There’s no difference between politics and show business anymore; it is the performance that persuades us that the candidate is sincere.

Arthur Miller speaking about his book Echoes Down the Corridor: Collected Essays 1944 - 2000

The same year he published Plan for the Assassination of Jacqueline Kennedy for the first time, Ballard wrote another piece called Why I Want to Fuck Ronald Reagan. By then the former actor had just become the governor of California and had begun to enchant the American masses. In this piece Ballard mounted the appearance of a psychological study of Reagan in which he compared the reaction of several test subjects to the face of the governor compared to that of other politicians and stars:

Motion picture studies of Ronald Reagan reveal characteristic patterns of facial tonus and musculature associated with homo-erotic behaviour. The continuing tension of buccal sphincters and the recessive tongue role tally with earlier studies of facial rigidity (cf., Adolf Hitler, Nixon). Slow-motion cine-films of campaign speeches exercised a marked erotic effect upon an audience of spastic children. Even with mature adults the verbal material was found to have minimal effect, as demonstrated by substitution of an edited tape giving diametrically opposed opinions. Parallel films of rectal images revealed a sharp upsurge in anti-Semitic and concentration camp fantasies (cf., anal-sadistic fantasies in deprived children induced by rectal stimulation).¹

Once again, we see the Hollywood star fusing with the figure of the sovereign/dictator (3.1). With his brutal lucidity, Ballard realized something that can be verified in almost all of Reagan’s campaign speeches: “In his commercials [he] 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…”² The only moment in which Reagan’s bodily attitudes are completely consistent with the content of his speeches is when he tells his famous jokes with the charisma of a well-trained actor. Unlike Beau Brummell, his manners no longer conjugate outside and inside, body and spirit (4.5), they have become the interstice where lies spring forth and truth disappears.³

Reagan’s role as a mask of sovereignty (1.14, 1.17) is addressed by Ballard in the following fragment:

The conceptual role of Reagan. Fragments of Reagan’s cinetized postures were used in the construction of model psychodramas in which the Reagan-figure played the role of husband, doctor, insurance salesman, marriage counsellor, etc. The failure of these roles to express any meaning reveals the non-functional character of Reagan. Reagan’s success therefore indicates society’s periodic need to re-conceptualize its political leaders. Reagan thus appears as a series of posture concepts, basic equations which re-formulate the roles of aggression and anality.⁴

No matter how defective or contrived Reagan’s appearance may have seemed in the late sixties, by the end of the next decade the american public had re-conceptualized their idea of leader and the former governor was on his way to the White House. Aggression, anality and, above all, simplicity had a lot to do with his triumph at the 1980 presidential election. According to a 2004 Gallup poll, his popularity improved substantially in the years after his administration. 

On his notes Ballard comments that in 1968 Bill Butler, a North American poet that ran a bookshop in Brighton, published this piece as a separate booklet, after which his establishment was raided and he was charged with the selling of obscene material (among the exhibits in the trial were works by Burroughs and Bataille). “A defence campaign was mounted,” says Ballard, “and I agreed to appear as a witness. Preparing me, the defence lawyer asked me why I believed Why I Want to Fuck Ronald Reagan was not obscene, to which I had to reply that of course it was obscene, and intended to be so. Why, then, was its subject matter not Reagan’s sexuality? Again I had to affirm that it was. At last the lawyer said: ‘Mr Ballard, you will make a very good witness for the prosecution. We will not be calling you’.”⁵ For Ballard the piece was always a frontal assault on the former actor and politician.

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1. Ballard, The Atrocity Exhibition, 166. ↩︎
2. Ibid. IV, 193. ↩︎
3. In fact, in his commentary to the RE/Search edition of The Atrocity Exhibition, Ballard describes Reagan as a vacuum, “an empty stage-set of a personality across which moved cut-out cartoon figures, dragon ladies or demons of the evil empire, manipulated by others far more ambitious than himself. Many people have commented on his complete lack of ideas and his blurring of fiction and reality in his stumbling recall of old movies. But Reagan’s real threat is the compelling example he offers to future film actors and media manipulators with presidential ambitions…” an especially urgent and relevant observation in these trying times. ↩︎
4. Ibíd., 170. ↩︎
5. Ibid., 169 ↩︎