Iron Man’’s Robert Downey Jr. No Longer a Liberal

Robert Downey Jr. may be the actor least likely thought of to play a comic book superhero.

But the critics and public love Downey in Marvel’s latest big-screen spectacular, “Iron Man.”

“Iron Man” is the first film to be produced by Marvel Studios, although it is distributed by Paramount. Marvel is now financing its own flicks after an impressive track record of blockbusters like “Spider-Man,” “X-Men,” “Fantastic Four” and sequels.

Meanwhile, during a recent interview with the New York Times, Downey disclosed a change he experienced in his worldview as a result of his troubled past.

The veteran actor noted that his newfound politics would not necessarily be well received by his Hollywood friends.

“I have a really interesting political point of view, and it’s not always something I say too loud at dinner tables here,” Downey said.

“But you can’t go from a $2,000-a-night suite at La Mirage to a penitentiary and really understand it and come out a liberal. You can’t. I wouldn’t wish that experience on anyone else, but it was very, very, very educational for me and has informed my proclivities and politics every since,” he added.

The New York Times commented on Downey’s educational experience in this way: “Suffice it to say he is not one of the Hollywood types who weeps over innocents trapped behind bars.”

The effects of Downey’s new views are obvious—he’s happily married, a father to teenage kids and far distance away from the struggles he had to endure.

He explained, “If I see somebody who is throwing their life away with both hands and is raging around and destroying their family, I can’t understand that person.”

“I’m not in that sphere of activity anymore, and I don’t understand it any more than I understood 10 or 20 years ago that somehow everything was going to turn out O.K. from this lousy, exotic and dark triple chapter of my life. I swear to God I don’t even really understand that planet anymore,” he shared.

Things on Downey’s new planet turned out really okay. “Iron Man” looks to be the start of a Downey franchise. The movie had the second best opening weekend ever for a film that’s not a sequel, with over $100 million being brought in on the domestic front and another $97 millioironmanmovien from overseas ticket sales.

In Variety’s review, “Iron Man” was contrasted with previous anti-war flops: “Finally, someone's found a sure-fire way to make money with a modern Middle East war movie: Just send a Marvel superhero into the fray to kick some insurgent butt.”

One of my favorite bands, The 77's, are releasing a blues/gospel album this summer. In preparation, lead singer/guitarist Mike Roe is embarking on a mini "house show" tour. During the tour, he travels to friend's houses in different cities and performs various songs from the upcoming CD for a small audience. About 30 tickets are all that are sold to each performance. The first stop on the tour was last night In Nashville and I was able to "snag" a couple of tickets for Amy and I. The show took place at the home of John J. Thompson (True Tunes, The Wayside) who recently moved to Nashville from Chicago. it was a great show. Mike was his usual eccentric self as he gave us a teaser of the upcoming album. 

One of the advantages of seeing this kind of show in Nashville is that it usually attracts a number of "usual suspects" in the way of musicians that tend to show up. So, along with MIke, a number of other artists showed up to play with him. They included Phil Madeira (The Phil Keaggy Band, et al), Matt Slocum (Sixpence None The Richer), Jimmy Abegg, and Steve Hindalong (The Choir).  Needless to say, it was a once in a lifetime event that I was glad to have been a part of.

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Link of the Week

“Why I Am No Longer a ‘Brain-Dead Liberal’ ”

By Mark Alexander

Nothing annoys a liberal more than when one of their celebrated intelligentsia defects toward the Right.

This week, yet another Leftist icon, David Mamet, announced he is coming to his senses.

Mamet is a Tony- and Oscar-nominated playwright, screenwriter and film director. His notable plays include Glengarry Glen Ross, which won the Pulitzer Prize in 1984, and Speed-the-Plow. His films include The Verdict, Wag the Dog, The Postman Always Rings Twice and Ronin (a personal favorite). He currently writes for and produces the television show “The Unit.”

As an author and essayist, he has accrued a large and loyal following among the Leftist glitterati.

Mamet chose to “come out” with an op-ed published by Norman Mailer’s rag, The Village Voice, entitled, “Why I am no longer a ‘Brain-Dead Liberal’,” in which he outlines, in some detail, his migration from the Left.

