ABSTRACT
If the narrative contexts available to account for the presence, let alone the activity, of one man's head in another man's lap seem to offer us only the binary alternatives of prurience or sentimentality—the alternatives, as one might put it, of giving head or giving succor—the ideological lenses that polarize these ways of coloring such a scene may blind us to the process whereby the insistence on one can filter out the effects and operations of the other. Thus in January of 1992 when audiences in Japan and America watched with horror and fascination as their televisions repeatedly presented them with images of President Bush throwing up on Prime Minister Miyazawa before collapsing into his lap, the machinery of the news media on both sides of the Pacific was obliged to construct a context in which to construe this unusual relation of ministerial lap to presidential head. The on-scene reporter for the New York Times, after noting, for example, that videotape of this episode "was repeatedly shown on television both here in Japan and in the United States," went on to observe immediately thereafter that "the President's host, Prime Minister Kiichi Miyazawa, cradled his head for some minutes until Mr. Bush was strong enough to get up on his own." 1 The verb of choice, "to cradle," which secures the necessary relation of sentimentality in defining the affect proper to this disturbing interaction, appeared as well in the translation of an article from Tokyo's Nihon Keizai Shimbun—a translation that extended the reach of this verb by invoking a related figure from its tropological penumbra: "The tape of Miyazawa cradling Bush's head after the president collapsed at a state banquet in Japan was shown over and over again on American television, and the sight was etched into American people's minds. 168The scene was pregnant with symbolism of America's current need for help from Japan." 2
