Other's I; for others' eyes. To see oneself
as "one" would see one: an impersonal (objective) perspective conceivable only as the
sum total of subjective perspectives. To be the division, not only between the "I" and
the "you," but between all I's and all you's at once. To be "one"--in all its multiplicity.
Unity as a supertopological overlay of all possible inter-geographies of bodies in
motion. Subsumed by a name.
A nagging question is how "Reagan" could produce a wholeness- or wellnesseffect in spite of his evident mental and physical deficiencies, what his so-called
'charisma' consisted of. At first, what seemed to be the most plausible hypothesis was
that it was his hairdo. But it became increasingly clear that the 'magic'12 "Reagan"
worked did not have to do with his body itself, or any of its organs, natural or dyed,
whole or incised, or any power of interpersonal magnetism they had. It seemed to
have to do with two quite mundane things.
First, his gestures. On a good day, Reagan was a master of the smooth move.
Like the circle he drew in the air to illustrate the Great Wall, his movements drew
pleasing figures in space. It was as if his entire body were a cartographer's pen
drawing an invisible map of some atmospheric utopian realm. He surveyed an invisible
space of well-being that was attached not to its body, but its movement, its
transitoriness, its fluidity. The body would some day rot, perhaps was rotting already,
First & Last Postmortem on the Presidential Body 23
but 'Camelot' would remain in the traces of his passing. Wholeness and wellness was
not on his body; it was not in his body. It was around it, in his wake. It was like a
negative trace of his body: his body grasped not as an object or an image of an object
but as a set of ordered motions between unlocalizable points suspended in the air.
"Wholeness" and happiness could be had by inhabiting the 'same' virtual space as
Reagan. We could make our personal space coincide with his by going through the
'same' motions. Of course, any repetition of the 'same' passages between points that
are by nature unlocalizable will be different, a translation, an im-personation (a
personification of the unpersonifiable subsumed by the Reagan name). Repeating
"Reagan's" gestures with a difference, we actualize a quadrant of his virtual geography
in our personal neighborhood, overlaying his super-abstract kinetic map on our
terrain, like an invisible image of all we could be (were we as inhuman as he).
Second, the "Reagan" 'magic' seemed to inhere in his voice, his reassuring,
mellifluous voice. His voice also drew patterns. Or rather, it set down rhythms, wrote
musical notes in tune with the national anthem.
Reagan's brain, body, and body-image were supplemented and subtended by
abstract figures: gestures and trajectories; and rhythms. These were without content,
nonvisual, and suprapersonal. The word "figure" is therefore misleading. Call them
processual lines. "Reagan"s political effectiveness was to be found on that presymbolic, pre-logical, quasi-corporeal level, in his ability to construct a body without
an image: to "meld image and body in a space where they cannot be separated."
[Agamben 1990:54-55]
First & Last Postmortem on the Presidential Body 24
Repeat After Me
God bless America ... I understand your
heartbeat.
--George Bush [Montréal Gazette, 20
January 1992, B3]
George Bush has the distinction of being the first candidate to win an election
with a slogan he never spoke. "Read my lips" ("NO NEW TAXES"). Bush, lacking his
predecessor's 'charisma,' resorted to reading his lines. It was Reagan who first
First & Last Postmortem on the Presidential Body 25
rejected a tax increase by quoting Clint Eastwood (in 1985). A quote of a quote whose
speaker remains unidentified: free indirect discourse. The 1988 campaign Bush, with
his annoyingly squeaky voice and staccato, windmill-like gestures at the podium, was
not a rousing orator. He had no choice but to be Reagan's "other fellow," to let himself
be possessed of the spirit of Reagan-America, giving free indirect voice to it like a
ventriloquist's puppet---turned ventriloquist. It was the voters who sounded the
words. The most dramatic stage-event of his inauguration celebrations was a variation
on Reagan's Statue of Liberty unveiling. As fireworks lit the sky, 40,000 picnickers on
the Washington Mall brandished miniature flash-lights at an oversized statue of
Abraham Lincoln (the "1000 points of light" of Bush's nomination acceptance speech of
the summer before). Bush encored by singing along to a rendition of an obscure
patriotic song by a second-rate singer (Lee Greenwood doing God Bless the USA).
Barbara stood faithfully by her husband's side, wearing an American flag as a shawl.
