Charlton Heston always seemed like a good man to me.
His movies weren't my favorite, although that was really more of a generational thing than anything else.
I saw him perfrom live in London in 1985, as Captain Queeg in "The Caine Mutiny."
I can watch "The Ten Commandments" again and again, and I think that's how I remember Heston the most.
In my younger, pre-neocon days, I simply didn't assess Heston politically.
Frankly, I wasn't even going to post an obituary until I read Matthew Yglesias' depraved comments on Heston's death:
His political trajectory was a little silly, but also in a very fitting way utterly typical of the larger trajectory of American history. His death, we hope, comes at a time when the great backlash of which he was a part is finally receding.
Yglesias concludes with "rest in peace."
I recall reading that when a conservative becomes ill or dies, leftists cheer. Yglesias isn't so disrespectful as he is distasteful. Perhaps he could have posted a picture, a link to an obituary, and then signed off with "rest in peace." No, he had to try and pull some larger meaning from Heston's passing, that perhaps burying Heston will presage the death of the conservatives he loathes so much.
I noticed not too many lefties commenting on Heston's death (as measured by links at Memeorandum).
Perhaps they've learned their lesson, that they want to avoid the total hypocrisy of their low-down attacks. As FrontPageMage notes:
For the left, civility is a one-way street, running toward them – but never in the opposite direction....
Their modus operandi is calling conservatives: racists, bigots, hate-mongers, warmongers, Nazis, trigger-happy cowboys, gun nuts, psychos, despoilers of the environment and political Ebenezer Scrooges rubbing their bony hands together in greedy glee as widows and orphans starve in the streets simply to boost the profits of their junk bonds.
Or, they simply hope that the death of a revered conservative American preceeds the passing of the movement to which they belong.
No class there, no class at all.
That's not surprising, of course. See my earlier post, "The Radical Foreign Policy of Matthew Yglesias."
See also Ann Althouse, "Charlton Heston, "remembered chiefly for his monumental, jut-jawed portrayals of Moses, Ben-Hur and Michelangelo."
Photo Credit: "In 2003, Mr. Heston was a recipient of the Presidential Medal of Freedom, awarded by President Bush," New York Times
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