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.
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 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 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.
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.
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