God bless America ... I understand your heartbeat.
--George Bush[14]
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 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 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, however temporarily.
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 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 aides 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. 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.
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, only in order to reappear transformed, reconnected in his own unique way to the body without an image.
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