'Old Glory' had figured prominently in the campaign. Bush's most successful issue after
taxes was the pledge of allegiance to the flag. The bizarre but almost universal
American ritual of forcing students to begin every school day by reciting, in unison
with a recorded message piped into classrooms over a loud-speaker system, a pledge
to give themselves over body and soul to the flag had been declared unconstitutional
by a disloyal Supreme Court. Bush rose to the defense of the fabric the outgoing
president had worn so well. ["More Flags Are Waving, as Bush Encourages Patriotism
and the Pledge," New York Times, 20 September 1988].
Ventriloquism, lipsynching. Rites of possession. Bush made a career of
repeating Reagan's moves. That is where the rest of "Reagan" went. Into Bush's body.
Bush strove to make his personal space coincide with Reagan's virtual geography. Had
First & Last Postmortem on the Presidential Body 26
Bush stood on his ground, he would never have had a chance. He was not 'presidential
material.' So rather than trying to stand on his own two feet, he became "Reagan"s
better half, patiently waiting by the White House door for the footfalls of his master's
missing limbs. But Reagan's ghost deserted him in the fall of 1990 when he voiced his
most famous ventriloquist phrase, almighty in its negativity but now flipped into the
affirmative: "new taxes." Bush had just learned to talk in complete sentences and
control his spastic oratorial style. He had become a man. A mere mortal, with an
image problem. In other words, with an image. He momentarily lost what connection
he had to the body without an image. He fell into direct speech in the first person
singular. As a consequence, his popularity plummeted to historical lows from which
only a well-timed enemy, obligingly supplied by Saddam Hussein, could rescue him.
Learning to talk had actually robbed Bush of his one recognizable
characteristic: the singular oratorial style known as 'Bushspeak.' The lack of symbolic
or ideational cohesion evident between Reagan press sessions, or even from one
phrase of Reagan's discourse to another, was telescoped into a single sentence of
First & Last Postmortem on the Presidential Body 27
Bushspeak, as though Bush were trying to master his master by condensing his
permutational power into the smallest possible space.
And the look on his face, as the man who was in jail and dying, or living-whatever--for freedom, stood out there, hoping against hope, for
freedom. ["Run That One By Us Again George," Arizona Republic, 10
August 1990]
The hero of democracy (in this case Vaclav Havel, first post-Communist president of
Czechoslovakia) is alive and dead, at liberty in jail, standing on his face for freedom-all in a single sentence, of sorts. A residual homology between country and body is
detectable in the face that begins to reflect the soul of the people, before suddenly
metamorphosing into a foot. And how will the "education president" improve
education, a high school student innocently asks? "Well, I'm going to kick that one
right into the end zone of the secretary of education" [ibid.]. When the well-being of
the body/well-being of the nation equation is successfully made, it is not only with
the wrong body but with the wrong end of it, as the President nonchalantly takes his
leadership and kicks it up an educated ass.15
Bush gave it up. He borrowed another tactic from Reagan: he got scripted.
When his aids began to pre-plan the questions and responses at as many of his press
sessions and meetings with the public as possible, Bush's grammar improved markedly.
First & Last Postmortem on the Presidential Body 28
But that left nothing to identify him by. Renouncing Bushspeak meant losing his only
media-worthy characteristic: his spectacular lack of personality, popularly referred to
as the "wimp factor." Bushspeak is a form of agrammatical self-effacement. According
to a New York Times analysis ["Not Pretty. Seems to Work, Though," 9 March 1990], it
is marked by an almost complete avoidance of the first person pronoun "I" and a
tendency to drop active verbs. Non-Bushspeak Bush speak is a grammatical version of
the same disappearing act. The stated policy of his press officials is that less is
better, in stark contrast to the Reagan team's "any image, even a bad image, is good
by definition." A successful Bush press meeting consists in issuing "nonwords," phrases
that will be carried on TV or in the print media but will be so slight in meaning and
lackluster in character as to escape notice ["From Bush, a Few Choice Nonwords,"
International Herald Tribune, 31 August-1 September 1991].
Voice low. Voice getting lower. Doctors tell me it can go even lower
still.
--Saturday Night Live comedian Dana Carvey, as quoted in the New York
Times, 9 March 1990, op. cit.
Becoming imperceptible.
