This Is Not a President

Sense, Nonsense, and the American Political Imaginary

Diane Rubenstein

• Verlag: NYU Press
• Jahr: 2008
• ISBN:
  9780814776209
• Thema: Literatur
• Thema: Nordamerikanische Literaturkritik

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In This Is Not a President, Diane Rubenstein looks at the postmodern presidency — from Reagan and George H. W. Bush, through the current administration, and including Hillary. Focusing on those seemingly inexplicable gaps or blind spots in recent American presidential politics, Rubenstein interrogates symptomatic moments in political rhetoric, popular culture, and presidential behavior to elucidate profound and disturbing changes in the American presidency and the way it embodies a national imaginary.

In a series of essays written in real time over the past four presidential administrations, Rubenstein traces the vernacular use of the American presidency (as currency, as grist for popular biography, as fictional TV material) to explore the ways in which the American presidency functions as a "transitional object" that allows the American citizen to meet or discover the president while going about her everyday life. The book argues that it is French theory — primarily Lacanian psychoanalysis and the radical semiotic theories of Jean Baudrillard — that best accounts for American political life today. Through episodes as diverse as Iran Contra, George H. W. Bush vomiting in Japan, the 1992 Republican convention, the failed nomination of Lani Guinier, and the Iraq War, This Is Not a President brilliantly situates our collective investment in American political culture.

1
Introduction
My Own Private Presidents

The object casts its shadow on the subject.

—Christopher Bollas

This book is about the vernacular use of the American presidency. For the American presidency enters into the every day life of its citizens in myriad ways, both marked and, often, oblique. Presidents figure in the currency we use as we go about our tasks (in contrast to preeuro France, whose currency featured both St. Exupéry’s Little Prince and Berlioz, and Germany, which put the mathematician K. F. Gauss on the ten-Deutschmark note). Every President’s Day we see the representations of Washington and Lincoln hawking furniture and discounted Chevy Blazers. “George Washington” himself advertises the new one-dollar coin, seemingly nonplussed about his replacement, dancing in a disco or driving through a highway tollbooth (“I look good on paper”). “Abraham Lincoln” (played by Martin Short) does a quick star turn for the Biography Channel (“But I always wanted to be a dancer”). People increasingly consume biographies and nonfiction books about the presidents in both popular and scholarly versions and read about the difficulties with “plagiarism” that plague public presidential historians (e.g., Joseph Ellis, Doris Kearns Goodwin). It is indeed difficult to open the New York Times Sunday Book Review or cable-surf (the History Channel, A&E, the Biography Channel, Turner Classic Movies) without experiencing a “presidential moment” even if one is not watching 24, Commander-in-Chief, the Emmy-winning West Wing, or Battlestar Galactica. Commercials for a sleep-inducing pharmaceutical (Rozerem) feature dream sequences starring Lincoln (alongside an astronaut, a talking beaver who accuses Honest Abe of cheating at cards, and a human).

In a younger niche market, there are punk groups (“Dead Kennedys”) and pop recording artists (“The Presidents of the United States”), and most of my undergraduate students can sing all the words to the “mediocre presidents’ song” from The Simpsons. (“We are the mediocre presidents / You won’t find our faces on dollars and cents”). Presidents appear in animation cartoons, making cameo appearances on The Simpsons and on Beavis and Butthead. Their real counterparts, both candidates or elected leaders, make the round of the talk shows or do bit parts in Hollywood releases, as Bill Clinton did in Bob Zemeckis’s film Contact. More recently, they appear on reality shows such as Extreme Makeover: Home Edition, as Laura Bush did after Hurricane Katrina, or both Bushes on American Idol. Families on vacation at Disneyland, in California, can share some “great moments with Mr. Lincoln.” On a recent vacation, one family traveled from Disneyland to visit President Gerald Ford’s body, lying in state at Rancho Mirage. Alternatively, families can drive either to Yorba Linda, where they can select from an array of Nixon-Elvis souvenirs (mugs or watches, the most popular item) at the Nixon Birthplace and Library museum shop, or to Simi Valley, where they can interact in a simulated situation room or push a button and end the Cold War via holographic images of Mikhail Gorbachev and Ronald Reagan in a Geneva cabin replete with a fake burning log. Or they can visit one of President Reagan’s brown suits from his Hollywood days. In Orlando, an animatronic Bill Clinton joins the roll call in the Hall of Presidents, situated right next door to the Haunted House at Disney World.¹

While the presidency has always served as a subject for the great Hollywood directors and actors (Henry Fonda as Young Mr. Lincoln, Spencer Tracy as aspiring candidate in State of the Union, Gregory Lacava’s Gabriel over the White House), its presidential monuments, such as Mount Rushmore (North by Northwest), the Jefferson Memorial (Born Yesterday and Hitchcock’s Strangers on a Train), and the Lincoln Memorial (Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, Tim Burton’s Planet of the Apes), perform a crucial diegetic function for a plot’s narrative tension. These monuments often appear heroically as metonyms for normative citizenship or, in postmodern fashion, as in The Simpsons’ “Mr. Lisa Goes to Washington” episode, where Lincoln’s “father function” is ironically underlined by a throng of citizens asking Mr. Lincoln such questions as “How do I get my kids to brush more often?” and “Do you think I should grow a mustache?”² The Lincoln Memorial serves as a tragic backdrop in Oliver Stone’s Nixon, or it frames the “infantile citizenship” of Forrest Gump’s address at the March on Washington, a film that splices in actual presidential footage (in Zelig fashion) within a traditional fictional narrative.³

