Over to You Chuck (or Chucks)

For years, starting in the 1990's and only recently less so, as I traveled the Interstates and state and county roads of the West, I often saw a certain bumper sticker on the back of vehicles passing me by or vice versa. The vehicles were usually driven by husky males dressed for a come-as-you-are-party (as long as you wear cammo gear). They mostly drove F-250 or Dodge ram pick-up trucks or an SUV with the low gas mileage that would make a Saudi sheik smile. And the bumper sticker would say:

"My President is Charlton Heston"

"Oh boy," I used to say to myself . I know they are talking about Ben-Hur's tenure as top dog in the National Rifle Association, but you got the idea it was about denial of electoral reality.

Now I like some of Charlton Heston's movies as much as the next guy. Sure the guy overacted a bit and added color to roles that were overlarge to begin with but he was usually playing guys a bit wacked out by something. But he ws the go-to guy for movies like "Planet of the Apes" (1968), "The Omega Man"(1971), "Soylent Green" (1973), et al. (I was hoping the recent version of the "I Am Legend" story with Will Smith" would have been called "Omega Dude". But no such luck.)
Who could forget the Chuckster pounding sand on the beach after the misanthropic Captain Taylor sees the great big you-know-what destroyed by some long-ago atomic war in "Planet of the Apes"? Who could forget his futuristic Detective Thorn, bloody and shot up and even weakened further by the loss of any hope for humanity, shouting at the finale: "You've got to warn them...Soylent Green is People!" as he is as carried out to certain demise from a church overcrowed with desperate victims of bad ecology and rampant population growth?

Who could forget King Chuck the First as Omega Guy, the last guy on earth--he thinks--watching a documentary on the Woodstock festival in a empty movie theater and saying sardonically, "they just don't make movies like that anymore."

Heston's roles as an actor in the 1970's often personified a warning cry for many of us who thought we just might be headed down a bad and narrow road as a civilization.

But then I came to discover that the guy who personified that angst about our overpopulated and war-weary world was in fact a reactionary political-celebrity. Despite what movies he was in, in public he actually despised enviromentalists, seemed to support an unnessasary war in Nicaragua in the 80's and even spoke out against laws protecting labor unions, even though he was once the president of the Screen Actors Guild. Go figure.

He did once march for Civil Rights a few times in the early 60's but I guess that was just a flirtation with equality.

Well, now there's a new Chuck in primary town. Not new in the public sense because he's 67 years old and has been around in B-movies and a long-running television show I've never watched. He's Chuck Norris, of course, and he's out in the hustings trying to sell voters in the next GOP primary that John McCain is too old to be President and that the affable but rigidly doctrinaire Mike Huckabee is the right guy for the job. (Good grief, Norris himself is only four years younger than McCain! Maybe he'ss too old to give advice using his own logic.)




I hope people take ALL celebrity endorsements with a large grain of salt, both on the left and the right. Norris is probably a nice guy, but he's a nice guy with just a high school education whose claim to fame is that he can simulate hurting people in front of a moving camera or for real at one time better than most people.

That shouldn't qualify him to be taken more seriously for a political philosophy than the guy who tightens your lug nuts at the local gas station.

Anyway, as the band The Who put it (sort of ) back in the day, "Meet the new Chuck, same as the old Chuck."

Anyway I guess I might be seeing "My Secretary of Defense is Walker-Texas Ranger" bumper stickers on our highways pretty soon.