The Bush body followed in its voice's footsteps: "Read My Hips" he said, jogging
away from reporters ["A Case of Doing Nothing," Time, 7 January 1991, p. 29,
reporting on events of October 1990]. His public image became so low-key that it left
the impression that he was on full-time paid leave--in Bush's nonwords, he began
"vacating" regularly [International Herald Tribune, 31 August-1 September 1991]. His
preferred public pose was no longer in suit and tie behind a podium, but in leisure
wear with golf club. Bush all but disappeared from the media gaze and microphone,
First & Last Postmortem on the Presidential Body 29
only in order to reappear transformed, reconnected in his own unique way to the body
without an image.
Missile Vision
Like Reagan, Bush withdrew into an audio-visual relay. But where Reagan had
disappeared into his own self-aggrandizement, receding flag-bedecked into an infinite
feedback loop provided by television as political apparatus of entertainment, Bush
took the country with him on a one-way ride to oblivion. The Bush relay consisted in a
video-mounted missile superimposing its point of view on the home-viewer's set as it
zoomed for the kill, followed by blackness, the mark of efficiency, as the target blew.
Reagan disappeared into the disseminating entertainment screen, multiplying himself
beyond measure in a burst of color. Bush stepped aside from it, making room for
another screen, a targeting screen, fatal in its monochrome finitude. Of course, the
oblivion that was screened was not Bush's or America's per se, but that of the
"enemy," the tastelessly moustachioed Arab. But in a way it was Bush's: the missile
screen was his proxy body, a graphic incarnation of the willingness to kill in the name
of all that America stood for (in this case, the "democratic" principle of nonintervention that he had not long before flagrantly violated in Panama). Bush missile
vision: the look of America at war, standing, living and killing, whatever, for
"freedom."
First & Last Postmortem on the Presidential Body 30
The old Bush spent the better part of the Gulf War quietly vacating. Employing
a technological body double had allowed him to melt along with "America" into the
military apparatus, while simultaneously putting his genteel way across the green.
The President reappeared after his early troubles with Bushspeak and the wimp factor
transformed. He had split. Time magazine dubbed him "Men of the Year," dividing its
cover between two half-images of his face. "A Tale of Two Bushes," went the title.
"One finds a vision on the global stage; the other still displays none at home" [7
January 1991]. It has been revealed that his boyhood nickname was "Have Half"
["Trumpeting Victory in Retreat," Time Australia, 2 December 1991, p. 63].
It would be a mistake to take this "schizophrenia" too seriously as a diagnosis,
as if it corresponded to a pathological condition suffered by Bush "the man" or even
collectively by his constituency. Bush's condition was every bit as slippery (multifunctional) as Reagan's. One article diagnoses Bush as a hysteric, a masochist, a
transvestite, and an overcompensating macho male, all in the space of three pages,
First & Last Postmortem on the Presidential Body 31
without noticing any contradiction. [Rubenstein 1990:256-58] Which makes perfect
sense. As with Reagan, the question of contradiction simply does not arise, at least
not on the level of being or meaning. The Presidential question is not "What ails him
(us)?"--the obvious answer being "everything you like"--but rather "What does he do by
acting that way? Where does it get him (us)?"
Bush's splitting must be seen in the same way as Reagan's infinite cut, his
fracturing to infinity: as an enablement. Reagan's fracturing enabled reconnection,
disappearing him into the omnipresence of his varying image. Bush's splitting allowed
him to become imperceptible on the home front while reappearing on the war front
as principled obliteration. If the Bush-America spirit was embodied by the missiles, it
was so most intensely at the moment of impact when the screen went blank and the
home-viewers cheered. Blankness was Bush's hallmark of effectiveness on every front.
What does our latter-day Commodore Perry do at the climax of his mock-dramatic,
pre-reelection campaign trip to open Japanese markets to the West? At an imperial
banquet, he collapses on camera into the lap of the Japanese prime minister, vomits,
then sinks out of sight to the floor ["Stunned Japanese Offer Sympathy as Some are
Struck by Symbolism," New York Times, 9 January 1992, A8].
First & Last Postmortem on the Presidential Body 32
Reagan had became immanent to the social field in spite of himself, as a sideeffect of an impossible quest for transcendence that left his audio-visual image
proliferating endlessly across the country he had tried to elevate to his lofty plane.
After leaving office, Reagan made millions of dollars providing photo opportunities for
the Japanese imperial family and high-ranking functionaries. Bush rolled at their feet.
