Why the fuck did William S Burroughs endorse Mr Peanut for mayor in 1974?
As Bart Simpson, Milhouse Van Houten and Nelson Muntz found out the hard way with their cinema trip to see Naked Lunch, whatever you think will happen when you engage with the work of William S Burroughs is almost certainly wrong.
Even by the standards of the beat generation he defined, Burroughs’ work was challenging, experimental, and often outright shocking.
Inspired as it was by severe drug addiction, life on the fringes of society and frequent dalliances with the occult, the work of William S Burroughs is the kind of intense literature that doesn’t give up its secrets on one’s first trip through it. Or in many cases, it’s the first five trips. And I don’t use the word trip lightly either.
The vast majority of the time, we are spat out of Burroughs’ work feeling much the same way that Bart and chums did earlier. Deeply confused and unnerved, wondering what else to make of what we just saw other than, “What the fuck?!”
The truth was, this was not just the most often reaction to the mam’s work, but the man himself took. A consummate trickster who loved flying in the face of anyone who tried to pigeonhole him, William S Burroughs was just as hard to pin down as anything he wrote.
Need proof? This was a man who spent his entire life professing his belief in ritual magic, who was a heroin addict as a young man, and took up drug dealing to support it, and he accidentally murdered his wife when their “William Tell act”, as he put it, went horribly, horribly wrong. This is a serious man who lived a harrowing life. Except that if you look hard enough, there are occasionally flickers of brightness that can’t help but shine through.
Like, for example, what on earth is he doing pictured with the literal Mr Peanut?!
Why was William S Burroughs pictured with Mr Peanut?
In 1974, performance artist Vincent Trasov ran for mayor of Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. At least, that’s who people suspect ran as a joke candidate back then because on the surface, it was the infamous Planters mascot, Mr Peanut. The advertising icon ran on an art-first platform, one best summed up by a not confusing at all acronym. P for Performance, E for Elegance, A for Art, N for Nonsense, U for Uniqueness, and T for Talent. Honestly? RuPaul did it better.
On the day that Trasov announced his candidacy, Burroughs happened to be in Vancouver. Sensing an opportunity, Trasov met up with the esteemed author and asked him to endorse the Peanut campaign. William S Burroughs, madman that he was, thought the whole thing was hilarious and accepted the offer on the spot.
Giving a genuinely thoughtful speech at the campaign launch party of a sentient peanut, where he said the following…
“I would like to take this opportunity to endorse the candidacy of Mr Peanut for mayor of Vancouver. Mr Peanut is running on the art platform, and art is the creation of illusion. Since the inexorable logic of reality has created nothing but insolvable problems, it is now time for illusion to take over. And there can only be one illogical candidate-Mr Peanut.”
Can’t say that the man didn’t have a point, can you? Unfortunately, the Peanut campaign cratered, receiving just over 2,600 votes.
One has to wonder what would have happened had he taken City Hall, though. At least they’d get their money’s worth out of the costume.