***END UPDATE

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Chaos is unfolding in Oakland and on top of that, we’ve documented over 125 separate incidents of violence, vandalism, perversion, drug use, sexual assault, and an overall draining of precious and limited police resources throughout the country. The $50 Million Dollar Man’s response:  blame the cops.

Like his political soul brother Jon Stewart, Michael Moore is only in love with first responders when being in love with first responders is good for your image and career. But as soon as it’s politically useful to attempt to blame those same first responders for the violence committed by your real political soul brothers, they do.

Original tweet here.

Here’s a link to what we can assume Michael Moore’s referring to when he speaks of Glenn Beck fantasizing about killing him.

Ooh, menacing stuff.

Moore is unattractive enough without adding “playing the victim” to the pile.

Furthermore, we’d like to see or hear evidence of the “daily” encouragement of violence against him on “hate radio.”

We all know who fantasizes and encourages violence. If it’s not just a guy in Obama’s neighborhood it’s a guy introducing Obama or unions or disturbing stuff like this:

It’s the Left.

Liars in the world of entertainment will tell you that what happens on screen has no real-world effect. Which is why corporations spend billions every year using visual mediums to get people to change their behavior through advertising.

You know, because it has no effect.

More here.

So Danny Glover is back in the news, in the only way Danny Glover knows how: by sputtering nonsense he cribbed from a pair of discarded swim trunks he found on the highway.

Here he is discussing the root causes of the Tucson shooting.

Hmmm..I wonder who he’ll blame that on?

“You know, even though we know that this young man is just deranged in some way, there’s the side that drove him to that act, with the kind of vitriol, the kind of nasty, just villainous violence that is happening. The violence that happened even during, you know, town hall meetings…during the healthcare crisis, the healthcare debate and everything, all this kind of violence.”

Glover calling someone deranged is like the ocean calling someone wet.

Look, we know why he’s doing this. Linking the Tea Party or conservatives in general to Tucson is just the newest way to silence people the left hate. It’s now replaced “you’re racist,” as a way to stifle debate. It sucks, but it’s not surprising.

Anyway, it’s worth noting that Glover is busy promoting a film he coproduced called The Black Power Mixtape. The movie is about, as you can guess, Black Power, an oft-romanticized phenomenon rife with authentically violent rhetoric, much of it leading to authentically violent violence!

Remember the Black Panthers in their commie berets, posing with guns? Or that vicious nutbag Angela Davis, once tried for murder? And of course, there was Huey Newton – a brutish criminal who died a brutal death.

And there’s nothing more heartwarming than little black kids taught to sing, “pick up your guns.” All the new footage came from Swedish journalists, so you know they think it’s cool.

Stick to meatballs, people.

Anyway, out of fear of being perceived as racist, the media always wraps this movement in phony language – rather than condemn it, they say it simply illustrates how divisive the country once was.

So rag on the Tea Party instead. As one idiot reviewer notes, the film “made me think… of how many of the radical statements espoused by the Black Panthers are now being echoed by the Tea Party.”

Well… I guess that means the Tea Party should be expecting better press!

Don’t count on it.

And if you disagree with me, then you sir, caused Tucson.

TONIGHT!

Bill Whittle!

S.E.Cupp!

Remi Spencer!

I announce the winner of the appendix drawing (yeah, that’s a big “draw”)

But that doesn’t mean they’re horrible people or we can’t find common ground.  They’re sensible enough to know that the bank bailouts were a crock, and now, whether they realize it or not, they’re gaining empathy for Sarah Palin.

When word came out from a former classmate that Jared Lee Loughner listened to Anti-Flag in high school, speculation poured in that the band’s left-wing political message may have motivated last Saturday’s shooting.  Some have also tried to implicate nu-metal  band Drowning Pool due the use use of their song “Bodies” in a flag-burning video found on Loughner’s YouTube page.  Both bands have responded to these insinuations.  First Anti-Flag:

It has come to our attention that a purported former classmate of Jared Lee Loughner stated the following about him, “…he was a pot head & into rock like Hendrix, The Doors, Anti-Flag. I haven’t seen him in person since ‘07…” This comment has led to some discussion in the media and elsewhere regarding Anti-Flag and what Anti-Flag stands for.

For well over a decade Anti-Flag has endorsed non-violent progressive change and has lobbied for peace, equality, justice, and health care (including mental health care) for all people of America and the world.