He just didn't have the right stuff. He had no choice but to dispense with
transcendence, to sink into his own self-effacing immanence. Image faint. Getting
fainter by the course. Doctors say it had the flu. "I was only trying to get some
attention" [ABC evening news, 8 January 1992]. Fade to black.
If a frog had wings, he wouldn't
hit his tail on the ground. Too
hypothetical.
--George Bush16
First & Last Postmortem on the Presidential Body 33
Old Glory's magic dust didn't stick to Bush's lapels. Try as he might to pledge
himself to it, it fell from his shoulders like dandruff. Whenever he drew attention to
himself, it was in a way that highlighted his inability to rise above, or even remain
seated--to maintain his presence at all. For example, Bush could never garner for
himself the kind of political capital Reagan did with second-hand war stories, even
though he had a true one to tell. Bush actually was a fighter pilot in World War II. The
story he tells is about being shot down. It ends with him floating aimlessly in a little
yellow raft thinking wistfully about his family as he waits for rescue. In his hour of
danger, a raft away from death, the thought of family did not unify the Bush
substance(lessness) with that of the nation, as it had for Reagan reminiscing about his
birth; rather, it led him to reflect on "my faith, the separation of church and state."17
Church/state ... mind/body, spirituality/materiality, self/other. This split, which
Reagan tried so hard to overcome, was a given for Bush, his "faith." It was his ultimate
element, his destiny, it was to Bush what the sea was to his doomed fighter plane.
The Bush-body goofs, his voice gaffes. Bush-mind and Bush-body are never
completely in harmony, however carefully scripted. He lacks a unifying will. His
speaking style is to this day distracted. Despite his Ivy League past, Bush is painfully,
embarrassingly, vomitously, down-to-earth. He's an ordinary Joe. The director of
ABC's docu-drama of the Gulf War, "Heroes of Desert Storm," said that he asked Bush
to appear because the film (which bombed) "was meant to be a salute to the ordinary
people who did extraordinary things" in the war, and he "thought having the president
would be a nice touch" [The Arizona Daily Star, 6 October 1991, 4A].
"One of us." A hero of the ordinary. Floating in the Patriot sea. Immersed in
separation, the perceived separation of mind and body, the absence of a strong
First & Last Postmortem on the Presidential Body 34
persona. The inevitability of goof and gaffe engulfing Reagan's hapless successor
condemned him to abject immanence in the familiar, imperfect, everyday world.
When Bush did manage to rise above, he did it by temporarily reversing the direction
of the slide into immanence without, however, transforming it into a climb to
transcendence. The colors of the Reagan-American flag ran in all directions. The Gulf
War Bush-bomb went air-borne. But it rose only in order to zoom back in, converging
explosively with the vanishing point at the center of the militarized home-viewing
screen. At which point it became blankly apparent that Bush had missed his own ride,
that he was at no time any less earthbound for having fired his body-double missile
than he was for piloting a plane.
Although glory did burst forth in Bush's general vicinity, it did not adhere to his
disappearing person, and was of an explosive kind that leaves little trace. Bush's GulfWar glory was as self-expiring as the blast and accompanying clapping of hands. It did
not last him even to the beginning of the reelection campaign. Bush is incapable of
accumulating prestige in the way Reagan did. General Schwarzkopf was the Reaganoid
glory hog at this trough. It was his body which gave a visual image to military prowess,
his voice which expressed the appropriate bluster and sentiment. Bush, for his part,
continued to putt. He let Schwarzkopf stand in for him on the stage of glory. The
General retired soon after to hefty speaking fees and speculation about political
ambitions. It didn't seem to matter to Bush. Schwarzkopf was merely his human proxy.
One of many. Time magazine's reelection campaign coverage referred to Bush's
propensity for body-doubling in an inadvertantly oxymoronic headline: "Bush Makes it
Personal: The President Counters a Rightist Challenge with a Stream of Surrogates" [6
First & Last Postmortem on the Presidential Body 35
January 1992, p. 48]. It was his inhuman surrogate, the high-tech hardware of war,
that summed him up most singularly.
Mystery of the Killer Wimp
Gonna be alot of weird dancin' goin' on.
