In The Assassination of John Fitzgerald Kennedy Considered as a Downhill Motor Race, Ballard culminates the secularization process implicit in Alfred Jarry’s The Passion of Christ Considered as an Uphill Bicycle Race (2.15),

Oswald was the starter.

From his window above the track he opened the race by firing the starting gun. It is believed that the first shot was not properly heard by all the drivers. In the following confusion Oswald fired the gun two more times, but the race was already under way.

Kennedy got off to a bad start. 

There was a governor in his car and its speed remained constant at about fifteen miles an hour. However, shortly afterwards, when the governor had been put out of action, the car accelerated rapidly, and continued at high speed along the remainder of the course.¹

In Ballard’s hands JFK’s assassination becomes another one of those cliched sports narrations modern media has gotten us used to. A thorough banalization of sovereignty. On the other hand, the direction of the race, “downhill”, indicates the character of katabasis a downward spiral leading into an netherworld of sorts, our current world. (0.4, 0.5, 0.7, 0.8, 3.3.3).

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1. Ballard, The Atrocity Exhibition, 171 ↩︎