Anti-Flag unconditionally condemns the heinous actions of Mr. Loughner and our heartfelt condolences and best wishes go out to every single person affected by Mr. Loughner’s senseless act of violence. Our message is and always has been very clear, violence in any form is unacceptable.

The official statement from Drowning Pool reads:

We were devastated this weekend to learn of the tragic events that occurred in Arizona and that our music has been misinterpreted, again.We’ve performed for the troops overseas several times in places like Iraq, Afghanistan and Kuwait. Through our song ‘Soldiers,’ we were able to create a petition that helped pass the Lane Evans Mental Health Care Reform Bill, which we presented to then-Senator Barack Obama.

We’ve been lucky enough to have some of the biggest success of our career with our new album and we want to continue to spread positivity for the future, not dwell on negativity. For someone to put out a video misinterpreting a song about a mosh pit as fuel for a violent act shows just how sick they really are. We support those who do what they can to keep America safe.

‘Bodies’ was written about the brotherhood of the mosh pit and the respect people have for each other in the pit. If you push others down, you have to pick them back up. It was never about violence. It’s about a certain amount of respect and a code.

Our hearts go out to the victims and their families of this terrible tragedy.

Both are classy statements, and both are absolutely right.  Even though we can know that Loughner apparently listened to both of these bands — which is more of a connection than can be made to him and Glenn Beck or Sarah Palin — neither band is in any way responsible for the murder and mayhem carried out by Loughner.  As I noted last week on BigJournalism, when you’re listening to a media voice you agree with and that media voice is not calling for violence and is instead encouraging non-violent solutions to political or personal problems, it’s going to decrease your propensity towards violence.  The situation which caused Jared Loughner to target Gabrielle Giffords has little, if anything, to do with the content of his iPod.

So, even though I may disagree with Anti-Flag’s politics as much as is humanly possible, I can’t bring myself down to the level of entertainment-industry leftists such as Roger Ebert and Patton Oswalt and use that disagreement to justify an obviously false and libelous accusation of culpability for these heinous murders.  I’d like to think it doesn’t take a lot of self-awareness to concede that much human dignity to your political opponents, but these open-minded, progressive celebrities keep plumbing new depths to prove that assumption wrong.

For which group is there more evidence of members assenting to racist comments:  the Tea Party or the NAACP?  

While the national leftist media outlets continue to fall over themselves trying to figure out a spin on the story that sticks, we at Big Hollywood thought we’d double down with some analysis of the NAACP’s treatment of racism in the entertainment industry.

For 41 years, the NAACP has awarded “Image” awards to black entertainers who achieve excellence in the arts.  Despite its rightful role in celebrating the accomplishments of people of color in the arts, the awards show has also been beset by controversy.  Several nominees and winners of awards have engaged in openly racist behavior.  For example, Jamie Foxx, a winner of multiple NAACP Image awards, called Miley Cyrus a “little white bitch” who should “catch chlamydia on a bicycle seat.”  The NAACP has yet to comment on Foxx’s remarks.  Going beyond hatred for one white person, rapper Ice Cube released a song in 1993 titled “Enemy,” with lyrics that state:

[Referring to Martin Luther King Jr’s “I Have a Dream” speech]

You gonna grow old holdin’ crackers’ hands
Before you hold each others’ hands?
You gonna walk with your enemy
Before you learn to walk with one another?
How sick can you be? …
Please don’t [shoot] til you see the whites of his eyes,
The whites of his skin, the whites of his lies.

Two years later, Ice Cube was nominated for an Image award for his role in the film Higher Learning.

His other songs are reprehensible as well. “No Vaseline” makes derogatory statements about Jews, but the actual focus of the song revolves around anally raping and shooting/lynching his former N.W.A. colleagues.  “Black Korea” is unabashedly racist against Asian-Americans.  After peppering the song with slurs (“Oriential one-penny counting motherfuckers,” “little Chinese motherfucker,” “your chop suey ass”), Mr. Cube says, “So pay respect to the black fist/ Or we’ll burn your store right down to a crisp.”  Sounds a little too close for comfort to the racially incendiary art of another Image award winner. No NAACP statement has ever been made condemning his endorsement of racially motivated violence.