--George Bush18
Bush did in fact have a major public relations success of his own before the war
broke out. Actually, it wasn't exactly his. It was Barbara who pulled it off, with a little
help from her dog. Millie could never be mistaken for Lassie. The best-selling book
she "dictated" to the First Lady tells in glossy pictures and bland words of the
unremarkable day-to-day goings on on the White House lawn. The narration chronicles
"with characteristic modesty" (jacket) the circuitous path that brought the First Dog
to the White House, against all odds. "Ms. Millie," you see, is a down-home pup who,
First & Last Postmortem on the Presidential Body 36
like the man she shadows through a "typical day," "shuns hounding media attention."
"One dog's life as Presidential best friend": or as Presidential proxy? Yet another?
Millie's Book [1990] outsold Reagan's second autobiography (which would seem to
prefigure an impending second death) by many tens of thousands of copies,
confirming that Bush immanence had in fact superseded Reagan transcendence as the
dominant political dynamic, Stormin' Norman and his travelling war show aside
["Bush's Dog Outselling Reagan," Montréal Gazette, 28 November 1990]. Schwarzkopf is
a reminder that "Reagan" is very much alive, again and as always, but the balance of
quasi-corporeal power has at least temporarily shifted Bushward.
As if to underscore the difference between the two presidents, George fell sick
after the cessation of hostilities, perhaps spent by the effort of golfing in wartime. He
did not even manage to be original at illness. The major health event of his
presidency was the onset of Graves disease, a condition that had already been
diagnosed in Barbara. Although lacking in originality, Bush's malady did have an
element of mystery to it. The exact cause of Graves disease is unknown. The
statistical chance of two people unrelated by blood developing the disease is
infinitesimal, so even though it is generally accepted that it is not contagious, the
press of late May-early June 1991 was filled with rumors about a hidden carrier.
Suspicion immediately fell upon Millie. Some argued for the First Dog's innocence,
blaming an unknown environmental factor at the Vice Presidential mansion (which,
incidentally, raised the specter of Dan Quayle being similarly stricken). The insistent
protest by doctors explaining that Graves was not due to environmental factors any
more than it was contagious went unheard. In other words, Bush was not suffering
from his eight years playing second fiddle to Reagan any more than from over-
First & Last Postmortem on the Presidential Body 37
familiarity with his dog. The disease had no meaning and no cause. Reagan's
infirmities, by contrast, had a surplus of meaning and multiple yet specifiable causes.
"Reagan" is a dirty joke. Bush, at best, is a banal mystery.
Last week, [Bush's personal doctor, Burton J. Lee 3rd] said he learned of
a syndrome including left-handedness, autoimmune disorders and certain
other problems. The President, who is left-handed, has been treated for
Graves' disease, an autoimmune disorder. Some people with the
syndrome are dyslexic and Dr. Lee speculated that Mr. Bush's well-known
problems with syntax might be linked somehow to the other conditions.
["Every Time Bush Says 'Ah,' Second-Guessers of His Doctor Cry 'Aha,'"
New York Times, 18 February 1992, C3]
Bush, the unnamed syndrome: an incoherent voice lowering to the point of
inaudibility, sounding from a body sapped by derisory or uncaused ailments:
disappearing only to reappear as a dog, a general, a missile, all the while never
ceasing to be a golfer. Autoimmune-deficient Bush can indeed be as protean as
Reagan, in body and in words; his boundaries are too weak, or simply not of the kind,
to endow him with a diagnosable form.19 Protean Bush can be, but he is more
basically split, just as Reagan was basically fractured. For that is how he functions.
The missile split is the most telling. It is the Bush equivalent of Reagan's 1984
Republican Convention speech. The video relay of the missile approaching its target
provides the most condensed expression of what Bush was doing by failing to be and
mean what he said he meant he was, or what he meant he said he was, or something
like that. For example the "education president." Or was it the "environmental
president"? Whatever. Bush is the whatever-president, the man without qualities who
First & Last Postmortem on the Presidential Body 38
nominated other men without qualities to top positions (Supreme Court nominees
David Souter and Clarence Thomas, who won confirmation by virtue of having no
documentable opinions). The excess of unity after which Reagan strove so
energetically and which drove his many metamorphoses, supplying his political career
with a continual surplus of meanings and symbolisms, was beyond Bush from the start.
The closest he came to it was the "thing"-thing of his early Bushspeak period. This is
how he explained that "vision-thing" (by which he meant his spiritual vision for the
country, not missile sights): "We need to keep America what a child once called
'nearest thing to heaven.' Lots of sunshine, places to swim, and peanut butter
sandwiches" ["Run That One By Us Again, George," Arizona Republic, 10 August 1990].
