This living exemplar of Warholian celebrity was a former middling actor whose sensibilities derived from Hollywood, and in whom a sense of irony was never detected: unable to distinguish between an atrocity and a photograph of an atrocity. His presidency was defined by this notion of politics as role-playing, as camp: “the farthest extension, in its sensibility, of the metaphor of life as theater.” For Reagan, Joan Didion wrote, “rhetoric was soon understood to be interchangeable with action.”