As is commonly criticized in rap lyrics, the “N” word is all too often used and abused.  Jay-Z and Whoopi Goldberg have each stated that they use the term to delineate brotherhood and try to co-opt its original hateful meaning, which I understand completely.  I can’t count the number of times I’ve called myself an evil neocon in jest, attempting to turn a stupid pejorative into a word with no power to intimidate or silence any person by grouping him or her with a label that immediately assigns hate and ostracism.  But in rap music, the use of “n*gger” is often derogatory, not uplifting.  Consider lyrics from Image award winners R. Kelly, Tupac Shakur, and—oh yes, nominee Jay-Z.  Perpetuating the “N” word’s use as a hateful and demeaning slur against African Americans is exactly what the NAACP should be denouncing, not rewarding.

And for these artists, the racially insensitive expressions are not limited to lyrics themselves.  In the music video for “Run This Town,” a collaboration between Jay-Z, Kanye West, and Rihanna (all three are Image winners & nominees), the artists lead a flame-engulfed riot, dressed in outfits similar to groups that promote racially motivated violence:  the PLO (keffiyehs), the KKK (pointed hoods—but they’re black!), and the Black Panthers (plain, all-black shirt & pants with black beret—but, of course, this could just be a reference to beatniks, right?).

And, to top it all off, this past year the NAACP gave an Image award to Van Jones, the former Green Jobs Czar who casually singled out “white polluters,” stereotyped that “only white suburban kids shoot up schools,” and decried Israel’s “occupation” of Israel.  Benjamin Jealous gave Jones the NAACP President’s Award at the 41st annual Image Awards.  “Van Jones is an American treasure,” he reasoned. 

—–

Now, the temptation here is to use the tactics of the left, to declare these men and women wholly bad and to disregard any artistry, charity, or basic humanity for which they should be shown respect.  To do that, or to label the NAACP as an organization that tolerates and welcomes racism as the Left has labeled the Tea Party movement, would be disingenuous and irresponsible.  One person making racist statements or statements construed as racism indicates nothing about the people who constitute the majority of and define the values of a group.  But let’s look at how said majority has reacted to racism in both the Tea Party and the NAACP.

This last April 15th, a small movement of agent provocateurs mobilized to try and embarrass Tea Partiers at nationwide protests.  In several locations, individuals espousing white supremacy or other hateful sentiments were booed and forced away from the crowd.  Whether these people were leftists trying to forge some evidence for the “Tea Partiers are Racist” meme or genuine racists trying to piggyback off the Tea Party’s popularity, the overwhelming majority of Tea Party members showed that racism has no place in their movement. 

Compare this with the NAACP’s reaction to clear racism in both the political and entertainment world.  Ms. Sherrod’s remarks, before revealing her change of heart, were greeted by her audience with murmurs of approval, chuckles, and absolutely no objections.  Reverend Jeremiah Wright’s audience has been a tad more enthusiastic in response to his hateful comments, with no rebuke from Mr. Jealous’ organization.  The NAACP has nominated the aforementioned artists for Image awards, given them the prizes—sometimes more than once—and never once condemned their openly hateful speech.  At the very least, even if the opportunity to deny an artist a nomination has passed, the organization could issue a statement saying that such behavior is not appropriate for those who have been honored with Image awards. 

The NAACP ought to hold those it designates as role models for the black community to higher standards than this.  If it continues to ignore the propagation of racially incendiary and violent expression, the group has no leg to stand on when condemning the Tea Party.

Too great an indulgence in adolescent exhibitionism can often suppress the audience appeal of a work of culture.

That’s apparently what happened to the new film Kick-Ass this past weekend. It had an unexpectedly weak first three days, finishing second in U.S. movie ticket receipts, behind How to Train Your Dragon, which is in its fourth week of release. The newly released comedy Death at a Funeral finished third, with a $17 million box office take, about what was expected.

Kick-Ass is by no means a a sleazy film, but it’s more than a little sanguinary and includes some very nasty language—spoken by children, no less.

It brought in a respectable $19.8 million, but that was much less than the $30 million industry observers had expected it to snag. The industry buzz was that Kick-Ass would have strong appeal to audiences after getting an excited response at last year’s Comic-Con and a big wave of Internet interest.

It went into theaters with an R-rating, however, which is generally a drag on ticket sales, and the fact that the central characters were children but the film couldn’t be seen by that age group was clearly a difficulty. It did get good reviews, however, and the studio’s head of distribution said he expects word of mouth to be strong.

Of course, he’s paid to say that and to hope it’s true. Hence the lesson remains. Sensationalism can be great fun, but it’s not as big a draw as Hollywood seems to think.

