By Paul Kersey
02/12/2013
Gun control seems likely to figure as much as amnesty in President Obama’s State of the Union address on Tuesday night. Vice President Biden will certainly get his wish (“we’re counting on all of you, the legitimate news media”) for campaigning coverage from the Main Stream Media. And now the Administration can also count on Arnold Schwarzenegger, who recently announced his conversion to gun control [Arnold Schwarzenegger On Gun Control: 'Leave No Stone Unturned', By Natalie Rotman, Huffington Post, January 17, 2013]
It’s worth contrasting Schwarzenegger’s sickening scuttle with the contrary evolution of another movie action hero, Charlton Heston, who began as a liberal and a supporter of “Civil Rights” — when most of Hollywood was afraid of getting involved — and ended as five-term President of the National Rifle Association. Indeed, Schwarzenegger seems finally have taken to heart the early advice of his Jewish publicist Charlotte Parker:
One person she advised avoiding was the forthrightly conservative Charlton Heston, who since The Ten Commandments had brought Moses-like authority to his political conventions. While Schwarzenegger’s political ideas weren’t that different from Heston’s [my emphasis — PK], and it would have seemed natural for the two conservative stars to stand arm in arm, Parker’s protective instinct was to keep Schwarzenegger away from the National Rifle Association’s Hollywood poster child. If Heston appeared as the same event, Parker insisted, Schwarzenegger must never allow himself to be photographed with Heston, or, she warned, he would become marked as a right-wing ideologue.
Fantastic: The Life of Arnold Schwarzenegger, (2005) by Laurence Leamer, P.164
But back when Schwarzenegger preparing to take on the role of his life, Conan the Barbarian, director John Milius told him to hang out with Hell’s Angels to research the type of character he wanted Schwarzenegger to portray. And, Schwarzenegger biographer Leamer writes:
His natural sympathies were with those living on the wild fringes of American life. He fancied that these self-conscious outlaws were the torchbearers of a kind of liberty that those in corporate/bureaucratic America had long forgotten or considered mere indulgence. He was a skeet-shooting hunting control. He had, by his count, about fifteen guns in his house, including not only shotguns and pistols but an Uzi.” (p. 133) [my emphasis — PK]
Charlton Heston’s final book, The Courage to Be Free (2000), offers remarkable insight into the very different personality of the man who played Ben Hur. He wrote about his experience during the L.A. Riots of 1992:
Police couldn’t stop the riots in the wake of the Rodney King trial verdict in Los Angeles. I know. I was there. I was at home in the Los Angeles area when those riots broke out just a few miles away. And I was armed. Like everyone within a radius of fifty miles of those riots, I was concerned when I realized that the Los Angeles police Department could not, or would not, control the carnage and vandalism.
The fear ran so quickly and so deeply throughout the Los Angeles basin that even my liberal friends were frightened. My phone rang day and night. As TV news choppers hacked through smoke-darkened skies over L.A., I got a phone calls from firmly anti-gun friend in clear conflict.
"Umm Chuck, you have quite a few … ah guns, don’t you?"
"Yes, I do."
"Shotguns and … like that?"
"Indeed."
"Could you lend me one for a day or so? I tried to buy one but they have this 15 waiting day period … " (p.73)
One can only guess that many of those who called Heston asking for guns had been clients of Charlotte Parker.
In The Courage To Be Free, Heston did not hesitate to draw a moral about the attack on America’s founding ethnicity:
The message from the cultural warlords is everywhere, delivered with the arrogant swagger of absolute confidence. Summarized, it is this: Heaven help the God-fearing, law-abiding, Caucasian, middle class, Protestant (or even worse evangelical) Christian, the Midwestern or southern (or even worse rural) hunter, apparently straight or admitted heterosexual gun-owning average working stiff, or even worse still male working stiff, because not only do you not count, you're a downright obstacle to social progress. Your tax dollars may be just as welcome and green as you hand them over, but your voice deserves no hearing, your opinion is not enlightened, your media access is virtually nil, and frankly mister, you need to wake up, wise up, and learn a little something about your new America.
And until you do, why don’t you just sit down and shut up! (p.5-6)
Sounds like the anti-white MSM chest-thumping after Obama’s 2012 re-election.
But, just as Schwarzenegger has finally steered clear of Heston, the David Keene NRA, now very much a part of Conservatism Inc., would certainly distance itself from Heston’s frank defense of white peoples’ right to exist.
Schwarzenegger’s recent autobiography Total Recall inadvertently reveals the cost of his social climbing:
I followed the presidential campaigns that year with great interest and accepted happily when I was invited to take part in the Republican National Convention in New Orleans in August. My assignment was to add celebrity power to one of the “caucus teams” of Reagan administration officials and Bush supporters whose job it was to glad-hand the state delegations and chat them up on key issues.
I’d been to Republican conventions before, but this was the first since I’d married a Shriver. Maria and I believed that we should continue as we always had: she would go to the Democratic convention and to gatherings for all the things she believed in, and she would cover Republicans as a journalist, and I would keep going to the Republican convention. But we needed to be careful to avoid unnecessary controversy. Everything went well in New Orleans until my friend and trapshooting buddy Tony Makris, the PR guru of the National Rifle Association, mentioned that the NRA was holding a brunch in honor of Texas Senator Phil Gramm — would I like to stop by? I’d gotten to know Gramm well by then. When I showed up the next morning, other celebrities were there also, but the reporters converged on me. The Kennedys, having endured two tragic political assassinations, were very antigun, so what was I doing at an NRA reception? I hadn’t even thought about it. If I had, I would have been sensitive enough not to attend this NRA event. They also asked, as a Kennedy by marriage, was I supporting the NRA? What was my position on automatic weapons? Saturday night specials? Sniper rifles? Cop-killing bullets? I didn’t know how to respond. I belonged to the NRA because I believed in the constitutional right to bear arms, but I hadn’t though through all those issues and details. There was even a question about my very presence at the 1988 Republican National Convention: was it some kind of statement in defiance of the Kennedy family? (p. 368)
Besides his Kennedy connections, Schwarzenegger worked his way into intimacy with the Bush family dynasty — he campaigned for Bush I against Pat Buchanan in the New Hampshire primary. (Not that it helped — Buchanan struck Bush a mortal blow).
Indeed, one can’t help but wonder if he has adopted the Bush family strategy — as Steve Sailer has slyly described it — and decided to ensure that a future Hispanic Schwarzenegger can oversee his lucrative real estate investments in the Mexifornia of tomorrow, even after a law is passed making it illegal for white people to own property in the state.
Perhaps this explains Schwarzenegger’s curious decision to father a love child with his portly Hispanic housekeeper — just as the Bush family have half-Mexican George P. Bush.
As his Hollywood star wanes, Schwarzenegger grasps at anti-gun platitudes to fit with the reigning zeitgeist.
But Heston, who ended his NRA speeches by holding a rifle above his head and pledging that gun grabbers would have to pry it out of "my cold dead hands,” finished The Courage to be Free with the type of admonition the men and women who fill the halls of power in America today can never understand:
But take heart- for your courage is contagious. And with each step along the way you will, by your example alone, confound adversaries, make converts, inspire believers, and cast countless seeds for unborn future followers who will someday cultivate their own courage to be free. (p. 161)
That’s the stuff that nations are built upon.
Paul Kersey is the author of the blog SBPDL, and has published the books SBPDL Year One, Hollywood in Blackface and Escape From Detroit, and Opiate of America: College Football in Black and White.
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