Felipe Arraño’s Reviews > Age of Assassins > Status Update

Violence on TV news screens and movies (p. 535). Paul Schrader, Taxi Driver’s writer (pp. 536-538). Martin Scorsese (pp. 538-539). November 1978, Peoples Temple in Guyana of Jonestown mass massacre/suicide (p. 548). December 1980, John Lennon was murdered (pp. 550-551). March 1981 John W. Hinckley Jr. shot President Reagan (pp. 553-555). Reagan is the only President to have introduced the note of comedy into assassination; he laughed off the assassin (p. 558). At that time, in the US, someone was murdered with a gun every forty-eight minutes, around 10,000 gun-related murders per year (p. 560). Hinckley’s letter to Jodie Foster before shooting Reagan; he was in love since her role in Taxi Driver (p. 563). Shooting Reagan was a vicious approach to Foster (p. 566). The jury acquitted Hinckley on account of insanity (p. 569). When Hinckley shot Reagan, there were at that time 400 people monitored bu the US as serious potential assassins, and another 25000 filed as a lesser risk; Hinckley was on neither list (p. 572). A world of demagoguery and celebrity was the reason that in the post-war period assassination became a feature of USA political life; more than anywhere else the USA married a cult of individualism and personal success to existences of struggle and anonymity (p. 573). This led to a peculiarly US version of the “propaganda by the deed:” that is, “propaganda for the self” (p. 574).