The President Electric: Ronald Reagan and the Politics of Performance

NOTES

NOTES Introduction 1. Brian Massumi and Kenneth Dean, “Postmortem on the Presidential Body,” in Body Politics: Disease, Desire, and the Family, edited by Michael Ryan and Avery Gordon (Boulder: Westview, 1994), 158. 2. Michael Rogin, Ronald Reagan the Movie and Other Episodes of Political Demonology (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987), 3. 3. Walt Whitman, “I Sing the Body Electric,” in Leaves of Grass (Philadelphia: David McKay, [1855] 1900), 81. 4. David S. Reynolds, Walt Whitman’s America: A Cultural Biography (New York: Vintage, 1996), 156. 5. Ibid., 154–93. See also Lawrence Levine, Highbrow/Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1990). 6. Quoted in Reynolds, Walt Whitman’s America, 161. 7. Dean Pitchford and Michael Gore, “I Sing the Body Electric,” soundtrack from the movie Fame, 33 rpm and audio cassette, RSO Music, 1980. 8. Walt Whitman, “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloomed,” in Leaves of Grass (Philadelphia: David McKay, [1855] 1900): 255. 9. Raymond Williams, “Drama in a Dramatized Society,” in Raymond Williams on Television, edited by Alan O’Connor (London: Routledge, 1989), 3–4. 10. Ibid., 7, 11. 11. Lou Cannon, President Reagan: The Role of a Lifetime (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1991); Neil Gabler, Life, the Movie: How Entertainment Conquered Reality (New York: Vintage, 2000), 108. 12. Notable exceptions to this tendency are Cannon, President Reagan; Rogin, Ronald Reagan the Movie; Edmond Morris, Dutch: A Memoir of Ronald Reagan (New York: Random House, 1999); Peggy Noonan, What I Saw at the Revolution: A Political Life in the Reagan Era (New York: Random House, 1991); and Garry Wills, Reagan’s 225 226 / notes to pages 9–16 America: Innocents at Home (New York: Viking Penguin, 1988). Their accounts are indispensable, and I cite them throughout. 13. It was in his address to the 1988 Republican National Convention that Reagan declared, “[I]deas are stupid things.” 14. Lawrence Grossberg, We Gotta Get Outta This Place: Popular Conservatism and Postmodern Culture (New York: Routledge, 1992), 255, emphasis in the original. 15. Ibid., 83–84. 16. Michael Denning, “The End of Mass Culture,” in Modernity and Mass Culture, edited by James Naremore and Patrick Brantlinger (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991), 256. 17. Karl Marx, Capital, vol. 1 (New York: International Publishers, 1967), 178. 18. Richard Dyer, “Entertainment and Utopia,” in The Cultural Studies Reader, edited by Simon During (New York: Routledge, 1999), 373. 19. Raymond Williams, Marxism and Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), 128–35. 20. Quoted in Cannon, President Reagan, 51. 21. Quoted in Grossberg, We Gotta Get Outta This Place, 39–40. 22. Edward Bernays, “Engineering of Consent,” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 250 (March 1947): 113–20. 23. Frederic Jameson, “Rei‹cation and Utopia in Mass Culture,” Social Text (winter 1979): 139. 24. Frederic Jameson, Postmodernism; or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham: Duke University Press, 1991), 48. 25. Michael McManus, undated memo to Michael Deaver, folder 1, box OA7624, 1982, Michael McManus ‹les, Ronald Reagan Presidential Library. 26. Cannon, President Reagan, 156–57. 27. Noonan, What I Saw at the Revolution, 163. 28. Cannon, President Reagan, 53–54. 29. Quoted in Mark Hertsgaard, On Bended Knee: The Press and the Reagan Presidency (New York: Random House, 1988), 35. 30. Ibid., 35. 31. Ibid., 26–27. 32. Donald Regan, For the Record: From Wall Street to Washington (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1988), 248. 33. Cannon, President Reagan, 55. 34. Hertsgaard, On Bended Knee, 46–47. 35. Noonan, What I Saw at the Revolution, 159. 36. Henry Adams, The Education of Henry Adams (New York: Houghton Mif›in, 1961). 37. I refer throughout to America and Americans as the designation for a constellation of beliefs, ideas, and desires ‹rst enunciated by the Puritan clergy as “the errand in the wilderness” and echoed throughout the nation’s history in terms such as American Exceptionalism, Manifest Destiny, and myth of the frontier. My use of notes to pages 16–24 / 227 America is not meant to connote a geographically ‹xed place but rather a historically contingent epistemological space. In the same vein, I use Americans to refer not to a group of individuals de‹ned by a national boundary but to a mythic tribe. Americans, in this sense, does not describe the people born or living within the national boundaries of the United States. Instead, like the term Israelites, it denotes the inheritors...