Gonna be alot of weird dancin' goin' on.
--George Bush[18]
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-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 Bush 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 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 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."
What Bush did--or rather, a long-term process that has culminated during his presidency--consisted in enabling a split between the leader's body/mind and the technological apparatus with which they meld but which continued 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 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 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 home-viewing 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 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.
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 record-breaking 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 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-in-Mouth 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 ill-considered 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 functioned 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 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 possession-effect. 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 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 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.
BACK TO CHAPTER 3 CONTENTS PAGE
BACK TO FIRST AND LAST EMPERORS HOME PAGE
CONTINUE