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 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 semi-automaton." He is now a real-life amputee. And at that point he realizes that half of 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, real-life 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].
But the series of minuses proliferates at a pace with the pluses. Any anti-amputation 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 [© 1984, Spitting Image Productions].
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 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," Montréal 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 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.
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