Where We All Walk: Chapman, Hinckley, and Unintended Consequences

J. D. Salinger's slide into that last good night sent my mind to assassins.

And suddenly, it's Dec. 8, 1980, night on a New York city sidewalk where a chunky Mark Chapman draws his Hawaiian-bought Charter Arms .38 and from spitting distance blasts four out of five hollow point bullets into ex-Beatle John Lennon's back. As Lennon bleeds out on the sidewalk and Yoko Ono screams and sirens wail closer, the assassin reaches into his pocket, pulls out and reads Salinger's most famous book, Catcher In The Rye.

FADE IN: Washington D.C. March 30, 1981, a cool spring day. Boyishly good looking but a failure as both a Nazi and a rock star, John Hinckley leaves his copy of Catcher In The Rye in his rented room to lurk outside the Hilton Hotel and fire a volley of shots with a Saturday night special .22 revolver that years later when the FBI let me hold it felt like a high school track team's harmless starter pistol. Hinkley's bullets hit four men, including his target President Ronald Reagan.

As best as we can know...

Chapman sensed some kind of prophetic power via Salinger's novel that the assassin believed would help him in his quest to be John Lennon, a quest that -- of course -- necessitated killing the real John Lennon.

Hinckley somehow thought Salinger's plot of a misunderstood teenager might be a map on his quest to win the love of actress Jodie Foster -- who'd starred as a runaway teenage prostitute "saved" by a crazy taxi driver in the cinematic art form that nurtured the man Hinckley shot, President Reagan.

Salinger had no way of predicting the existential reach of fiction he wrote. There's no record of what he thought when the news linked his most famous work to blood-spattered Chapman and Hinkley. But what Salinger had to wonder about in those windswept moments when we try to grasp the cosmic ways of cause and effect surpasses the what if's most of us face.

And those what-if's haunt all of us. We are all authors of a book of lives where what we do becomes what is written. We get up in the morning, make it through the day, fall back in bed to wonder if the work we did in our waking hours was worth it. And maybe, just maybe, sometimes we wonder what bizarre unpredictable thing might happen because of what we did. Philosophers and political scientists codify such concerns within The Law Of Unintended Consequences.

For novelist J.D. Salinger, for all of us, the sad truth of this nonfiction life is that The Law Of Unintended Consequences enforces itself in our world where we walk the streets with assassins.