Bush's Body Politics: Why Impeachment Is Unlikely

Summary:The lower prong of the right wing's two-tier marketing strategy, simply stated, focuses on placing the American body in jeopardy and then promising to defend or release it. Since Bush's presidential body is not in jeopardy, like Clinton's was, there can be no impeachment.

The Argument: In the right wing's brand differentiation strategy, liberals are portrayed as architects and advocates of unnatural bodies and unnaturally used bodies. Liberals are careless of the bodies of the people. They would put people of different colors together, fostering "race mixing." Liberals would give license to homosexuals who express their unnatural bodily desires and gender preferences. Liberals would reach into mother's wombs, and shut off life-support machines. Liberals, soft on communism/ terrorism/ Marxism/ socialism, put the bodies of average Americans within the grasp of death-dealing Others. Liberals take away guns, which is the average American's last line of defense of the body, against criminals, criminals coddled by liberal courts, as well as the usual non-whites and radical Others. And, liberals would let bodies live that have murdered the lives of innocent bodies. The list goes on.

It seems to me that these body politics play particularly well in the South, and that the Bush brand strategy emphasizes Bush's Southern white male body to reinforce his power and his policies with his base. I reference here a empirical study on the "Southern Culture of Honor" which talks about how the Southern white male thinks of and uses his body differently than the Northern white male. I saw a short documentary about it on PBS a couple of years ago, and it seems relevant here.

This "experimental ethnography" involved an experimental design that had having one male researcher walk down a long, narrow hallway, accidentally bump against an unsuspecting test subject coming from the other direction and mutter "asshole" at contact. A camera was mounted in the ceiling to observe what happened and metrics devised to measure reactions, and included measuring and comparing testosterone and cortisol levels. The main finding? Men from the South were much more likely to take affront at the contact, for instance, to demand an apology, threaten the other man with physical harm, and to fight. They also exhibited higher levels of testosterone and cortisol in the blood. Men from the North who were bumped typically paid less attention to the contact, and experienced lower levels of hormonal change.

The researchers cite at some length what I guess one might call an culture-anthropological explanation for the difference referencing "shepherding behavior" which I find somewhat interesting. In this explanation, the ancestors of Southern men, coming from some "herding economies on the fringes of Britain" are more prone to violence because the herding life is all about terroritoriality. The paper also mentions the institution of slavery as a potential contributing factor, but seems to me to give it short shrift. It would seem to me that the Southern Culture of Honor was at least reinforced the South for about 250 years was a gigantic slave labor camp. This was massive prison which required that all white males, who as a population were outnumbered by slaves, be on constant guard against the possibility of slave rebellion. In addition, each southern male was enjoined to participate in the capture of runaway slaves as a duty of citizenship.

This vigilante behavior did not go away after the Civil War. The disciplinary regime merely changed from discipline and punish to discipline and lynch. Also, the South has, perhaps because for much of its history it was a prison camp, the South has always been much more militaristically inclined than the North. The military, of course, has very strict codes regarding personal honor, and a strict hierarchical structure which dovetails with the disciplinary regime of the Slavocracy.

So what's that got to do with the lower prong of the two-tier marketing strategy? The marketing messages that claim liberals put the body in jeopardy has worked particularly well in the South because they fit with the culture of honor. The flip side of maintaining honor is fighting back against those who would humiliate you and would thus call into question your honor. As the losing side in the War Between the States, the South has been resentful of Northern power ever since, and has fought back so ably and with such dedication that U.S. politics have been effectively Southernized over the past 30 years.

Okay. Let's turn to the Southern male body of George W. Bush, noted often for its swagger, its cockiness. As Bush's brand manager, communicating news about the presidential body, Karl Rove knows that the image is much more powerful than the word. He places Bush in dramatic situations where Red Staters can see the language of Bush's Southern male body, and in so doing identify themselves in that language. The foremost example, of course, is Bush walking across the aircraft carrier in his flight suit to declare "mission accomplished." And more recently we were treated to his long walk the park in New Orleans to his podium, shirt sleeves rolled up, his walk a simulacrum of force, resolve and purpose. Bush has mastered this language, and its all his supporters, both South and North, need to see to understand that he's the one running the show, and that Liberals haven't got a chance.

Now consider Bill Clinton's southern male body. Consider how the American public was made to imagine "unnatural acts" being performed on that body. His body was coded as corrupt, unclean, unnatural, illegal and immoral. In other words, impeachable.

The reason, I'm claiming, why we don't have any serious, sustained calls for impeachment for Bush lying and spying is because in the Southernization of the American psyche we have become so captive to the language and imagery of the body that the violation of rights has become too abstract. It's not visceral enough. We do not squirm in our seats. The body does not recoil in fear or repugnance when we think of other people getting spied upon. The American people just don't get excited enough about principles anymore unless they are described in such a way as to put the body in jeopardy.

Further, that this is the problem that afflicts the left on many of its classic issues. The left tends to see the political in more abstract terms, terms of fairness and equality and rights: the right to privacy, to be free from unreasonable searches and seizures, free from discrimination, from exploitation, from want, etc. For each of these, the right points to a body in jeopardy. For instance, in the case of Privacy the right asks: Would you rather die or what? In the case of discrimination the right asks: You want "race-mixing" and homosexual teachers? It's the Anxious Either/Or (Control vs. Chaos) tied time and time again to the body.

What can the Democrats do to counter-punch the right-wing strategy of the body? I'll have to get back to you on that one.