Here’s the deeply offensive picture:

I know. Sickens you, doesn’t it? Of course PETA, weighed in:

Kim Kardashian isn’t the only person who mistakenly thinks that because a mother cat picks up her kittens by the scruff of the neck that a supportive hand under the rump isn’t needed.

Right. However, the other animal group, SPCA says the hold is pretty much fine – and that’s where I get all my advice when I potty-trained Bill.

But then they add, “the manner in which Ms. Kardashian is holding the kitten could lead others to mishandle animals.”

Which makes no sense. If the way she’s holding the furball is fine, how could it cause others to hurt other cats? Weird. It’s like the media’s take on the tea parties. Sure, their protests are peaceful, but it could lead others to extremist violence!

Hopefully not against kittens.

Anyway, this little tale shows you how much animal rights activists really know about animals. It’s slightly less than their knowledge about humanity, which is nil. Fact is, they got into animal rights because people can’t stand them. So they find comfort in this activism, thinking they’re doing something for animals, when they’re just doing something for their egos.

In fact, Kim’s kitten clutch is the natural, correct way to hold a kitten. Sorry PETA: Mommy cats can’t cradle the kitten’s bottom in its “supportive hand.” Because it doesn’t have a hand. It has paws. Hence they carry the kitten by the teeth – which is also how Andy Levy transports Pixel and Stormy when he’s moving apartments.

And if you disagree with me, you’re a racist homophobe who heckles during sex.
Tonight we’ve got comedian Jim Florentine, gossip maven Tara Palmeri, and FBN’s Sandra Smith!

Plus, other stuff.

and…i’ll be on Hannity later tonight!

Child-abusing barbarians, I know.

They were rich, the Flemings. Grandfather made his fortune pioneering investment trusts, and when Valentine came of age he inherited hundreds of thousands of pounds. Thus it was that his second son Ian, born in 1908, grew up in a world of wealth and privilege. Mother was a typical socialite, a lover of status and all the good things that money could buy, but Father was different. He ran for government office as a conservative, and was by all accounts a thorough patriot of crown and country much admired by everyone who met him. When war became imminent, there was never any question whether he would use his money and influence to weasel out of the fight. Valentine joined the Queen’s Own Oxfordshire Hussars of his own volition and trained for combat, counting among his friends a fellow officer named Winston Churchill.

Ian and his family watched with dread as their Dad headed off to the front in 1914, and for the next three years they saw him but seldom. Valentine sent his family cheery letters to lift their spirits, but his missives to Churchill laid bare the truth:

Day and night in this area are made hideous by the incessant crash and whistle and roar of every sort of projectile, by sinister columns of smoke and flame, by the cries of the wounded men, by the pitiful calls of animals of all sorts, abandoned, starved, perhaps wounded. Along this terrain of death stretch more or less parallel to each other lines of trenches, some 200, some 1000 yards apart, hardly visible except to the aeroplanes which continually hover over them, menacing and uncanny harbingers of fresh showers of destruction. . . . It’s going to be a long, long war in spite of the fact that every single man in it wants it to be stopped at once.

Fleming was a nine-year-old student away in boarding school, his head filled with the stories of H. Rider Haggard, Jules Verne, and Robert Stevenson, when word came in May 1917 that Dad was dead, killed instantly by a shell while scurrying between trenches. Winston Churchill, by then a rising figure in government, wrote the obituary for the Times. The Fleming boys were left fatherless among their socialite mother and her widow-wealth and elitist friends. From then on, whenever they said their nightly prayers, they would finish with, “And please, dear God, help me to grow up to be more like Mokie.”

The loss of his idealized father would have repercussions for the rest of Ian Fleming’s life. Without his war-hero Dad’s sterling example, his pampered circumstances transformed him from a devastated child into a spoiled teenage Byronic rebel, torn between his father’s laudable memory and his mother’s smothering social ambitions. He became a champion athlete but otherwise struggled with rigid school discipline, drifting through several tony academies as a constant source of upset to the rest of the family. Money and good looks allowed him to pose as a (in hindsight, quite Bondian) romantic loner, seducing young women by the score yet finding little real happiness in the effort. The girls called him “glamour boy,” and fancied him as a moody, handsome, far-eyed dreamer, his personality a potent mix of devil-may-care gaiety and inner sadness.

