Monday rant.

Like a lot of you, I was not really surprised to hear of Charlton Heston’s death this last weekend. He’d been in decline for a long time, suffering from Alzheimer’s and out of the limelight for a while. I wasn’t surprised but I was still very sad to see another great icon of my youth go the way so many others have gone. The way we’ll all eventually go.

I’ll never forget the day John Wayne died. I was a senior in high school, sitting in front of the TV one night, killin’ time, when they broke through the show I was watching with the news and a prepared obituary. I cried my eye’s out as they went through all the familiar roles he’d played in the decades of his life. It really tore me up, even though I’d seen him at the Oscars and knew he was not long for this world. He was a HUGE hero of mine back then. I still love him, but I guess it’s a lot harder now to sustain the worshipful admiration. I guess I’ve grown up.

As with Heston, they went briefly in their obituary into Wayne’s political activities and talked about how he’d become widely known as a conservative figure, riding an armored car into Harvard once in the late ‘60s to take a roasting from one of their societies, giving back for every barb he took, earning the respect of those who tried to insult him.

It’s always easy for liberal critics of these men to profile them as right wing nuts, the way they love to profile all of us as right wing nuts for believing in many of the same values these men championed. It makes it much easier for them to fully embrace their own simplistic notions of right and wrong, portraying our beliefs in cartoonish ways. It leaves them feeling that much more sophisticated but makes most of them incapable of understanding the real subtleties of thought that are evident in most of our beliefs.

Clicking on Drudge this morning I read an obituary of Heston that included this little revelation…

Decades before his NRA leadership, Heston was a strong advocate for civil rights in the 1960s, joining marches and offering financial assistance.

Civil-rights leaders in Los Angeles held a moment of silence in Heston's memory Sunday after an unrelated news conference.

Heston had contributed and raised thousands of dollars in Hollywood for Martin Luther King Jr.'s movement, said Earl Ofari Hutchinson, president of the Los Angeles Urban Policy Round Table.

"We certainly disagree with his position as NRA head and also his firm, firm, unwavering support of the unlimited right to bear arms," Hutchinson said. But, he added, "Charlton Heston was a complex individual. He lived a long time, and certainly, there were many phases. The phases we prefer to remember were certainly his contributions to Dr. King and civil rights."

I knew that fact going into the deal. I'd learned it a long time ago. I'd seen Heston in the footage at the Lincoln Memorial to hear King's famous "I Have A Dream" speech. It had always been one of the things that made me love Heston all the more. He was a champion of liberty, end of story.

At least these representatives of the left may be incapable of reconciling these notions... That you can champion gun rights and civil rights at the same time and not be somehow confused. They think the one makes you automatically a right wing nut, and the other a liberal saint. That’s their knee jerk profiling again. But the truth is both positions display a strong belief in individual liberty. That’s the simple connection liberals seem incapable of recognizing. Poor dumb bastards. They’ll never understand.

There’s absolutely NOTHING different in advocating the one or the other. They are the same. In fact the one is designed to support the other. If the Black people in the South had been armed and organized, how much harder would it have been for those Southern Democrats to lynch them and treat them like shit, the way they did for so many decades after Blacks were supposed to have been set free? In fact, one of the freedoms white supremacists, North and South, were most afraid newly freed slaves would be able to celebrate was gun rights! What might they do with those guns, having been treated like cattle for generations?

You ever accidentally bump into someone at a gun show? People are amazingly polite in those venues. “Excuse me” is followed by “No problem”. Imagine how much more polite society might be if all the idiots out there knew that the next rude, stupid thing they did for fun might just be the LAST rude, stupid thing they ever did. We can all dream. There’s a gun show in Dallas this weekend. I’ll go and plunk some money down in memory of old Chuck, and the Duke. Can’t think of a better way to celebrate their legacies.

Anyway, I was gonna post something this morning about takin’ mom to the Olive Garden last Friday, till this rant boiled up outa me this mornin’. She made her famous Chicken Enchiladas Sunday night and I have pictures of that too. I’ll get those posts done this week some time and you’ll see all the food. It was wonderful.

By the way, my favorite Chuck Heston flicks were Will Penny and The War Lord... OK, aside from all the other great ones too. But these were two that stood out to me. What were yours?

You guys take care and keep your powder dry. We’ll talk. Cheers.