Why I Want to Fuck Ronald Reagan

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Why I Want to Fuck Ronald Reagan is a short work by dystopian English author J.G. Ballard, first published as a pamphlet by the Unicorn Bookshop, Brighton, in 1968.

It is written in the style of a scientific paper and supposedly catalogues a series of bizarre experiments intended to measure the psychosexual appeal of Ronald Reagan, then the Governor of California and seeking the Republican presidential nomination.

Ballard himself was inspired by the then-new phenomenon of "media politicians" and in his preface to the 1990 edition of The Atrocity Exhibition, explained:

"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 far-right message on the other. 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." [1]

In 1970, the pamphlet was added as an appendix to The Atrocity Exhibition, leading Doubleday to pulp its first American edition of that work.[2]

Ballard has also made the following claim:

"At the 1980 Republican Convention in San Francisco a copy of [Why I Want to Fuck Ronald Reagan], minus its title and the running sideheads, and furnished with the seal of the Republican Party, was distributed by some puckish pro-situationists to the RNC delegates. It was accepted for what it resembled: a psychological position paper on the candidate's subliminal appeal, commissioned by some maverick think-tank."[3]

It should be noted that the 1980 GOP convention was held in Detroit.

[edit] Quotes

  • '"Slow-motion film of Reagan's speeches produced a marked erotic effect in an audience of spastic children"
  • "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."

[edit] See also

v • d • e
Works by J. G. Ballard
Novels:

The Wind From Nowhere (1961) • The Drowned World (1962) • The Burning World (1964) • The Crystal World (1966) • The Atrocity Exhibition (1969) • Crash (1973) • Concrete Island (1974) • High Rise (1975) • The Unlimited Dream Company (1979) • Hello America (1981) • Empire of the Sun (1984) • The Day of Creation (1987) • Running Wild (1988) • The Kindness of Women (1991) • Rushing to Paradise (1994) • Cocaine Nights (1996) • Super-Cannes (2000) • Millennium People (2003) • Kingdom Come (2006)
Short stories:

"The Voices of Time" (1960) • "The Recognition" (1967) • "Why I Want to Fuck Ronald Reagan" (1968)
Short story
collections:

The Voices of Time and Other Stories (1962) • Billennium (1962) • Passport to Eternity (1963) • The Four-Dimensional Nightmare (1963) • The Terminal Beach (1964) • The Impossible Man (1966) • The Venus Hunters (1967) • The Overloaded Man (1967) • The Disaster Area (1967) • The Day of Forever (1967) • Vermilion Sands (1971) • Chronopolis and Other Stories (1971) • Low-Flying Aircraft and Other Stories (1976) • The Best of J. G. Ballard (1977) • The Best Short Stories of J. G. Ballard (1978) • Myths of the Near Future (1982) • The Voices of Time (1985) • Memories of the Space Age (1988) • War Fever (1990) • The Complete Short Stories of J. G. Ballard (2001)
Essays & reviews