Charlton Heston died yesterday. I like him as an actor and he does have some great cinematic moments to his credit: Ben-Hur, The Agony & The Ecstasy, Ten Commandments, Planet of the Apes, Soylent Green, Omega Man...
But how could any decent-minded person not hate him forever for this little gem:
Delivered at an NRA convention in Denver less than a month after the Columbine High School massacre in Littleton, Colorado (itself a suburb of Denver) in the spring of 1999, that speech - or a Hollywood actor like Heston even being in a position to deliver that speech - once again proves to me that conservatives are stupid. Why else would the rare conservative actor (and they are almost exclusively male and white, BTW) very nearly always rise to prominence within the right-wing? Heston, Reagan, Thompson and Schwarzenegger... mediocre actors who, because they are famous and also out-spoken about being unevolved, earn enough conservative street cred to become GOP demi-gods. Or in Reagan's case, actually replacing the Holy Spirit in the Holy Trinity.
I suppose it has something to do with the conservative mindset, top-down and hierarchical as it is, that it is sufficient for someone to appear authoritative to be given authority.
Whatever. Heston is dead. At least he left us with some classic lines. Besides "Damn, dirty ape" my favorite is this one:
But how could any decent-minded person not hate him forever for this little gem:
Delivered at an NRA convention in Denver less than a month after the Columbine High School massacre in Littleton, Colorado (itself a suburb of Denver) in the spring of 1999, that speech - or a Hollywood actor like Heston even being in a position to deliver that speech - once again proves to me that conservatives are stupid. Why else would the rare conservative actor (and they are almost exclusively male and white, BTW) very nearly always rise to prominence within the right-wing? Heston, Reagan, Thompson and Schwarzenegger... mediocre actors who, because they are famous and also out-spoken about being unevolved, earn enough conservative street cred to become GOP demi-gods. Or in Reagan's case, actually replacing the Holy Spirit in the Holy Trinity.
I suppose it has something to do with the conservative mindset, top-down and hierarchical as it is, that it is sufficient for someone to appear authoritative to be given authority.
Whatever. Heston is dead. At least he left us with some classic lines. Besides "Damn, dirty ape" my favorite is this one:
UPDATE:
I agree with Shakes about this. I should have been more generous above about how much I actually like Heston as an actor. As she so eloquently puts it:
He was an epic film star with an epic personality, and I loved to hate him as much as I hated to love him.
UPDATE #2:
I also want to be clear that I thought of the title of this post last night around 12:30 am, long before I read Jeff Fecke's title, and saw his YouTube clip. But Shakesville gets about a thousand to ten-thousand times the traffic as this blog (readership of three - it's official!) so in a joke-credit derby, I would certainly lose.
Besides, Fecke is always funnier than me anyway, so - I concede.
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