The National Rifle Association (NRA) and its Right-wing allies are furious at comedian Jim Carrey.
The reason: His recent music parody video: “Cold Dead Hand,” which mocks gun fanatics and the late Charlton Heston, former president of the NRA.
Click here: Jim Carrey’s Pro-Gun Control Stance Angers Conservatives
Among its lyrics:
Charlton Heston movies are no longer in demand
And his immortal soul may lay forever in the sand.
The angels wouldn’t take him up to heaven like he’d planned.
’Cause they couldn’t pry that gun from his cold, dead hand.
The phrase, “cold dead hand,” originated with Heston himself.
Charlton Heston in his prime
On May 20, 2000, the actor and then-president of the NRA addressed the organization at its 129th convention in Charlotte, North Carolina.
He warned that then-Vice President and Democratic Presidential candidade Al Gore “is going to smear you as the enemy,” and concluded:
“So, as we set out this year to defeat the divisive forces that would take freedom away, I want to say those fighting words for everyone within the sound of my voice to hear and to heed, and especially for you, Mr. Gore: ‘From my cold, dead hands!'”
Carrey’s stance on gun control couldn’t be more opposite.
In in February, he outraged Right-wingers by tweeting: “Any1 who would run out to buy an assault rifle after the Newton massacre has very little left in their body or soul worth protecting.”
Jim Carrey
Fox Nation referred to the tweet as “nasty.” Red Alert Politics writer Erin Brown dismissed it as “a careless remark … rooted in the shallow, parroted talking points so commonly espoused by liberal elites.”
But that was nothing compared to the rage that has greeted “Cold Dead Hand.” Reason TV’s Remy offered a parody rebuttal to Carrey’s song. Its lyrics included:
It takes a talking ass
to oppose a vaccination
when your PhD is in
making funny faces.
None of which bothered Carrey. In fact, he exulted in Right-wing outrage, tweeting: “Cold Dead Hand’ is abt u heartless motherf%ckers unwilling 2 bend 4 the safety of our kids.Sorry if you’re offended…”
Among its lyrics:
It takes a cold, dead hand to decide to pull the trigger.
Takes a cold, dead heart and as near as I can figger.
With your cold, dead aim you’re tryin’ to prove your dick is bigger …..
Many psychologists have long theorized that a fascination with firearms can compensate for inadequate sexual performance.
But it’s one thing for an unknown psychologist to write this in an obscure medical journal and another for a famous comedian to splash it across the Internet.
Carrey is especially ruthless in attacking those who–like the NRA–make a lucrative living off gun sales:
Imagine if the Lord were here…
And on the ones
Who sell the guns
He’d sic the vultures and coyotes
Only the devil’s true devotees
Could profiteer
From pain and fear.
Many Rightists attacked Carrey for parodying a man–Heston–who died in 2008 and could not defend himself. But Heston had appeared several times on “Saturday Night Live” to spoof his granite-hard image.
In his video, Carrey dares to attack not simply the masculinity of the Rightist NRA crowd, but even its courage:
You don’t want to get caught
With your trousers down
When the psycho killer
Comes around
So you make your home
Like a Thunderdome
And you’re always packin’
Everywhere you roam.
Perhaps that’s what most outrages the Right–the accusation that its members live in fear and do their best to generate needless fear in others. Fear that can supposedly be abated by turning America into a society where everyone packs a weapon and every moment holds a potential High Noon.
An accusation, in short, based on fact.
Carrey has not been shy in responding to his Rightist critics. On March 29, he issued this statement:
“Since I released my “Cold Dead Hand” video on Funny or Die this week, I have watched Fux News rant, rave, bare its fangs and viciously slander me because of my stand against large magazines and assault rifles.
“I would take them to task legally if I felt they were worth my time or that anyone with a brain in their head could actually fall for such irresponsible buffoonery. That would gain them far too much attention which is all they really care about.
“I’ll just say this: in my opinion Fux News is a last resort for kinda-sorta-almost-journalists whose options have been severely limited by their extreme and intolerant views; a media colostomy bag that has begun to burst at the seams and should be emptied before it becomes a public health issue.”
Bullies are conspicuously vulnerable to ridicule. Their only “defense” is to smash anyone who dares to mock their folly, brutality or pretense to omnipotence.
The NRA has spent decades bribing and intimidating its way through Congress. Those members who subscribe to its “guns for everyone” agenda get legalized bribes (i.e., “campaign contributions”).
Those who refuse to do so face the threat–if not the reality–of being ousted.
At the end of the Carrey video, “Heston” accidentally shoots his own foot off.
In their over-the-top response to what is essentially an inoffensive parody, the NRA and its Rightist allies may well do the same.
