The Rise of the 'Media Politician'
BALLARD, J.G. Why I Want to Fuck Ronald Reagan. Brighton: Unicorn Bookshop. 1968.
8vo. Wire-stitched white, silk-screened wrappers printed in red and blue; unpaginated; small brown stain to head of front wrapper and minimal rubbing to top and bottom of spine; otherwise near fine.
Incredibly scarce first printing, one of 250 copies of which 50 are numbered and signed by the author. This is an unnumbered and unsigned one of the 50 as shown by the limitation statement left blank on the final page.
"Ronald Raegan and the conceptual auto-disaster" - J.G. Ballad
Published 12 years before his election as president of the USA in 1980, The Unicorn Bookshop was accused of obscenity for their endorsement of this work. Why I Want to Fuck Ronald Reagan is composed in the manner of a scientific paper and puts forward a number of experiments concerning the psychosexual appeal of Reagan, then Governor of California.
The experimental 'short story' would go on to be published in Ballard's The Atrocity Exhibition (1970). In 1980, it was used as a political prank at the Republican National Convention at which Reagan was officially nominated President and this rare pamphlet was one of the first to satirise the birth of new 'Media Politicians'.
Ballard expressed that he was intrigued by the modern, then novelty, notion of the "Media Politician", those in power that held preference for advocating and performing policies that were at the benefit of their individual interests rather than that of their 'audience'.
As he wrote in his preface to the 1990 edition of The Atrocity Exhibition, "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".
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