4/7/08: RightWingTrashMan: Colonel George Taylor

No surprise with today’s entry—but you’ll notice that this is about a character played by Charlton Heston, and not just a movie. Bear with us, and maybe we’ll offer something new amongst the general mourning for a great man:

Charlton Heston starred in three great sci-fi films of the ‘70s. We’ve gone on plenty about The Omega Man. Maybe we’ll get around to Soylent Green. And there’s certainly no mistaking Planet of the Apes as some great conservative filmmaking—even it was written by two Hollywood liberals.

Let’s fast-forward through all the action where Colonel Taylor does some inadvertent time travel. You already know about him landing on a futuristic Earth where primates hunt down humans. The important scene is when the simians learn that Taylor can speak, and bring him up before the National Academy. This is a parody of the House Un-American Activities Committee, with overtones of the Scopes Monkey Trail (and a few traces of Darwinism’s inherent racism).

Science fiction always brought out the heavy-handed worse in Rod Serling. This scene, however, can likely be credited to co-scripter Michael Wilson, who was briefly blacklisted after the HUAC hearings. Cornelius and Zira are the two troublesome chimps who are endangering their scientific careers. They’re making the case for how Taylor must have come from another planet (which is even Taylor’s original assumption), and that humans might be capable of civilized behavior. The reigning intellectuals of the Academy—with orangutan Dr. Zaius in the lead—consider this to be blasphemy. They believe (or at least pretend) that Taylor is part of a larger conspiracy.

Planet of the Apes remains a conservative film because Taylor represents the truth. The tinsel town Commies of the McCarthy era—whether from ignorance or malevolence—were attempting to perpetuate a lie about their political beliefs. They had plenty of help from The New York Times, of course, which was busy covering up inconvenient truths such as genocide. Taylor’s situation is a lot less complex. He may not know the whole story, but he’s fighting to prove his mere existence. It’s a liberal intellectual hierarchy that attempts to prove him wrong.

Back in ‘68, Leftists watched Planet of the Apes and saw Dr. Zaius as some kind of religious zealot. The problem with that is Dr. Zaius knows the truth. In fact, Zaius is trying to perpetuate a fundamental belief that he knows to be false. He’s a pastor in the church of affirmative action, or gun-control laws, or climate change. Zaius and his fellow apes are right to be scared of Colonel Taylor. He’s their past come to haunt them, and he also represents their own doomed future. The bitter and cynical Taylor is the spirit of manliness. It’s inevitable that someone like him would arise amongst daffy theorists like Zira and misguided patricians like Zaius. The poor guy might as well be caught in the war between Abbie Hoffman and Hubert Humphrey.

Colonel Taylor will eventually learn the truth about his surroundings. So did Charlton Heston. In fact, the character would end up having a lot in common with his creator. Before his career was over, Charlton Heston found himself on trial while battling lies and misrepresentations—all for his sin of being a Republican in Hollywood.

Some of it was particularly petty—as in the Hollywood bio Ed Wood, where Orson Welles shows up at the end to complain about having to use Charlton Heston as the star of Touch of Evil. In real life, Heston lobbied for Welles to direct that classic film. The screenwriters for Ed Wood are good Leftists, though, and wanted to rewrite history. Tim Burton was the director, and probably didn’t know enough to even be aware of the lie. Anyway, Heston was still willing to show up in Burton’s Planet of the Apes remake—where his character once again served to illustrate how the apes’ past had come back to haunt them. He also made a good case for gun ownership.

(Tim Roth was Heston’s co-star in the remake, and later provided a quote about how much he detested Heston’s politics. Tim Roth must be some kind of racist.)

There were plenty of other snide attacks. Our favorite, though, was a particularly desperate turn by Juan Andrade at the Chicago Sun-Times. The columnist slithered out the same week that Heston announced his retirement from public life in 2002. Andrade couldn’t stand the idea of seeing an NRA spokesman getting any kind of sympathy. The piece was headlined, “He’s no Moses, he’s the bad guy.”

Maybe the editors came up with the headline, but Andrade gets all the credit for the following:

[L]ast Saturday morning, it wasn’t long before Heston reminded me and perhaps countless others why now he is more reviled than revered by millions of Americans. In his taped remarks, Heston compared himself and his own resolve to John F. Kennedy, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and Ronald Reagan: three of the most revered names in America. He has nothing in common with any of them, save for Reagan, with Alzheimer’s.

Creeps like Andrade are why Charlton Heston announced his illness on videotape. Go to that tape, and we’ll find Andrade is either an idiot or a liar. Heston never compared himself to Kennedy, King, or Reagan (even though Heston, much like Reagan as he took political stances, was actually risking his livelihood when he marched alongside King in Selma). Heston actually said the following: “I believe I’m still the fighter that Dr. King and JFK and Ronald Reagan knew, but it’s a fight I must someday call a draw.”

Andrade could get even pettier, though—with a superior tone, too:

And Heston just couldn’t leave bad enough alone. As if to somehow comfort us and assure us that he will always be with us, Heston said, “I parted the Red Sea, but I can’t part with you.” “I” parted the Red Sea? Give us a break. That was Moses, the Deliverer.

Go to the tape, and see that Heston made that statement in reference to a life spent perceived by an audience. Heston easily proved Andrade to be just another frightened revisionist. The good news was that weasels like Andrade were already no longer a concern to a man like Charlton Heston.

And to make things even worse for types like Andrade, the Huffington Post isn’t even allowing comments on their Heston obituary.

Make him your own: Well, here’s the classic film, and you can also find Taylor (briefly) in Beneath of the Planet of the Apes—where a bunch of Leftists make all the wrong moves, and Taylor does us a favor by destroying the Earth with a doomsday device.

Which brings us to our entry on Escape From the Planet of the Apes.

 

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