Why I Want to Fuck Ronald Reagan

File:Ronald-Reagan-governor-California.jpg

The American actor and politician Ronald Reagan in 1967.

"Why I Want to Fuck Ronald Reagan" (1968), by J. G. Ballard, is a short story written in the style of a scientific report on a series of experiments intended to measure the psychosexual appeal of the Californian politician Ronald Reagan, who then was governor of the state of California, and also a candidate for the 1968 Republican presidential nomination, which he lost to Richard Nixon.

First published as a pamphlet in 1968 by the Unicorn Bookshop in Brighton, the short story was later republished in The Atrocity Exhibition (1970), a collection of thematically related short stories. It was later used as part of a prank at the 1980 Republican National Convention, at which Reagan was nominated as president.

History

In the preface to the 1990 edition of The Atrocity Exhibition (1970), the novelist J.G. Ballard said that he was impressed and inspired by the phenomenon of media politicians who speak for private interests, whilst pretending to speak for the public interest, because:

A bookseller who sold the pamphlet-edition of the short story “Why I Want to Fuck Ronald Reagan” was charged with the crime of public obscenity. In 1970, the Doubleday publishing house included the pamphlet edition as an appendix to the first U.S. edition of The Atrocity Exhibition, which is a collection of thematically related short stories and condensed novels.

Moreover, at the 1980 Republican National Convention in Detroit, Michigan, as a political prank, ex-Situationists distributed a copy of the short story “Why I Want to Fuck Ronald Reagan”, the cover of which was decorated with the official seal of the Republican Party in order to impress and deceive the delegates of the report's documentary credibility. Ballard said that the political delegates readily accepted the short-story fiction for what it resembled: a scientific report about the psychological dynamics of the subliminal appeal of the media politician Ronald Reagan who was proffering himself as a Republican candidate for the national presidency.

Quotes

• Patients were provided with assembly kit photographs of sexual partners during intercourse. In each case Reagan's face was super imposed upon the original partner. Vaginal intercourse with "Reagan" proved uniformly disappointing, producing orgasm in 2% of subjects.
• "Faces were seen as either circumcised (JFK, Khrushchev) or uncircumcised (LBJ, Adenauer). In assembly-kit tests Reagan's face was uniformly perceived as a penile erection. Patients were encouraged to devise the optimum sex-death of Ronald Reagan."

See also

• Crash, a Ballard novel which focuses on similar themes
• Ronald Reagan in music