Lincoln has functioned as well in avant-garde performance pieces, colorized in blackface in Holiday Inn, impersonated by African American actors and women (a recent performance piece begins with a woman draped alongside a black Lincoln Continental, only to have a “car crash” into history and survive in the form of a “female Lincoln”!). There are “Lincoln impersonation conventions” where an array of Lincolns and other people in period dress chant “Ready and Abe-L.”⁴ Lincoln also enters, in a very displaced way, in Ben Stiller’s Zoolander, in which a male-model conspiracy theory of presidential assassinations is proposed, with John Wilkes Booth characterized as a “male model.” (Oswald wasn’t a male model, but a viewer is shown some footage and asked to check out “those two guys on the grassy knoll” who are filmed in postures reminiscent of GQ and Esquire layouts.) The assassination is fodder for a Sondheim musical, Assassins, and going to that musical is part of Sarah Vowell’s best-selling Assassination Vacation. Most recently, Lincoln appears as a depressive in the biography by (and marketing of) Joshua Wolf Shenk’s Lincoln’s Melancholy: How Depression Fueled His Greatness and in the History Channel’s two-hour documentary derived in part from the book (and is also presented as potentially “queer” for his intense homosocial friendship with Joshua Speed). A review by the New York Times theater critic Patricia Cohen asks: “Can the generally disappointing crop of national leaders today be attributed to the Prozac generation’s addiction to cheeriness . . .? The emotionally suffering artist stokes our imagination, the emotionally suffering politician evokes panic; who wants to think about Eeyore nose to nose with bin Laden?”⁵ Doris Kearns Goodwin’s popular Team of Rivals fuels speculation about improbable fusion tickets in the 2008 presidential race, such as a McCain-Clinton pairing. Lincoln becomes a talking-point comparison after George W. Bush’s “new” Iraqi surge policy (like Lincoln, he had to change some generals). This meets up with its hilarious Daily Show counterpart, a found recording of Lincoln mangling “A house divided” (“You can’t stand in a divided house”) to illustrate yet another similarity between W-Bush and Lincoln.

The Kennedy assassination itself could supply material for several books about the vernacular use of the presidency. From the more literary “novelizations” such as James Ellroy’s American Tabloid or Don De-Lillo’s Libra, to Oliver Stone’s film JFK, the assassination itself, as well as its dispersive metonyms and part-objects—Dealey Plaza (site for the ending of DeLillo’s first piece, Americana) to Jackie’s pink Chanel suit and pillbox hat (forever emblematized in The House of Yes, where a reenactment of the motorcade scene and shooting serves as a prelude to acts of brother-sister incest and repetitive family trauma), pervade popular culture. In David Cronenberg’s Crash, a protagonist, Vaughn, suggests that the Kennedy assassination is just another iconic car crash, along with those of James Dean (DeLillo sees Oswald as a poor man’s James Dean), Jayne Mansfield, and Albert Camus. These mergers of national history and family or personal trauma are increasingly played out during the Clinton presidency films (even in comic ones like Dick that ostensibly treat other presidents), such as Absolute Power, Murder at 1600, and The Contender. Moreover, we might locate a Lewinsky affair legacy in the increasingly forensic view of the White House, in particular, in the siting of the Oval Office as crime scene, and in the beginnings of the procedural or reality TV shows that have displaced earlier detective genres. For the Lewinsky affair did demonstrate, as shows like CSI do so ably, that “truth” resides outside consciousness/cognition in the forensic object—the blue dress or the bloody glove, to cite just two Clinton-era relics. There is even some speculation that the popularization of the Lewinsky affair made the revelation of the Catholic Church abuse scandals easier because of the Clinton scandal’s matter-of-fact presentations about oral sex.