Mamet opens his essay with a quote from macro economist John Maynard Keynes, who responded to a challenge about his changing views, saying, “When the facts change, I change my opinion. What do you do, sir?”

You may recall that Keynes, whose early 20th century writings advocated the “New Deal” socialist economic policies still embraced by Democrats, was roundly criticized for adjusting his economic opinion after free market economist Friedrich von Hayek critiqued Keynes’ 1930 Treatise on Money. In fact, after reading Hayek’s seminal condemnation of socialism, The Road to Serfdom, Keynes proclaimed, “Morally and philosophically I find myself in agreement with virtually the whole of it: and not only in agreement with it, but in deeply moved agreement.” (Apparently, Demos did not get the memo.)

According to Mamet, his own transformation began when he “wrote a play about politics, and as part of the ‘writing process,’ I started thinking about politics.” Now there’s a novel concept for Leftist politicos, actually “thinking about politics.”

He notes that central to Leftist thinking is the precept that so much is wrong with America, and responds, “This is, to me, the synthesis of this worldview with which I now found myself disenchanted: that everything is always wrong... I took the liberal view for many decades,” says Mamet, “but I believe I have changed my mind.”

Mamet continues, “In my life, a brief review revealed, everything was not always wrong, and neither was nor is always wrong in the community in which I live, or in my country. Further, it was not always wrong in previous communities in which I lived, and among the various and mobile classes of which I was at various times a part. And, I wondered, how could I have spent decades thinking that everything was always wrong... We in the United States get from day to day under rather wonderful and privileged circumstances—that we are not and never have been the villains that some of the world and some of our citizens make us out to be, but that we are a confection of normal individuals living under a spectacularly effective compact called the Constitution, and lucky to get it.”

Mamet contrasts current criticisms of President George Bush with the Left’s most revered protagonist, John F. Kennedy: “Bush got us into Iraq, JFK into Vietnam. Bush stole the election in Florida; Kennedy stole his in Chicago. Bush outed a CIA agent; Kennedy left hundreds of them to die in the surf at the Bay of Pigs. Bush lied about his military service; Kennedy accepted a Pulitzer Prize for a book written by Ted Sorenson. Bush was in bed with the Saudis, Kennedy with the Mafia.”

On capitalism: “Oh, and I began to question my hatred for ‘the Corporations,’ the hatred of which, I found, was but the flip side of my hunger for those goods and services they provide and without which we could not live.”

On the military: “And I began to question my distrust of the ‘Bad, Bad Military’ of my youth, which, I saw, was then and is now made up of those men and women who actually risk their lives to protect the rest of us from a very hostile world.”

On the Left’s relentless classist rhetoric: “Classes in the United States are mobile, not static, which is the Marxist view. That is: Immigrants came and continue to come here penniless and can (and do) become rich; the nerd makes a trillion dollars; the single mother, penniless and ignorant of English, sends her two sons to college (my grandmother). On the other hand, the rich and the children of the rich can go belly-up; the hegemony of the railroads is appropriated by the airlines, that of the networks by the Internet; and the individual may and probably will change status more than once within his lifetime.”

On the freedom to think: “Prior to the midterm elections, my rabbi was taking a lot of flack. The congregation is exclusively liberal, he is a self-described independent (read ‘conservative’), and he was driving the flock wild. Why? Because a) he never discussed politics; and b) he taught that the quality of political discourse must be addressed first—that Jewish law teaches that it is incumbent upon each person to hear the other fellow out. I, like many of the liberal congregation, began, teeth grinding, to attempt to do so. And in doing so, I recognized that I held two views of America (politics, government, corporations, the military). One was of a state where everything was magically wrong and must be immediately corrected at any cost; and the other—the world in which I actually functioned day to day—was made up of people, most of whom were reasonably trying to maximize their comfort by getting along with each other (in the workplace, the marketplace, the jury room, on the freeway, even at the school-board meeting).”

