"He Was Legend": Charlton Heston vs. Arnold on Guns and White America

Charlton Heston's gun room

Charlton Heston was the true last action hero. It's interesting that Arnold Schwarzenegger was once in discussion to star in a "I Am Legend," remake, a role that eventually went to the Will Smith. Even better, Heston had played the same role of the last man on earth in "The Omega Man."

Latest PK column at Vdare explores the evolution of Arnold's politics versus those of Mr. Heston [Schwarzenegger Vs. Heston: Gun Control As An Attack On America’s Founding Ethnicity, 2-2-13]:

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.

Read the rest at Vdare, but comment on it here. Even better, try and put this article in gun/2nd Amendment forums.