The Clinton presidency marked an intensification of these cultural trends in more conventional ways, as well. Michael Rogin’s insightful reading of Independence Day discusses not only how the film entered the 1996 campaign (where both Clinton and Dole felt obliged to “endorse” it) but its most popular trailer, which shows the blowing up of the White House.⁶ Tim Burton’s Mars Attacks! covers much the same territory; alien invaders destroy most of monumental Washington, with a president played by Jack Nicholson and Glenn Close as first lady (dressed in Nancy Reagan red). The president became an action hero to identify with when Harrison Ford took on the role (in Air Force One, Clinton’s personal favorite). Clinton claimed that the best perk of being president was not Air Force One or Camp David but the inhouse movie theater. Bill Pullman (in ID4) forgot his constitutional role and flew an airplane himself to defeat the aliens. W-Bush’s “Mission Accomplished” photo op on the deck of the USS Abraham Lincoln mimics Pullman’s presidential performance.⁷ Great comic actors such as Jack Lemmon and James Garner played unwitting ex-presidential heroes in My Fellow Americans. Kevin Kline played a convincing (GHW) Bush-style president in Dave and exposed corruption in the executive branch while his friend Charles Grodin, as Murray the accountant, balanced the budget. John Travolta convincingly portrayed Clinton, fictionalized as Jack Stanton, in Primary Colors, and Jeff Bridges was in many ways an even more compelling Clinton in The Contender. Gene Hackman was the president in Absolute Power, promoted from his cabinet position in No Way Out. Clint Eastwood didn’t get to be the president but was at least in the Secret Service in In the Line of Fire. Morgan Freeman comforted the nation in the comet-disaster film Deep Impact. Of all the demographically viable popular Hollywood actors, perhaps only Mel Gibson did not get a presidential role (although it could be argued that he did pave the way historically in The Patriot or that he was preparing to appeal to a “higher authority” in the W-Bush years with his Passion of the Christ).

At other times, the merger of Hollywood and Washington could be dizzying. Marilyn Monroe’s singing of “Happy Birthday, Mr. President” is endlessly circulated in biographies of Marilyn, of JFK, of Jackie, and of the Rat Pack (the Peter Lawford connection). It is decontextualized and recontextualized in an eerie impersonation by Drew Barrymore on the cover of John F. Kennedy Jr.’s George magazine. And, to return to my opening example, an ad for a car-leasing deal on President’s Day 2001 claimed that the offer was democratically available, even to those who weren’t “big shots” like the president: “You don’t have to be a Washington or Lincoln to get the presidential treatment and there is no residency requirement” (intimations of Hillary Clinton’s Senate campaign—where the ad also appeared—in 2000). Even the Florida recount after the 2000 presidential election became grist for the mill, as in the Doritos Chip inspector ad where chips, substituting for ballots, are held up to a light while the inspector says, “I’ve lost count.” Bob Dole’s public-service (erectile dysfunction) ad for Viagra is indexed in his Viagra-inflected Pepsi ad shown during the 2001 Superbowl, in which he extols his “little blue companion” and seems to be having a lot more fun on the beach than he did in the original public-service announcement/ad, in which he was shown alone in his office with an American flag. Bob Dole made his first Viagra disclosure on Larry King Live, and, again in 2001, a NASCAR with the Viagra logo is shown racing around a track and then stopping, the driver opens the door, takes off his protective helmet, and asks, “Who were you expecting—Bob Dole?” One can argue that W-Bush did a lot of product placement in his appearances for the 2002 Winter Olympics. The ubiquity of these examples is not just a recent effect of a celebrity culture or some epiphenomena of infotainment.

Scholars such as Murray Edelman, Barbara Hinckley, Jeff Tulis, and Anne Norton have noted the specifically rhetorical or symbolic aspects of the American presidency.⁸ Norton quotes Alexis de Tocqueville to the effect that the presidency is a semiotic function and links its signifying forms to practices of everyday life, from shopping and eating to popular court and lawyer television series. My presentation of the American presidents in this introduction focuses less on representative or semiotic (signifying) functions (which are addressed at length in chapters 2, 3, 5, and 7) than on their position as a site for an existential or experiential form of knowledge. In other words, one of the implicit claims I develop is that the dialogue between president and citizen is an operational as well as a representational form of knowledge.

When a major novelist like DeLillo in Libra speaks to us as Oswald, or a debutant author like Lydia Millet, in her more frivolous George Bush, Dark Prince of Love, stages an erotic transference, or a Pulitzer Prize–winning biographer such as Edmund Morris in Dutch casts himself in a Reagan presidential primal scene, these are self-conscious and publicized aspects of the daily use we make of our presidents, living and former. This “use” is often not conscious. Its logic is not necessarily linear and may be diffusely associative (what Deleuze might call rhizomatic),⁹ but it can perhaps be best designated by what Donald Winnicott calls a transitional object and Christopher Bollas a transformational object.¹⁰

For Winnicott, transitional phenomena, both objects and spaces, “refer to a dimension of living that belongs neither to internal nor external reality; rather it is the place that both connects and separates inner and outer.”¹¹ Transitional objects and spaces are places of cultural experience, invention, and creative play, developmentally necessary for symbolization. In other words, in addition to a person’s intersubjective relations and intrapsychic world, “which can be rich or poor and can be at peace or in a state of war,” there is an intermediate (or third) area of expertise to which both inner and outer worlds contribute: “It is an area which is not challenged, because no claim is made on its behalf except that it shall exist as a resting-place for the individual engaged in the perpetual human task of keeping inner and outer reality separate yet interrelated.”¹² The transitional object marks an important step in psychoanalytic theory between object-relating and use of an object; “from an observer’s point of view it is an aspect ...