John Hinckley Jr. can’t catch a break.
The 68-year-old folk singer/attempted presidential assassin keeps booking gigs only to have them canceled, on account of how he once tried to kill Ronald Reagan in order to impress Jodie Foster, with whom he became obsessed after watching Taxi Driver.
“I think that’s fair to say: I’m a victim of cancel culture,” Hinckley told the New York Post. “It keeps happening over and over again.”
Though he is literally getting canceled on, “cancel culture” really only applies to people who, at one point at least, had established careers in a particular field. I have not been asked to play Hinckley Jr. in a gender-swapped revival of Sondheim’s Assassins, but that doesn’t mean I’ve been canceled. Hey — they did it with Company, and the Squeaky Fromme part is a little out of my range. I’m no Annie Golden! These are sentences everyone understands and finds relatable!
But I digress.
Hinckley, who releases his songs on YouTube to his 36,000 subscribers, estimated that a dozen of his scheduled performances were canned because “owners don’t want the controversy.”
“They book me and then the show gets announced and then the venue starts getting backlash,” he told The Post over the phone from his Williamsburg, Virginia, home.
“The owners always cave, they cancel. It’s happened so many times, it’s kinda what I expect,” he added.
“I don’t really get upset.”
Then why are they booking him in the first place? I mean, I’d say maybe they just didn’t know who he was, but I don’t think you can just call up random places and book yourself a gig without people knowing who you are. Can you? Asking for a friend!
Aside from the literal cancellations, though, Hinckley’s infamy probably gives him an advantage over all of the other 68-year-old men just starting out in the music industry.
Now, I am going to come out with what is probably the unpopular opinion here and say that I have absolutely no problem with Hinckley trying to make a go of it as a folk singer. I also think that, as hard as this may be for people, what he did should not be held against him. (And not just because I’m not the world’s biggest Reagan fan.)
Hinckley did what he did when he was severely mentally ill. He wasn’t trying to kill Ronald Reagan for a rational reason, he didn’t want to kill him for a political reason, or a religious reason, or because of a personal issue between the two of them. He did it because he wanted to impress Jodie Foster, a person he did not know, when there was no indication whatsoever that this was something Jodie Foster wanted him to do. Because he was literally psychotic.
He had, according to his doctors, an unspecified psychotic disorder that is now in full remission. He still has other issues, but not ones that require inpatient care. I suppose there are people who think he should have been kept at St. Elizabeth’s for the rest of his life, but it’s not like we have so many mental health care beds that we can just keep someone institutionalized if they don’t need to be.
You always see characters on cop shows getting outraged over the idea of bad people getting away with their crimes by pleading insanity and going to a “cushy” mental institution, but in reality, the insanity defense is only used in one percent of all felony cases and only about 30 people per year are actually found not guilty by reason of mental disease or defect. This is despite the fact that 43 percent of all prisoners in the US prison system have a mental illness diagnosis and 2 out of 5 death row prisoners have schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, or PTSD. People also only get to plead insanity if their crime was directly caused by a disorder, and even then it is rare.
Also, mental institutions are far from “cushy.”
What would society look like if we saw a story like Hinckley’s and thought “Wow, it’s really sad that he got to that point, he really needed help. It’s good that he got treatment and is now doing better and trying to do something with his life”? Or think about the fact that many other people with similar issues didn’t get help they needed because, just a few months after the assassination attempt, Ronald Reagan repealed the Mental Health Systems Act, Jimmy Carter’s landmark mental health care legislation?
Because that’s not just kind and empathetic, it’s not just having a bleeding heart or whatever, it’s actually a whole lot more rational and reality-based than the magical thinking of just declaring people irredeemably evil and insisting that the only way to deal with them is through thoughtless cruelty. Seems like the way to go!
In the meantime, I think people probably need to find better things to do with their time than call up venues and yell at them for booking John Hinckley, Jr.
PREVIOUSLY:
"Ronald Reagan repealed the Mental Health Systems Act"
How many issues America is facing today can be traced to this bigoted c-list movie actor's administration?
CNN had only been on the air for about 9 months when Hinckley shot Reagan. The DC bureau was way understaffed. We had no one covering the back door to the Hilton where Reagan exited and was shot and so did not get any video of the shooting. Being the feisty little network we were, CNN promptly stole another network's feed off the satellite and used their footage. I think it was NBC, but I can't remember for sure. We were sued, but that was okay. We had the same footage as the big boys, even if we had to steal it.