He concludes, “I realized that the time had come for me to avow my participation in that America in which I chose to live, and that that country was not a schoolroom teaching values, but a marketplace. I began reading not only the economics of Thomas Sowell (our greatest contemporary philosopher) but Milton Friedman, Paul Johnson, and Shelby Steele, and a host of conservative writers, and found that I agreed with them: a free-market understanding of the world meshes more perfectly with my experience than that idealistic vision I called liberalism.”

Predictably, some of Mamet’s former colleagues and devotees among the ever-tolerant and inclusive ranks of mindless tin men, were quick to condemn Mamet for his changing views: “How sad that an intelligent person like David would write such a simplistic, downright infantile article filled with stereotypes and lacking any substantive insight whatsoever.” “Does this mean that you’ve given up on democracy and thrown in with the authoritarians?” “I had no idea Mamet could be so shallow.” “Mr. Mamet is now simply brain dead.” “I’m saddened to learn David is either a liar or a fool or both.” “Mamet is a political ignoramus who hides his frustration by lashing out at an imagined ‘liberalism’.”

Notably, many of his Lefty critics mentioned Mamet’s faith: “Our old friend Mamet is perhaps too rich and too Jewish.” And more to the point: “It’s been apparent for quite some time that Mamet is a Zionist. This screed is just additional evidence.”

For his part, however, Mamet’s essay is courageous. He joins a long list of Leftists who have moved right, including such notables as David Horowitz, Chris Hitchens, Norm Podhoretz, Irving Kristol, Nat Hentoff, Marvin Olasky, Bernard Goldberg and Evan Sayet—all of whom are persona non grata among their old colleagues.

There are also many Democrats who courageously switched political allegiance and became outspoken conservatives, including Charlton Heston, Strom Thurmond, Jesse Helms, Jeane Kirkpatrick, Bill Bennett, Phil Gramm, Ben Nighthorse Campbell and Richard Shelby.

Of course, a onetime Democrat also became the 20th century’s greatest champion of conservative philosophy: Ronald Wilson Reagan.

President Reagan said, “I did not leave the Democratic Party, the Democratic Party left me.” To the millions of Americans who followed him to the Republican Party, he said, “I know what it’s like to pull the Republican lever for the first time, because I used to be a Democrat myself, and I can tell you it only hurts for a minute, and then it feels great.”

And a footnote: I can list countless Americans who have moved from the ideological Left to the Right, but I am hard pressed to name a single established conservative who has moved Left. 

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Link of the Week

Christians who believe in capital punishment and Christians who don’t believe in capital punishment use the same Bible to support their positions. So who’s right?

I firmly believe that the Bible does in fact teach that capital punishment is a legitimate form of punishment for certain capital crimes (particularly for murder). God’s will on the subject is clearly set forth in Genesis 9:5-6 where He states to Noah: “And from each man, too, I will demand an accounting for the life of his fellow man. Whoever sheds the blood of man, by man shall his blood be shed.”

The early chapters of Genesis reveal that God instituted human government for our protection. As part of that protection, human government has been given the authority to extract “a life for a life.” You might be asking:” Why should the murderer receive such severe punishment?” Because to murder people who are made in God’s image is to show contempt for God, not to mention mankind.

It’s interesting to note that while capital punishment was set forth by Moses (Ex. 21; Deut. 19), the command given to Noah actually precedes the Mosaic law and therefore appears to be a universal principle. However the allowance of capital punishment is not just found in the Old Testament. The principle is reaffirmed in the New Testament as well. For example, Romans 13:1-5; here we have the statement that the governing authorities can and should use force to maintain peace and order. The Apostle Paul even states that the authorities “do not bear the sword in vain.” By the way, the sword was the Roman symbol for the death penalty. As well, Jesus acknowledged the legitimacy of capital punishment before Pilate (John 19:11), as did Paul before the Roman Governor Festus (Acts 25:11).
 
Capital punishment was instituted by God when human civilization began, and it was never repealed by Jesus nor by His apostles. There is one thing to remember: the death of the body does not necessarily mean the death of the soul. In fact, those who are facing the electric chair may very well be receptive to the free gift of eternal life through faith in Christ.

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Link of the Week