Recasting men as gods is neither new nor novel, yet our recurring error in believing in them is everything but avoidable. From Reagan to Jobs, from Trump to Musk, we never fail in venerating modern-day super-important guys as saviors of our future.
Whether we believe technological innovation alone will engineer us out of a climate crisis or that isolationist politics offer the only escape from geopolitical peril, we too often invest our hopes in salvation in narrow-minded cults of personality. We seem to believe that if we cede enough of our opinions to the man-gods marketing monolithic American values, GIF-making smartphones, perpetual litigation, or subscriber-based free speech, all our problems will just fade away.
In choosing our idols, we rarely choose wisely. But choose we fiercely do, nonetheless.
J.G. Ballard took the deification of Ronald Reagan to a sci-fi extreme in “The Secret History of World War 3” (1988), a short story included in War Fever (1990).1
In “The Secret History of World War 3,” Ballard imagines his near-future America as a country so blinded by Reagan’s iconic stature that, “after the inauguration of his luckless successor,” Congress intervened to grant him a third term as president. The story offers a plausible rationale:
The multiplication of the world’s problems—the renewed energy crisis, the second Iran/Iraq conflict, the destabilization of the Soviet Union’s Asiatic republics, the unnerving alliance in the USA between Islam and militant feminism—all prompted an intense nostalgia for the Reagan years. There was an immense affectionate memory of his gaffes and little incompetencies, his fondness (shared by those who elected him) for watching TV in his pajamas rather than the attending to more important matters, his confusion of reality with the half-remembered movies of his youth.
While the talking points of Ballard’s prognostication aren’t all right—equating Islam with militant feminism is a late-Eighties prejudicial minefield—the author, in gestalt, captures the qualities of the spell Reagan cast over too many of us.
In the story, Ballard imagines Reagan’s grip on the public imagination to be so powerful that almost everyone but the narrator remembers that a nuclear World War III actually happened during his third term.
How did they miss the near end of the world? His believers were conditioned to pay attention to the wrong things. Reagan, who was in a state of “advancing senility,” wasn’t able to offer an unrelenting stream of tweets, product updates, frivolous lawsuits, or off-the-cuff policy pivots to keep them distracted. Instead, his administration broadcast all of his second-to-second “Is he dead or alive?” health metrics to TV networks 24/7. And you know what? People ate it up.
Newscasts sounded like:
… here’s an update on our report of two minutes ago. Good news on the President’s CAT scan. There are no abnormal variations in the size or shape of the President’s ventricles. Light rain is forecast for D.C. area tonight, and the 8th Air Cavalry have exchanged fire with the Soviet border patrols north of Kabul. We’ll be back after the break with a report on the significance of that left temporal lobe spike.
The key to total power in Ballard’s imagination is not the strategic parsing out of information; it is rather feeding the public’s hunger to consume an unrelenting supply of it—be it of the right, wrong, or most importantly, “Say, what now?” varieties. Sound familiar?
In Ballard’s future, and our present, the man-god’s greatest claim to power is his inability (or unwillingness) to just. Shut. Up. Already.
Have I said too much? Maybe. So I’ll quote someone else.
In 1991, David Foster Wallace called Ballard “not a great fiction writer” but “an important one,” mostly because his prose was often cold but his ideas were bold. Stylistically, I get that criticism (though one critic’s cold is another’s cutting). Regardless, I often return to Ballard because his perspective only grows more prescient. DFW observed more closely, “The real Ballard has since the early ’60s been a pioneer of a certain sort of literary science fiction I like to call Psy-Fi. Psy-Fi, often parodic, surreal and grotesque, and almost always set in some near and recognizable future, seeks to explore the psychopathology of post-atomic life, stuff like high technology, mass-media, advertising, PR, totalitarianism, etc.”
While Ballard, like many of his contemporaries, didn’t predict the details of the future with 100 percent accuracy, he did foresee how our emotional connections to leaders would only grow stronger as our ability to assess their intellect would wane.
What’s changing is that today’s man-god is less image-reliant than he is information-dependent. The more blather he can firehose at his followers, the less likely they are to realize that their blatherer-in-chief is untethered from something we used to call reality.
Thus I, for one, stay off the Twitter.
J.G. Ballard’s War Fever. New York: FSG, 1990.
Another excellent post!