Spurred on by his mother, now a maven of upper-crust English society, he learned the usual social graces: dancing, food, drink, all things that would later give the fictional world of James Bond its verisimilitude. In Ian Fleming: The Man Behind James Bond, biographer Andrew Lycett aptly describes the young rich kids of that era:

Their favorite destinations were the French resorts of Le Touquet and Deauville, where the casinos offered an opportunity to gamble as well as play golf. The young bloods crossed the channel — some in their private planes — for regular weekends of gaming and carousing, interspersed with the odd round of golf to cure hangovers and give the impression they were doing something healthy and good for their constitutions.

Yet in between the fun to be had at boarding schools, finishing schools, mansions, and European vacation homes, Fleming spent his idle hours writing world-weary poetry and short stories. He preferred books and the collecting of first editions to the usual moneyed pursuits of shooting, hunting, and endless soirees. Whereas his compatriots were enjoying the rich life and quickly rising to positions of power in government and business, Lycett describes Fleming as “a charming chancer who, dogged by the memory of an upright father killed on the Western Front in May 1917 and pushed by an ambitious and headstrong mother, had, by the time he was thirty, tried his hand at various careers — army officer, diplomat, journalist, banker and stockbroker — without ever finding his métier.” His was a life defined by a deep ennui.

While working for Reuters in the early Thirties, Fleming went to the U.S.S.R. to report on a Soviet show trial, and the experience gave him an insider’s look into the pure evil of James Bond’s future enemies. Later, as a (terrible, by all accounts) stockbroker, Fleming began rubbing shoulders with bankers and brokers with backgrounds in clandestine intelligence. The attraction to their world of veiled excitement, combined with patriotism and service and purpose, was immense. When WWII broke out, he lost no time in parlaying these contacts into a job as secretary for Admiral John Godfrey, Director of Naval Intelligence, and with that his life took a most dramatic turn. The boring world of high-society cads and whores gave way to battles, tactics, weapons, cartography, languages, and espionage. A mediocrity at his previous jobs, he excelled at his wartime intelligence exploits, to the point where his superior said, “Ian should have been the D.N.I. and I his naval adviser.”

Matters of escape, sabotage, and subversion consumed his waking thoughts. He developed contacts far and wide throughout Britain’s underground spy apparatus, even visiting with the group charged with developing the exact kind of gadgets that Bond would later receive from Q. He visited America, met President Roosevelt and FBI Chief Hoover, and played an important role in establishing a fruitful intelligence relationship with “Wild Bill” Donovan’s OSS (the organization under which, you will remember from our first FCML series, film director John Ford also worked.) Three times in England he narrowly survived bombs falling onto the buildings he was in — the last one covered him in debris and plaster. One of his grimmer moments during the war was having to identify the body of one of his favorite former lovers, killed in her bed during a bombing raid.

By the end of the greatest conflict of the twentieth century, Fleming had revealed that under the dilettante exterior and the spoiled rich-kid gloom was a man of, in biographer Andrew Lycett’s memorable phrase, “steely patriotism.” The war energized him in a way nothing else ever had, pointing the way to a life of excitement and adventure and freeing his fertile mind from the chains of stuffy blue-blood mores. By 1944, the man who once flirted with poetry and short stories told a friend in an unguarded moment that he was “going to write the spy story to end all spy stories.” Decades later, after his death, his widow Anne pegged the core of this self-promise: “You must realize that Ian was entirely egocentric. His aim as long as I knew him was to avoid the dull, the humdrum, the everyday demands of life that afflict ordinary people. He stood for working out a way of life that was not boring and he went where that led him. It ended with Bond.”

Visiting Ceylon on an assignment during the war, Fleming discovered that he loved tropical heat and the sea, and vowed never to spend a winter in England again. In the years after the war he built Goldeneye (named after one of his wartime missions) his now-famous idyllic refuge in Jamaica. There, working for three hours a day on an old typewriter, he dashed off Casino Royale, the first Bond novel, at a blistering pace that saw the book finished it little more than a month.

Part of his energy came from finally settling down and wedding his longtime (and, until recently, married) lover that same year –  in his Fleming biography, Lycett jokes that writing Casino Royale was the author’s method for dealing with “the horrific prospect of matrimony.” In between sessions of composing, he would enjoy the lush accoutrements of Goldeneye, his sanctum sanctorum, whiling away the days swimming, fishing, spearing lobsters for dinner, reading in lush gardens, and (according to his wife) spending evenings on the balcony “smoking and wallowing in the melancholy.”

