Annotation & Commentary by the author, J.G. Ballard, to "Why I Want to Fuck
Ronald Reagan", published in The Atrocity Exhibition, 1990:
"Why I Want to Fuck Ronald Reagan" prompted Doubleday in 1970 to pulp its first
American edition of The Atrocity Exhibition. Ronald Reagan's presidency
remained a complete mystery to most Europeans, though I noticed that Americans
took him far more easily in their stride. But the amiable old duffer who
occupied the White House was a very different person from the often sinister
figure I described in 1967, when the present piece was first published. The
then-novelty of a Hollywood film star entering politics and becoming governor
of California gave Reagan considerable air time on British TV. Watching his
right-wing speeches, in which he castigated in sneering tones the profligate,
welfare-spending, bureaucrat-infested state government, I saw a more crude
and ambitious figure, far closer to the brutal crime boss he played in the
1964 movie, The Killers, his last Hollywood role. 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. Though the man himself mellowed,
his later presidency seems to have run the same formula.
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