Such confidence in Bush results from the combination of vacuity and resolve. The content of Bush's speech registers less than the fact that he demonstrates resolve, strength, command. · This is not surprising: as the media said over and over, Americans were looking for leadership-or perhaps someone through whom they could enact revenge for the attacks. Nevertheless, the emptiness of Bush's expectatioq.s for Americans is notable. Am.ericans were to show resolve, too, but in what? In going about their everyday lives, returning to business, loving their families, hugging their children, and shopping. Bush gave Americans permission to do what they want to do. Doing what they want became their patriotic duty.
Media emphasis on Bush as presidential produced a weird split. Insofar as news media in the .first months following the September 11 attacks emphasized how presidential Bush was, they inadvertently voiced an anxiety that he was not quite presidential or that there was at least a risk of him not being presidential enough. Shouldn't resolve be demonstrated by more than going back to our everyday activities? Shouldn't someone be made to sufer? To die ? Diferently put, attention to the appropriateness of his resolve or demeanor underscores the gap between the man and his ofice. \_As the war on terror continued, this gap was covered over by the fantasy of a second, evil, more powerful leader, one less constrained by goodness or compassion, one wilg to exact the necessary, awful revenge-Vice President Dick Cheney at work in his secret underground bunker, heading the shadow government.
Slavoj <sup>Z</sup>izek's account of two figures of the master helps to explain the importance - of this doubling of authority. The invisible master, <sup>Z</sup>izek writes, "is a kind of uncanny double of public authority: he has to act in shadow, invisible to the public eye, irradiating a phantomlike, spectral omnipotence:'62 If Bush was the visible voice of justice, resolute but vague nevertheless, then fantasies of Cheney provided the obscene supplement underping this resolve. After 9 I n, Bush relied on "evil" as a nodal point holding together the discourse that would establish the meaning o f the war on terror. Bush and Cheney were two sides of an image of the master momentarily securing this meaning. Bush could give people what they wanted, and the very vagueness of what he was giving could be masked by the fantasy of the repulsive Cheney at work behind the scenes, a fantasy of people really getting what they wanted. Cheney provided the fantasy of secret power, of actions so unbecoming to the president, to America, that they best not see the light of day.
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