So in 1981 President Reagan was gunned down by John Hinckley who claimed he did it in an attempt to impress Jodi Foster. So my question is why did he think that this would impress her? Yeah, sure, Hinckley was a crazy one but, it seems odd to just choose a random president to try and kill. Was there some pre-existing enmity between Reagan and Foster?
Not that I’ve ever heard or seen anyone mention.
The logic of “brave dramatic acts to positively impress people” isn’t the same as the logic of effecting a pragmatic solution to a given problem. And besides, with both crazy AND sane people, the explanations they give for an act which they are chided for AFTER THE ACT, are often based more on trying to please the people chastisng them, rather than to provide original factual information about their true motivations.
Reagan wasn’t a “random president”. He was the only POTUS we had at the time. I don’t believe Hinckley had any particular grievance against Reagan per se; he was just the guy with the highest profile job in America. Likewise, Sarah Jane Moore shot at Ford not because she had a grievance against him but because he was the President and “at the time it seemed a correct expression of my anger”.
Conversely, Samuel Byck was specifically (albeit largely irrationally) mad at Nixon and Charles Guiteau obsessed with Garfield (and SoS James Blaine). Crazy comes in all flavors.
I was going to mention that the choice of presidents to kill was a bit restricted at the time so that has already been covered, so I’ll mention the fact that Jodie Foster was only 19 at the time Reagan was shot, so not room for a lot of history between her and Reagan. And Hinckley was obsessed with Foster from the movie Taxi Driver, when she was only 13 or so. A movie about a guy who wants to assassinate a political figure, Senator [DEL]Palpatine[/DEL] Palantine.
Per Wikipedia, Hinckley’s initial idea was to assassinate Jimmy Carter, when he was president. He only switched to Reagan after he took office.
I don’t think there was any specific political motivation to the assassination attempt. Hinckley just thought that shooting the President (any President) would make him famous and get Jodie Foster to notice his existence. Once she noticed him, she would fall for all his wonderful attributes. And presumably be willing to overlook the whole shooting the President thing.
The Onion: “Hinckley, Foster to Wed: Actress ‘Very Impressed’ by Lone-nut Gunman’s Attempt on President’s Life”
It’s not possible to make sense out of crazy people’s thoughts and motives. At best, you might find some random event that pushed them in a particular direction.
In the Mad magazine parody of Silence of the Lambs, in the last panel, depicting that final phone call between Hannibal Lecter and Agent Starling, she asks him why Buffalo Bill was committing all the crimes.
Lecter responds: “He said he was doing it to impress Jodi Foster. Whatever that means.”
I was in college with Jodie Foster when the whole thing happened.
I remember running into the first room I saw with a private teevee (not common in 1981), which was occupied by Henry Kissinger’s son and filled with his Young Republican friends, and exclaiming with delight that Reagan had taken a bullet. I soon got the message that a hairy hippie Wobblie was not welcome in the company, so I left and purchased a bottle of wine, then met up with a fellow hairy hippie student and sang improvised comic songs outside the Yale Station post office on the corner of Elm and High Streets.
No idea what Jodie-poo was up to. I’m not sure I even encountered her over the two years we shared in New Haven.
See I’d think she’d lose respect for him since Reagan failed to actually kill die.
Did you play the ukulele?
Not to mention, even if Foster fell for Hinckley, what kind of relationship can you have with a Hollywood actress when you are in jail or on death row?
Well he’s out now so… I guess they are free to get together.
I read that at first that the Young Republicans were happy Reagan got shot. I was trying to figure out the logic. Maybe they really liked Bush, and thought a martyr would help their cause? But Reagan won in a landslide, so why think that?
Makes a lot more sense when I notice that comma.
And man does she hate Trump!
Back when I was in IT one of our products was an intel fusion app that was used by the protective services for some corporate bigwigs & celebrities. Along the way I got to learn about the retinue of crazy bastards that follow most public figures.
Anyone who’s famous will have a group of nutbags who are convinced this celebrity either has it in for them, is stalking them, or is love with them but doesn’t know it yet, or would otherwise be really interested in whatever the nutbag is offering (everlasting fame, a great invention, a secret volcano lair) if only they could somehow connect.
This crew of nuts will write, email, fax, or call whatever contact points the celebrity has made public. Over and over. Often multiple times daily for the more obsessed. Our software was used to document and catalog all these communications and look for patterns and trends and signs that maybe the crazy was getting crazier or leaning towards more vehemence shading into violence. We also tracked everybody’s whereabouts to ensure a celeb didn’t travel to a city without their physical security team knowing about all the local loonies there, having pix, etc.
That some nutty guy convinced himself that Jodie Foster (actually the character she played in the film) was obsessed with him even though she didn’t know him yet, and all they needed was to meet in a dramatic way to seal the deal makes complete sense to me based on what I saw these other celebs going through.
In the nuts’ minds they are actually bigger and more important characters than the celeb; after all, the nutbag’s entire world revolved around themselves, so clearly the celeb was orbiting them somewhere nearby too. Once the connection is made, *of course *the celeb would glom onto the nut; how could it be otherwise?
There is apparently some consistent defect in human minds that triggers this flavor of crazy. There are legions of these people differing only in which random celeb they’re obsessed with and the specifics of whether they’re offering inventions, undying love, or just really oversized spectacular genitals.
It was a very weird experience learning about all this.
Sounds like this:
Nice link. I’m familiar with the displayed symptoms of the disorder, but wasn’t familiar with the term. (One of the most famous, I think, cases being the woman who first went after David Letterman, then Story Musgrave, then a train.)
No, I don’t actually play the ukulele. I could have run back to my room and got my tuba, but that would have made it hard to sing.