The Queasy Ironic Cult of John Hinkley Jr., Musician
The comedy duo of Scharpling & Wurster are fascinated by the surreal nature of fame and people who become famous for something random and strange and then try to segue that fame into show-business riches.
I consequently thought of Scharpling & Wurster when Claudia Conway, the Liberal daughter of professional Trump defender Kellyanne Conway and professional Trump hater George Conway, segued from making anti-Trump TikTok videos to competing unsuccessfully on American Idol.
Did she win? God no. Is she now a successful professional entertainer, like the girl who yelled, “Cash Me Outside?” On Dr. Phil? She is not. But she got to be on television, which is an empty, hollow victory in itself.
I similarly thought of Scharpling & Wurster when I discovered that failed presidential assassin John Hinkley Jr. was out of the mental hospital and on Twitter and Youtube trying to build a career as a singer-songwriter.
On social media, Hinkley Jr. is single-minded. He understandably wants people to focus on his life as an artist and a musician and not a man who shot and wounded four men, including President Ronald Reagan and Press Secretary James Brady.
When you do something as historic as shoot the most powerful man in the world it follows that everything that you subsequently do while seem comically insignificant by comparison.
Hinkley’s late in life sideline as just another guy with a guitar trying to interest the public in his gigs, new songs and Youtube videos struck me as surreal, fascinating, unlikely and darkly comic in the manner of a Scharpling & Wurster routine.
I was not the only one intrigued by Hinkley’s attempts to re-brand himself as a musician. Hinkley’s attempts to find a backing band and then gigs for that band proved successful.
Hinkley didn’t just book gigs, he sold out gigs. People were willing to very briefly get into the John Hinkley Jr. business until they weren’t.
In a not entirely surprising development, Hinkley’s sold out gigs were canceled by bookers who apparently took a long, hard look in the mirror and decided that the novelty of booking such an infamous figure was not worth publicly supporting a man who attempted to murder multiple people.
The Market Hotel captured the essence of these cancellations when it wrote that it was canceling the gig out of sensitivity to “the safety of our vulnerable communities” and also because, to be brutally honest, apparently Hinkley kind of sucked as an artist.
The hotel explained bluntly, “We might feel differently if we believed (Hinkley’s) music was important and transcended the infamy, but that’s just not the case here.”
That’s the thing. Hinkley’s infamy is massive. His music, on the other hand, is small and unimportant. It doesn’t seem to transcend anything, let alone the notoriety that comes with being a failed presidential assassin.
I felt weird following Hinkley Jr. on Twitter and re-tweeting him occasionally because I didn’t want to feel like I was either making fun of a mentally ill man, making light of his crimes or insulting the people who he shot, only one of whom was Ronald Reagan.
But you can’t really “support” Hinkley Jr’s career in any way, ironically or otherwise, without doing those things. What Hinkley Jr. did was real and awful and destroyed lives. It’s not funny. It’s weird. It’s strange. But it’s not funny and it is in terrible taste to pretend otherwise.
I feel ashamed to be part of the ironic John Hinkley Jr. Appreciation Society. I am going to unfollow him on Twitter and try to do better in the future because when we laugh at killers, attempted and otherwise, a whole lot of ugliness is unleashed in the process, whether we want to acknowledge so or not.
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