Why I want to fuck Ronald Reagan reveals an essential issue about sovereignty: the sovereign /celebrity has become a mask (persona) which, leveraged in secularization, gives rise to a world in which absolute falsehood is not only possible but necessary to keep the system going. In the notes to The Atrocity Exhibition we read the following commentary:

A kind of banalisation of celebrity has occurred: we are now offered an instant, ready-to-mix fame as nutritious as packet soup. Warhol’s screen-prints show the process at work. His portraits of Marilyn Monroe and Jackie Kennedy drain the tragedy from the lives of these desperate women, while his dayglow palette returns them to the innocent world of the child’s colouring book.¹

Van Heusen 356 (1985) and Vote McGovern (1972), which show Reagan and Nixon in Warhol’s colorful style are perhaps the best examples of the bland aesthetics that underlie pop politics. This banalization has spread like a toxic fog in the last forty years. One of its effects is to achieve a complete confusion over the implications and consequences of any act, for how could we put it in perspective if truth has ceased to be a frame of reference?

Van Heusen 356 (1985) & Vote McGovern (1972)

An anecdote Ballard relates in the notes to this piece offers a most curious proof of the matter. In 1980, during the Republican National Convention in Detroit—in which Reagan ran against ex-CIA Director George H.W. Bush for the presidential nomination—a group of activists ideologically aligned with the situationists, delivered copies of Why I Want to Fuck Ronald Reagan to the delegates under the title of ‘Official Republican 1980 Presidential survey’ and bearing the party seal. The antic passed without grief or glory and, according to Ballard, the text was taken “for what it resembled, a psychological position paper on the candidate’s subliminal appeal, commissioned from some maverick think-tank.”²

In what kind of world could one of the most prophetic and incendiary literary pieces of the 20th century go unnoticed at a national convention?

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1. Ballard, The Atrocity Exhibition, 17 ↩︎
2. Ibíd., 170. ↩︎