The American Dream has run out of gas. The car has stopped. It no longer supplies the world with its images, its dreams, its fantasies. No more. It’s over. It supplies the world with its nightmares now: the Kennedy assassination, Watergate, Vietnam.

Ballard frames the “American Dream” as a cultural engine—an image-making machine that once exported optimism, glamour, and consumer fantasy worldwide. By saying it has “run out of gas,” he suggests not a gradual decline but a sudden stall: the myth can no longer propel belief. The replacement of “dreams” with “nightmares” points to a reversal in America’s symbolic output, where televised political violence, scandal, and war become the defining global images. The list (Kennedy assassination, Watergate, Vietnam) functions as a canon of disillusionment, implying that modern mass media turns national trauma into the new shared mythology. In Ballard’s dystopian imagination, catastrophe doesn’t end spectacle—it becomes the spectacle.