Reagan set course for the promised land, paradise on earth. Wingless Bush would
settle for the next best thing--another swim in banality. His war story long ago
established that that was the nearest he would get to heaven (too hypothetical). The
"thing"-thing was his feeble attempt to grasp what always stayed just out of his reach-fullness of being, meaning, inspiration, panache. It designated vaguely, from a
distance ("that thing way over there," that thing that keeps receding even as we
speak) what Reagan habitually rubbed up against: political prestige, spiritual glory,
symbolic overabundance. It was the residual presence in Bush's discourse of the
Reagan excess.20 Reagan was the president of the exponential multiplication of pluses
enabled by cuts (minuses). Bush was a singular minus sign, designating no "thing"-thing
more convincingly than his own continually reenacted imperceptibility. What dogged
Reagan was his propensity to lose bits and pieces of himself. Bush's problem, and his
power, is his propensity to lose himself in his surroundings. When Reagan disappeared,
he did so ubiquitously and in style. Bush sinks, Bush blends. What he blends into
First & Last Postmortem on the Presidential Body 39
explains what he has been doing through all of this. If Reagan's reign marked the
coming out of the unconscious, Bush's term marks the coming out of the military
machine in all its technocratized glory, in all its human horror, for the first time since
the Viet Nam War, the wounds of which Reagan had "healed."
America may get more than it bargained for if Bush really does turn his talent
to domestic issues, as the prevailing political wisdom of the moment says he must to
win reelection. For what he has done--or rather, a long-term process that has
culminated during his presidency--consists in enabling a split between the leader's
body/mind and the technological apparatus with which they meld but which continues
to double them. Reagan's fracturing was an attempt to overcome just that split. His
vision-thing was to personify the nation, to embody it, to give it voice--an
unattainable goal in pursuit of which he lost himself in his chosen apparatus, the mass
media. Bush, on the other hand, lost himself in a technological apparatus embodying
an impersonal command function: computer-operated military hardware. It was not a
side-effect of pursuing a higher goal; it was the goal. "I will not tie the expert's
hands," Bush proudly and repeatedly declared during the Gulf Crisis and ensuing war.
Political leadership cedes to technocratic control. Schwarzkopf stands as testimony to
the fact that this command function can be personified. But only peripherally. Even
Schwarzkopf had to stand aside when the videos came in, passing center stage to the
high-tech equipment upon which his credibility rested in this push-button war
headquartered hundreds of miles away from the front. The President turns control
over to the experts, who turn it over to the machine.
Bush's splitting image allows this inhuman, essentially impersonal, command
function to come into its own. Two thousand years after it swept in off the steppes to
First & Last Postmortem on the Presidential Body 40
be captured by empire, the nomadic war machine returns to the desert. A vector of
destruction and disappearance darts out the far side of the now senescent State, into
a smooth space sleeker than sand or sea, now only a picturesque backdrop:
militarized cyberspace.
The impersonality of the command function animating the Gulf War was
underlined by the macabre lack of affect palpable throughout. The cheer-full
explosions of the missiles reaching their anonymous targets were durationless
outbursts punctuating excruciatingly boring hours of anticipation. The Gulf War was a
waiting war. News was slow, and when it did come, it was disappointingly incomplete.
People were glued to their screens, waiting for something to happen. Would a
chemical Scud hit Israel and widen the conflict? Would the ground war begin? If it did,
would the US be mired in Iraq for months? Was the Iraqi front ringed by oil-filled
moats? Did they have crude nuclear capability? When something did happen, it never
measured up to all the things the untied tongues of the TV experts had already
established could have happened. It almost went too smoothly for the American
hardware. The hours of blurry-eyed waiting and endless repetitions of the few images
and tidbits of intelligence available made every military event an anti-climax back
home before it even had a chance to transpire on the battlefield. Just one thing stood
out: zoom in and explosion. Blankness. Those amazing American missiles. When the
war was over and the yellow-ribbon celebrations wound down, it started to become
apparent just how little had happened in geopolitical terms. Kuwait was still ruled by
a greedy royal family whose idea of democracy was easy access to domestic help.
