Checking in the Mirror: Liberty Weekend's Patriotic Spectacle

Liberty Weekend, as you may or may not remember, was the patriotic extravaganza that celebrated the July Fourth, 1986 centennial of the Statue of Liberty. Conceived and presented in the thick of the long Republican reign, this celebration can provide us now with a peculiarly revealing case study of the Reagan-era mythos at work.' By July, 1986, two hundred and seventy-seven million dollars had been raised toward the restoration and maintenance of the statue, and work on the monument had been underway for two years. On Independence Day, the statue was "rededicated," as, with the help of a long distance laser beam, President Reagan relit the lady's torch.2 Chief Justice Warren E. Burger swore in two hundred and fifty new citizens on Ellis Island, while, nationwide, 26,000 other immigrants also took the holiday oath. Throughout the weekend, festivities multiplied. Tall ships made their way into New York harbor, celebrities made their way across stages, hightech fireworks were set off, and self-avowedly "glitzy" opening and closing ceremonies, lasting three hours each, were broadcast all over the world. It seems the passive construction is a significant requisite of response to any cultural text authored by that choral conglomerate known as a production staff.3 Of course, Lee Iacocca's was the name most closely associated with Liberty Weekend. The President of Chrysler Corporation, a company that had been recently rescued from likely extinction by government assistance, Iaccoca said his "thank you's" to the nation (receiving a great deal of personal publicity in the process) by instituting and chairing the Statue of Liberty-Ellis Island Foundation. In reality, of course, the decisions that shaped Liberty Weekend were made by hundreds of individuals: writers, designers, casting agents, choreographers, camera technicians, composers and celebrities. Further, the placement of commercial breaks and the carefully thematized content of those commercials had a bearing upon the broadcast event. The effect of this group effort? While the event's group fabrication was emphasized, as commentators litanized the compilation of technical and creative contributions, responsibility for interpretation was entirely lost in the shuffle. Furthering a project begun over a century ago with the rise of advertising and public relations, this Iacoccan "pseudo-event" uses the media to wed commercial and national symbolism, thereby mythologizing itself as an intrinsic part of the American vision.4 The competitive drive of the advertiser to successfully manipulate his audience becomes, itself, spectacle, and Liberty Weekend presents this overt valuation of the manipulative illusion as Americana, as a nation watching itself. This is the reflexivity of the advertiser, which asks not for scrutiny but for applause, making a sort of metaspectacle out of its own construction of an illusion that will sell, and inviting the audience to enjoy their complicity in their own hoodwinking.5 In this invitation to peek at the mechanics of a spectacle as it unfolds, Liberty Weekend actually acknowledges its audience to be more savvy than the broad face of that spectacle might lead us to believe. Indeed, on the face of it, like most patriotic extravaganzas, Liberty Weekend attempts to neutralize the critical faculties of its audience and participants simply by presuming the absence of such faculties. In its big shape, the spectacle reinvents a "pain-free past" for America (to borrow a phrase from Jefferson Morley), and guides audience ingestion of it with carefully spoon-fed on-screen commentary. But, as I have suggested, the leftover interpretive sophistication of the audience, although apparently belied, does not in fact go untended to. Rather, as I hope to chart here, this more perspicacious level of reception is addressed (and, in principle, safely engaged) by a rather defensive discourse of distanced self-scrutiny, or "checking in the mirror," that runs throughout the Weekends opening and closing ceremonies. …