1984: Head Of State

August 21, 1984: the Republican National Convention opens in Dallas.

August 20 quote from Paul Slansky's The Clothes Have No Emperor—

"It's a pain in the ass to explain.... No ERA, and no [abortion] exception for rape and incest. On women's issues, it's a stinkeroo."
—Sen. Lowell Weicker, the GOP's last liberal, bitching about the GOP platform

On August 22—

"Let's make it one more for the Gipper!"
—Nancy Reagan to the Convention, while a huge TV screen above the podium shows her husband in his hotel suite watching her on TV, inspiring her to wave frantically at him, and him—after some prompting—to wave back.

Michael Rogin's Ronald Reagan, The Movie compares the photo to an image in Thomas Hobbes' Leviathan. The frontispiece of this book by "the first modern political theorist" portrays an ideal of the state's sovereign: head atop a body composed of human figures representing his subjects.

Rogin writes that—

Hobbes wanted subjects to feel they were part of the sovereign, to identify with its actions as if those actions were their own. The theatrical metaphor by which he joined psychology to politics made spectacle part of his project. Hobbes also offered a picture of Leviathan in which the state took on human form. The image recalled medieval, corporate metaphors in which the different feudal orders composed different limbs and organs of the body politic. Hobbes' modern version, however, broke down that organic body. The body of his artificial person, Leviathan, is composed of tiny, complete homunculi. As Christopher Pye points out, they gaze at the head of the mortal god, the author of Leviathan, Thomas Hobbes... The image absorbs viewers into the body politic and keeps them passive observers at one and the same time. It offers a preview and ideal type of the relationship between modern mass society and the state.

... The frontispiece of Leviathan uncannily presages the invocation to President Ronald Reagan at the 1984 Republican convention… in which Nancy Reagan, representing the television audience, stares at the enormous head and shoulders of the chief of state.