I'm not trying to pile on Jim Carrey for his Cold Dead Hand video, but I couldn't help but notice that Charlton Heston movies are very much in demand this weekend. Yep, it's Easter weekend, and you know what that means: Charlton Heston movies galore on a variety of channels (but especially on TCM)! There was The Ten Commandments yesterday. Today there's Ben-Hur and The Greatest Story Ever Told. All three of these movies are huge family classic Biblical epics pretty much loved far and wide across the country, and you'll see them every Christmas and every Easter. So I guess the lesson here is that if you want to bash Charlton Heston for his NRA stuff, and you want to say nobody watches his movies anymore, maybe it would be better to do it around the end of summertime, because that's when people are least likely to remember these movies. Of course, he did make a lot of other great movies that get played on TV, streamed through the Internet, and rented on DVD and BluRay, etc., all the time, so maybe the time is never really right to convince people that nobody likes Charlton Heston movies anymore. I would still like them even if he stood for everything I didn't like, because it's not the movies' fault: what the actors believe in their private lives outside of the movies is of no concern to me while I'm watching the movies.
But you know, there's an epidemic of gun violence in America right now, plus we have a very disturbing trend of the government taking away our once sacrosanct Constitutional rights at an extremely rapid pace, both of which are really harmful to the country, and so it's no surprise that these issues have lots of people vehemently opposing each other's agendas. But what is not harming the country is a silly parody video on a comedy website. Maybe it's in bad taste to some, and I think those offended by it make plenty of valid points, but Jim Carrey isn't passing a new law to take away everyone's guns; he's just making fun of the issue from a gun control perspective, and people don't have to watch it if they don't want to. I'm a Charlton Heston fan and it didn't offend me. And despite the fact that Heston is dead and unable to "defend himself", etc., it's only natural that Carrey's song would target Charlton Heston because he's the most famous gun rights guy and everyone will instantly recognize his name and his NRA stuff (plus, Carrey is also a showbiz guy, as was Heston, so it's a natural reference for him to make). Was it crude and disrespectful? Yeah, I guess. But it was a joke. It may have an agenda behind it, but it's still a joke. I joke about both sides of this issue myself because people are so inflexible on each side and it lends itself well to parody. Gun violence and the erosion of our rights are harming us; jokes are not.