Saudi Arabia was if anything less democratic than before. And Saddam Hussein was
still in possession of his moustache, doing the things he does so well, such as
First & Last Postmortem on the Presidential Body 41
butchering his own people. It was as if the event of the war had "expired within the
interstices of our television schedules, forever lost" in the video relay linking homeviewing screen to army computer.
Much, of course, had happened to the Iraqis. The Gulf War was not Ballard's
World War III. It was simultaneously less grand and a great deal bloodier than the
fable: another difference between Reagan and Bush. Bush's splitting image freed him
to kill with impunity on a much more massive scale numerically, but in a markedly
less grandiose geopolitical frame than Reagan's mock-epic battle with an Evil Empire
that barely outlasted his term in office. According to Pentagon estimates, a minimum
of 350,000 Iraqis died during the war or in its aftermath, of which 200,000 were
civilians ["Taking Stock," Montréal Gazette, 9 May 1992, B3]. It never sank in. Not
even the haunting images of what Stormin' Norman called his "turkey shoot," when
defeated Iraqi soldiers fleeing the rout in primarily civilian cars and trucks were
picked off as they inched their way up the "highway of death" leading out of Kuwait.
Miles of twisted wrecks dotted the landscape as far as the camera could see. Charred
bodies were slowly covered by wind-swept sand, after being picked at by dogs with
First & Last Postmortem on the Presidential Body 42
less discriminating tastes than modest Millie. No reaction. It was all on TV. Over and
over again. At least as many times as missile vision. Still no reaction. No sadness. No
second thoughts. No shame. No guilt. No sympathy.
Is this the final solution that Bush and his command-function double could
deliver were they to turn their attention inward to domestic problems such as the
"war" on drugs and alcohol? A taste of that was on TV, too: in the wake of the Gulf
War, the Rodney King video showed how the untied hands of experts like the LA chief
of police deal with "substance abusers" who also happen to be Black. There was a
reaction to that. It was clear where the real abuse was. The country was not ready for
the other face of the Bush-thing. After the riots, it was. Bush's deployment of the U.S.
army to Los Angeles, "in what some aides now call a domestic Persian Gulf crisis"
["Bush Moves to Respond to Strong Test from Riots," New York Times, 4 May 1992,
A11], recast him in the role of commander-in-chief. The police were declared
innocent, as if in principle, irrespective of the evidence. Attracted by this premium of
a priori innocence, commander-in-chief segued into chief of police. The command
function had come home, with impunity. What this implies for the future, with the
likes of soldier-worshipper Ross Perot, Klansman David Duke, and crypto-fascist
Patrick Buchanan vying to be post-Bush Republican Party standard-bearer, can only be
left to the imagination.
A Bush without a Gulf War is like a pilot without a raft. Less than one year
after the foreign Persian Gulf Crisis, on the eve of the election season that was to
feature its home-front reprise, Bush's popularity rating had plunged from a recordbreaking 90 percent to a miserable 37 percent [CBS-New York Times poll released 25
November 1991]. The education-thing reared its ugly end zone again. A student at a
First & Last Postmortem on the Presidential Body 43
televised school meeting asked a question out of order, but Bush went on following
the script. "I don't listen to the question. I just look at this," he explained, referring to
his answer sheets. Everyone knows these meetings are scripted, protested his press
secretary. Why the big fuss? After all, Reagan did it and nobody minded. ["Foot-inMouth George Reveals Gift of Gaffe," The Australian, 29 November 1991]. Then Bush
erred by departing from the script. He ad-libbed during a speech prepared by then
chief-of-staff John Sununu, suggesting a ceiling on credit card interest rates. The next
day, the stock market dove, deepening an already serious recession. Bush tried to
pawn it off on Sununu, claiming it had been in the script all the time. Sununu
contradicted him on national TV, and was promptly sacked, a victim of Bush's illconsidered attempt to speak for himself. The rigors of the early 1992 Presidential
primary campaign made effective post-Sununu rescripting impossible. Bushspeak
resurfaced with a vengeance.21
Bush functions primarily in indirect discourse, which is sometimes attributed to
an identifiable live source ("the dog said it," "Sununu wrote it"), but which at the limit
is unascribable. For the voice of the Bush-thing, like its body, has melded with an
impersonal, fundamentally inanimate, automated command circuit of global reach, a
smooth cyberneticized space so integrated that the precise source of actions or words
issuing from it is impossible to identify. The technocratic Bush-thing takes "Reagan's"
possession mode to the extreme. From the beginning of his first campaign, Bush
