J.G. Ballard and the Psychosexual Appeal of Ronald Reagan

Why I Want To Fuck Ronald Reagan is a short story by ToM favorite J.G. Ballard, first published as a pamphlet and then later in his short story collection The Atrocity Exhibition. The story itself is a mock psychological study on the psychosexual appeal of Ronald Reagan, cataloguing a series of weird experiments.

Ballard's explanation of the story's origins, from The Atrocity Experiment:

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.

For the record, I haven't read this particular Ballard story, but I now need to hunt down a copy, simply because of this amazing claim from Ballard, about how it was distributed during the 1980 Republican Convention, without its title, as an actual scientific study, and blindly accepted by the delegates as factual.

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.

Of course, as we know, Reagan won, so perhaps Ballard's fantastic vision of millions of Americans rubbing their genitals against the cathode glow of his leathery televised face wasn't as far out as he believes.

Thanks to Mind Hacks for making me aware of this astounding historical event.