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SYRIA: A WARNING FROM HISTORY
In Entertainment, History, Military, Politics, Social commentary on June 1, 2013 at 4:48 pmOn May 27, Arizona U.S. Senator John McCain secretly entered Syria and met with commanders of the Free Syrian Army, who are fighting forces loyal to “President” Bashar al Assad for control of the country.
He was the first U.S. senator to travel to Syria since civil war erupted there in 2011. And after he left, he told CNN that he was more convinced that the United States must become more involved in the country’s conflict.
Earlier this year, on March 21, House Foreign Affairs ranking Democrat Eliot Engel (D-NY) and House Intelligence Committee Chairman Mike Rogers (R-MI) introduced the “Free Syria Act of 2013,” calling on the Obama administration to arm the Syrian rebels.
Not so fast, says Dr. James J. Zogby, the founder and president of the Arab American Institute. A Washington, D.C.-based organization, it serves as the political and policy research arm of the Arab American community.
In a June 1 column entitled, “Stop the Madness,” Zogby lays out the essential truths about this increasingly confusing self-slaughter:
“What began as a popular revolt against a brutal and ossified dictatorship, Syria has now degenerated into a bloody battlefield pitting sects and their regional allies against each other in a ‘dance unto death.’
“On the one side, is the Ba’ath regime, supported by Russia, Iran, Hizbullah, and elements in the Iraqi government.
“Arrayed against them are a host of Syrians (some of whom have defected from the armed forces and others who have formed militias receiving arms and support from a number of Arab states and Turkey) and a cast of thousands of foreign Sunni fighters (some of whom have affiliated with al Qaeda) who have entered Syria to wage war on behalf of their brethren.”
And then Zogby warns:
“This deadly zero-sum game is both dangerous and fatally flawed, because in reality this is a war that no one can win, and the consequences of continuing it will only make the situation worse.”
The neocons of the George W. Bush administration plunged the United States into an unprovoked war against Iraq in 2003. After Baghdad quickly fell, Americans cheered, thinking the war was over and the troops would soon return home.
They didn’t count on Iraq’s descending into massive inter-religious strife, with Shia Muslims (who comprise 65% of the population) squaring off against Sunni ones (who make up 35%).
Suddenly, American soldiers found themselves fighting a two-front war in the same country: Fighting an Iraqi insurgency to throw them out, while trying to suppress growing sectarian warfare between Sunnis and Shia.
Once again, Americans are being urged to plunge headfirst into a conflict they know nothing about–and in which they have absolutely no stake.
It’s all very reminiscent of events in the 1966 epic film, “Khartoum,” starring Charlton Heston as British General Charles George Gordon.
In 1884, the British Government sends Gordon, a real-life hero of the Victorian era, to evacuate the Sudanese city of Khartoum. Mohammed Achmed, a previously anonymous Sudanese, has proclaimed himself “The Madhi” (The Expected One) and raised the cry of jihad.
The Madhi (played by Laurence Oliver) intends to drive all foreigners (of which the English are the largest group) out of Sudan, and exterminate all those Muslims who did not practice his “pure” version os Islam.
Movie poster for “Khartoum”
Gordon arrives in Khartoum to find he’s not fighting a rag-tag army of peasants. Instead, the Madhi is a highly intelligent military strategist.
And Gordon, an evangelical Christian, also underestimates the Madhi’s religious fanaticism: “I seem to have suffered from the delusion that I had a monopoly on God.”
A surprised Gordon finds himself and 30,000 Sudanese trapped in Khartoum when the Madhi’s forces suddenly appear. He sends off messengers and telegrams to the British Government, begging for a military relief force.
But the British Government wants nothing to do with the Sudan. It had sent Gordon there as a sop to British public opion that “something” had to be done to quell the Madhist uprising.
The siege continues and tightens.
In Britain, the public hails Gordon as a Christian hero and demands that the Government send a relilef expedition to save him. Prime Minister William Gladstone finally sends a token force–which arrives in Khartoum two days after the city has fallen to the Madhi’s forces.
Gordon, standing at the top of a staircase and coolly facing down his dervish enemies, is speared to death.
When the news reaches England, Britons mourn–and then demand vengeance for the death of their hero.
The Government, which had sought to wash its hands of the poor, militarily unimportant Sudan, suddenly has to send an army to avenge Gordon.
As the narrator of “Khartoum” intones at the close of the film: “For 15 years, the British paid the price with shame and war.”
Americans have been fighting in the Middle East since 2001–first in Afghanistan to destroy Al Qaeda, and then in Iraq, to pursue George W. Bush’s vendetta against Saddam Hussein.
The United States faces a crumbling infastructure, record high unemployment and trillions of dollars in debt. It’s time for Americans to clean up their own house before worrying about the messes in other nations–especially those wholly alien to American values.
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