"Why I Want to Fuck Ronald Reagan" (1968), by J. G. Ballard, is a short story written in the style of a scientific report that catalogues a series of psychological experiments intended to measure the psychosexual appeal of the Californian politician Ronald Reagan, who then was governor of the state of California, and also a candidate for the 1968 Republican presidential nomination, which he lost to Richard M. Nixon.
First published as a pamphlet in 1968, by the Unicorn Bookshop in Brighton, England, the short story “Why I Want to Fuck Ronald Reagan” was later republished in The Atrocity Exhibition (1970), a collection of thematically related short stories.[1]
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Transcription
History
In the preface to the 1990 edition of The Atrocity Exhibition (1970), the novelist J.G. Ballard said that he was impressed and inspired by the phenomenon of media politicians who speak for private interests, whilst pretending to speak for the public interest, because:
In his commercials Reagan used the smooth, teleprompter-perfect tones of the TV auto-salesman to project a political message that was absolutely the reverse of bland and reassuring. A complete discontinuity existed between Reagan’s manner and body language, on the one hand, and his scarily simplistic right-wing message on the other [hand]. Above all, it struck me that Reagan was the first politician to exploit the fact that his TV audience would not be listening too closely, if at all, to what he was saying, and indeed might well assume, from his manner and presentation, that he was saying the exact opposite of the words actually emerging from his mouth.[2]
A bookseller who sold the pamphlet-edition of the short story “Why I Want to Fuck Ronald Reagan” (1968) was charged with the crime of public obscenity.[3] In 1970, the Doubleday publishing house included the pamphlet edition as an appendix to the first U.S. edition of The Atrocity Exhibition, which is a collection of thematically related short stories and condensed novels.[4]
Moreover, at the 1980 Republican National Convention in Detroit, Michigan, as a political prank, ex-Situationists distributed a copy of the short story “Why I Want to Fuck Ronald Reagan”, the cover of which was decorated with the official seal of the Republican Party in order to impress and deceive the delegates of the report's documentary credibility. Ballard said that the political delegates readily accepted the short-story fiction for what it resembled: a scientific report about the psychological dynamics of the subliminal appeal of the media politician Ronald Reagan who was proffering himself as a Republican candidate for the national presidency.[1]
Quotes
- Patients were provided with assembly kit photographs of sexual partners during intercourse. In each case Reagan's face was super imposed upon the original partner. Vaginal intercourse with "Reagan" proved uniformly disappointing, producing orgasm in 2% of subjects.
- "Faces were seen as either circumcised (JFK, Khrushchev) or uncircumcised (LBJ, Adenauer). In assembly-kit tests Reagan's face was uniformly perceived as a penile erection. Patients were encouraged to devise the optimum sex-death of Ronald Reagan."
See also
- Crash, a Ballard novel which focuses on similar themes
- Ronald Reagan in music
References
- ^ a b Kauffman, Linda (1998). Bad Girls and Sick Boys. Berkeley: University of California Press. pp. 169–171. ISBN 0-520-21032-8.
- ^ V. Vale, ed. (1984). RE/Search #8/9: J.G. Ballard. RE/Search.
- ^ "The Times obituary: J. G. Ballard". The Times. 20 April 2009.
- ^ Sheidlower, Jesse; Black, Lewis (2009). The F-Word. Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0-19-539311-8.
This page was last edited on 12 March 2024, at 20:04