played on other voices: making the electorate speak the words spoken by Reagan who
got them from Eastwood who delivered them on-screen; being spoken for by Millie, by
Schwarzkopf, by his script-writers, by missiles. The country went from being
possessed by a fractured spirit of Reagan-America to being possessed by an integrated
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command circuit enabled by a strategically split image. Press preoccuations with First
Ladies Nancy Reagan and Barbara Bush can be seen in this light. The "behind every
man is a strong woman" cliché gained new currency under the Reagans and continued
with the Bushes. Nancy "Doing All We Can" Reagan bore the brunt of the misogynist
sniping. Her habit of stepping in and feeding Reagan lines when he faltered led to
speculation that she was the real power in the White House.22 As if "power" was ever
really localized in the White House--in any one place. As if speech were originary. The
idea that there was a domineering presence at the helm was reassuring to those
nostalgic for the good old days evoked by so much Reagan imagery when authority
seemed a simple thing and essentially good. Having a "harpie" for an authoritative
presence was better than none at all. The focus on Nancy was a way of ascribing
Ronnie's indirect speech, of stopping the slippage, of controlling the possessioneffect. Barbara does not cooperate with this scenario to the same extent. She tends
to follow George in self-effacement, as when she takes dictation from Millie, reducing
herself to an indirect-discourse relay-station between man and animal.
The Bush-thing's relation to the body without an image differs from "Reagan's"
in important ways, in spite of the many continuities. In a way, it is Bush's that is the
most radical of the two. In becoming-imperceptible, it divested leadership of its
image (vocal and visual residue) as much as it was possible to do at its historical
juncture. The Bush-thing returned the body without an image to its inhuman, unliving
ground, or at least a late-capitalist translation of it. The quintessential capitalist
space where body and image meld and become inseparable is technology,
computerized military hardware at impact being the exemplary case. Where else do
First & Last Postmortem on the Presidential Body 45
matter and intention so effectively combine than in a "smart" missile "servicing" its
target?
In its "A Tale of Bushes" issue, Time magazine noted Bush's repeated attempts
to exit the stage of speech by immersing himself in a physical activity that seems to
embody mental control: "When faced with a complicated problem he often plunges
headlong into physical activity--gunning his speedboat, pitching horseshoes, flailing
away on the golf course. It is Bush's way, says an aide, to 'drive those demons of
indecision out of his mind.'" [7 January 1991, p. 28]. Speaking manifests his indecision,
his split condition, the fact that he is by nature divided against himself, his body
possessed by "demons." It is only in short bursts of mute projectile motion that he
appears at one with himself. Off and away: "Read my disappearing hips."
The question reporters were asking when Bush fleshed out the only good pun of
his career was: are you or are you not going to propose the tax increase we read away
last year on your lips? Running away with his hips earned Bush few friends. He had
flip-flopped four times on the tax issue in the preceding week. The jogging, meant to
signal strength and decisiveness, only embodied the side-to-side vacillation. That's
when Bush's popularity fell sharply for the first time: 20 percentage points in one
week. The pun came on October 10, 1990. Three months after that (a matter of days
after Time magazine's analysis of how he dealt with his splitting image), the Gulf War
began. The rest is history: that record-breaking 90 percent approval rating at the
polls.
If the lips betray you, there are always the hips. If the hips say that you are not
really jogging but swimming in nonwords, try missiles. The missile is an anti-raft, a
kind of flesh-empty presidential de-flotation device that lifts what's left of the chief
First & Last Postmortem on the Presidential Body 46
executive out of the feckless sea of mind/body disarticulation into the air again, the
calm desert air before the rains. The mind/body split is overcome for a soaring
instant in a bee-line flight to obliteration--the willed blankness of that which has no
image, not because it has been divested of it but by its very nature.
The Bush-thing reinvents the death drive animating the nuclear brinkmanship
of the Cold War that had shaped "Reagan," which was itself a reinvention of the
suicide run that led the First Emperor to his fatal confrontation with the sea. Qin Shi
Huangdi found a monstrous mirror image of himself at the end of his trail. Bush's
monstrosity consists in finding nothing, seeing nothing, feeling nothing, not even
suicidal.
A major challenge to the rest of the world in the coming years is how not to
become a mirror image of the American blankness, how not to be the "other fellow" of
techno-neutered all-American maleness.