Michael Rogin

The United States has been gripped by a campaign to drive violence from television. Some blame violent images for violent acts; others insist that the images themselves do violence. Senators bemoan television brutality, a national debate on the pros and cons of censorship takes centre stage for a time – displaced by other violent attention-getters like Lorena and John Wayne Bobbitt, Tonya Harding and Nancy Kerrigan, Singapore’s caning sentence to punish an American teenager, the ‘three strikes and you’re out’ Congressional proposal to jail for life those convicted of three violent crimes (a category that includes any drug-related offence and the use of imitation guns) – but nothing will change. Since violence sells, this campaign will fail. So long as the state is unwilling to interfere with the operations of the marketplace, the debate augments the fascination with violence rather than standing in its way.’

In a time of mass unemployment, budget deficits, infrastructure decay and economic decline, of ethnic cleansing, mass rape, communal violence and racial polarisation, Garry Wills and Sacvan Bercovitch proclaim the power of language to transform the world. Against one current fashion, both reject punning and the play of the socially detached signifier: they embed American words in American history. Against another current fashion, both are exceptionalists, seeing a special destiny for the United States. Earlier exceptionalists celebrated American uniqueness: the history that words transfigure in these two books is one of violence. For Bercovitch, American rhetoric promotes and obfuscates violence; the Gettysburg Address, for Wills, rises above the battle to create something new. The ‘redemptive promises of language’ trap Bercovitch’s United States in repetitive self-absorption; Lincoln at Gettysburg, in Wills’s subtitle, analyses ‘the words that remade America’.

Ronald Reagan left office more popular than any departing President since the end of World War Two. The same month Americans interviewed in a telephone poll achieved on a happiness scale the highest score in decades. Reagan’s popularity and American self-satisfaction have not risen together because of any general improvement in the standard of living: the rich are richer than they were a decade ago, the poor are poorer, and the average American stands about the same. It is not prosperity that accounts for the return of American happiness, but rather the terms on which the inhabitants of the United States connect their private lives to their sense of national well-being.

Ronald Reagan’s autobiography, Where’s the rest of me?, repeated the question the actor had asked in the movie King’s Row, when he woke up in a hospital bed to discover that his legs had been amputated. Reagan lost his legs in Hollywood, the autobiography explains, and recovered ‘the rest of me’ (that phrase is the leitmotif of his text) by fighting Communist influence there, acquiring personal and institutional backing, and marrying Nancy Davis. This reassemblage of the actor/politician made him whole – the cause he supported and the people who supported him constituting the rest of Ronald Reagan.’