h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Well, I saw Charlton Heston speak today. The school paid $30,000 to get Heston here in Boulder, and what with the nouveau-hippie atmosphere here, I expected the crowd to be pretty unforgiving. Shocked, I saw as soon as we took our seats that we were in a sea of radical conservative gun advocates. Terrifying. The audience was (ironically) frisked at the door, but I still felt nervous. Well, I needn't have worried because any tension was dissolved; everyone was in a great mood, the gun advocates because their god was talking and the gun-control advocates because he was hilarious. A real blemish on the face of American politics, which is saying a lot. The hilarity started when the UCSU rep introducing Heston. I forget the guy's name, but it was something like Matthew Hutner, so I'll call him that. "Thank you for coming, ladies and gentlemen," he said. "My name is UCSU Representative Matthew Hutner." I wonder if we could just call him "UCSU" for short. Sadly, my friend and I were the only people in the room who found that amusing. Heston himself was great. I bet there's a sitcom role out there with his name on it, and God knows he needs some scriptwriters. One of my favorite moments was when he said that he'd been "looking through some papers in my office last night wondering what I might say to you all" when he suddenly chanced upon a "stack of quotations," which makes me wonder how exactly he's got his office organized. He said that he was pleasantly surprised at how nicely they fit together in a paragraph. I didn't hope for much, since he'd misquoted one of my favorite quotes of all time (George Santayana's "Those who forget the past are doomed to repeat it") and actually had the nerve to quote Andy Warhol, who is reportedly rolling in his grave even as I type this. Even Martin Luther King Jr. was contained in this paragraph, although I lost the rest of it because some woman in the audience started yelling the words along with Heston...apparently when he said "last night" and "you all" he meant "a while ago" and "generic audiences everywhere." Heston promptly had the woman removed from the audience but was later advised that "if you want to avoid people yelling at you in the future, get a new speech because I've heard this one several times." Heston simply replied to THAT audience member that he should stop wasting "our" time. But by far the most amusing part of Heston's speech was his American egotism, as in the part where he said something along the lines of "the terror in China and Cuba where we still glimpse the bloody ravaged face of the bear" or moreover said that here in America, the country where we've "participated in two major wars in the last century and won them both," we are the "only nation in the world where we believe in doing right and good." Yow! So the NRA is holding that the Vietnam failure wasn't a war, which of course we all believe. Either that or his memory was all plugged up with his fond recollections of his movie roles, which was Reaganesque in its hilarity. "Playing Moses really let me know what it was like to be an oppressed Jew," he said. Well, of course there are a few small differences, in that Moses was a holy leader of the populace and Heston was paid millions to play him for a movie. I loved his talk of the film world; sure it was off-topic, but it was sooo impressive! His first little memory started like this: "Let me tell you about something that happened to a friend of mine, Mr. Kirk Douglas, while my movie Ben Hur was still playing." Wow! A real live...um...name dropper! By far the best question came from a woman who said, "Mr. Heston, the school is paying you $30,000 to be here. Would you consider giving that money to Save CU or the Columbine Memorial Fund?" He stuttered for awhile before replying that he gave money to many funds and individual candidates who he approved of, so he would talk the issue over with his wife before deciding how to spend it (really, he couldn't say anything else). The newscasts tonight said that Heston throughout the speech skirted the issue of gun legistlation. More than that; the forty-minute ($30k) speech had not one mention of the word "gun," EVER. The closest he got was "bayonet," when talking about the States' glorious military history {gag}. In short, I could sum the entire speech up in three minutes, and I would probably forget it. It was that pointless.