GUN HO - CHARLETON HESTON AT THE OK CORRAL
The law often allows what honor and dignity forbid.

If I were an American, inclined to take advantage of the land’s lax gun laws, I just might get me a Colt 45 and discharge some heavy metal into the porous matter of Charleton Heston. That would surely teach the cowboy a lesson or two of the consequences of not thinking a position through. But alas, I am a gentler Canadian, and despite the influence of American TV (the program you are about to watch contains coarse language, violence and breasts and is not suitable . . . . . ), up here in the tundra fields the pen is still mightier than the sword, and so it shall be with mere ink I begin my polemic against NRA (National Rifle Association) dupe Charleton Heston, (of Ben Hur fame and Victor Mature’s acting coach).

If I had to assign a number between zero and 10 characterizing Heston’s acting in Ben Hur, I would be obliged to decline unless granted access to double-digit, negative integers. On the other hand, if great acting happens when you come to believe the lines you are delivering are your very own, he would rate a 10 for his performance as poster boy for the National Rifle Association. And make no mistake about it, Charleton Heston believes it is the unalienable right of every responsible American adult citizen to bear arms. And why shouldn’t he?

By all accounts, an unassuming and reasonable man, when Heston looks up from his favorite instant coffee and newspaper to admire his locked up hunting rifle hanging high on the wall, and (Il Penseroso that he is), reflects on what his rifle can and cannot do, he must reasonably conclude that the weapon cannot discharge its fire power on its own, but requires on each and every occasion human intervention. Guns aren’t bad, he declaims: there are only bad people. This consummately good man furthermore knows he is categorically incapable of using his rifle other than for leisure or, in a worst case scenario, in self defense; just as he knows that, like himself, there are millions upon millions of decent and righteous American citizens for whom guns are a zero risk proposition.

Before his God and confessor, (and William F. Buckley) Charleton Heston takes comfort in the fact that even though he is in the employ of the NRA, its gun philosophy and his are one and the same.

In Critique of Judgment, the philosopher Immanuel Kant draws our attention to the tendency in all of us to want to rationalize our subjective aesthetic judgments, which is to say, when we deem a particular painting beautiful, we feel that everyone else should conclude the same. In a like manner, Charleton Heston believes everyone should subscribe to the view that the Second Amendment granting Americans the right to bear arms -- holds not just in the 18th century but for all time. And while it is self evident that guns in and of themselves are neither good nor evil, and that he is sincere in his convictions in exhorting us to accept as fact what are only his personal beliefs, we come to question not so much his message or motives, but simply the bearer of the message himself.

Could it be that he isn’t telling us everything because his woeful lack of imagination doesn’t permit him to recognize a world order that deviates from his own blinkered conception of one? This might constitute a sin of omission were it not for the fact that one cannot be held responsible for what one does not know, or, again paraphrasing the above mentioned philosopher, potential intelligence is stupidity.

Since Heston watches CNN, he knows that 1000ds of Americans are needlessly wounded and killed every year. He also knows that not only adults, but an increasing number of teenagers and even children are pointing guns at each other as America reverts to the OK Corral style of settling disputes. From this, Heston concludes the shootings are isolated, random, and statistically anomalous, that by far and away the majority of Americans are responsible citizens who shouldn’t be denied their constitutional right to bear arms. On the other hand, for the urban cowboys who do not share Heston’s vision, it must seem that the latter suffers from a defective imagination that refuses to admit there are people who act and think differently than himself, that allows him to characterize as merely anomalous that growing aspect of American culture that routinely turns to guns to settle scores once settled through reason and discourse.

In the play Six Degrees of Separation, one of the characters observes: “The imagination is God’s gift to man that makes the act of self examination bearable.” Take away this precious imagination and you have Charleton Heston unable to face the music: that he has been suckered by the NRA to promote a gun credo that undermines the very values he wants to preserve? Or that he counts among the millions of ‘decent’ Americans who implicitly concede that the 1000ds of unnecessary alcohol and gun-related deaths is the price they are willing to pay because they love their guns and alcohol more than life. Or that to deprive Americans of their beloved guns is to risk puncturing the guns-and-conquest myth upon which America was founded, leaving in its place a huge vacuum and an America having to face its cultural bankruptcy?

Yes. If there is indeed something about Charleton Heston that makes us want to teach him a lesson he’ll never forget, it’s not because he’s a phony, but a dummy, a mindless front-man whose convictions and smugness are born in ignorance, who doesn’t suspect for one moment that he might be a dupe for the new American right that understands perfectly well that the right of every American to own a gun is merely a pretext under which gun culture can be deployed to clean up America’s dirty back yards, to get rid it of its undesirables, its trouble-makers, its homeless and crazies. Let’s call it social selection, Darwin style: where they get ‘you’ (after a 5 day compulsory waiting period) to decide you’re better off dead than a drag on the American dream - and it’s all happening at the OK Corral -- an ABC Special television presentation.

THE END

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