Casino Royale was published in April 1953, and by the end of May the initial print run had sold out. The world had been officially introduced to what Lycett glowingly calls “the sparkling luminescence and darting romanticism of [Fleming’s] original mind.” Spurred on by early success and the need for money (the family fortune was still largely denied him by his aging mother) he wrote a book a year until his death, with sales slowly growing with each new novel’s appearance. Aspiring to be a sort of British Raymond Chandler, he was delighted when that famed American mystery writer (who lived for a time in Britain and who, like Fleming, also began his writing career at an advanced age) sang the praises of Casino Royale and its follow-up, Live and Let Die.

Nevertheless, Fleming was all-too-aware of his limitations as a prose stylist. Later in their correspondence, pressured by Chandler to attempt a higher level of quality in his work, Fleming glumly admitted: “My talents are extended to their absolute limits in writing books like Diamonds Are Forever. I am not short-weighting anybody and I have absolutely nothing more up my sleeve. The way you talk anybody would think I was a lazy Shakespeare or Raymond Chandler. Not so.”

Nevertheless, in his fine book biographer Lycett opines on the hidden depths present in Fleming’s fiction:

Ian skillfully matched this hard-edged delineation of contemporary reality with a more mythical interpretation of events. Bond is taking on the forces of evil, a heroic St. George-figure fighting on the side of virtue (and the free world), saving and bedding the girl, and attempting to slay the dragon. . . Only through such an epic battle, Ian was saying, could the function of good be understood. Bond says in Casino Royale that the villains he fights are “creating a norm of badness by which, and by which alone, an opposite norm of goodness could exist.”

In other words, beneath all the “sex, snobbery, and sadism” titillating readers, Fleming’s old wartime patriotism was once again present, fueling what on the surface seemed shallow and sensationalistic. Throughout his life, the creator of James Bond was an anti-Communist and anti-Nazi, going so far as to once quit a book club when he felt the monthly selections were becoming too left-leaning and fellow-traveling. Izvestia, the long-running Russian newspaper, accused Fleming of being a tool of American interests and dismissed him as “a retired spy turned mediocre writer,” slams which Fleming took as high compliments from the enemy.

A lifetime of seeing (and oftentimes enjoying) the effects of easy living left him with little confidence in human nature, which too often manifested itself in bitterness and rudeness. But in the midst of all the cavalier cruelty his enemies charged him with, simple gestures of humanity would often stand out. One American-based friend remembers fondly that — unlike the other wealthy jet-set acquaintances in their social circle — Fleming alone treated her belief in Catholicism “like hallowed ground,” going so far as to ask, after his health began to fail, if she could light a candle for him in St. Patrick’s Cathedral. When asked about this respect for Christianity, the creator of 007 replied sheepishly that “You can’t grow up in the English school system without it having an effect on you.”

Fleming’s later years, like his earlier ones, were in many ways not happy. Despite some genuine fondness his marriage was always a tenuous proposition, with both parties cheating regularly in between temporary reconciliations and bitter recriminations. A chain smoker and a drinker, his health declined precipitously just as Bond was giving him the income with which to truly enjoy his retiring years. Headaches, back and neck pains, and creeping coronary heart disease all took their grim toll.

Eventually, even the success of his novels became an albatross around his neck, albeit a lucrative one. “What was easy at 40 is very difficult at 50,” he wrote to a friend. “I used to believe — sufficiently — in Bonds & Blonds & Bombs. Now the keys creak as I type & I fear the zest may have gone. Part of the trouble is having a wife and child. They knock the ruthlessness out of one.” To another correspondent he lamented, “I am seriously running out of puff and my inventive streak is very nearly worked out.”

By the time of the fateful Saltzman/Broccoli Dr. No film deal, Fleming had suffered a major heart attack that signaled the beginning of the end. A few years later, just before Goldfinger was released into theaters, he was dead. Doctors long warned him about his inveterate smoking and drinking, but he never listened. If he had, he might have lived longer, true — but then he wouldn’t have been the Ian Fleming who created James Bond.

His wife later insisted that her oft-estranged husband was a “desperate melancholic,” and revealed that many of his last days were spent staring “from his bedroom window at the sea in total misery.” What was he thinking during those bitter times? In the final analysis, had his life meant anything? Had he even begun to live up to the long-cherished image of old “Mokie”?

One friend is on record as remembering her surprise when, while driving him around soon before his death, he asked to stop at a church so that he could pray for the forgiveness of his sins. Some might see that as a typical late-in-life hedging of the bets by a person with far too much to forgive and far too little actual remorse to put down as a down-payment. But I note once again Lycett’s analysis of the mythical “St. George” aspect of Bond’s character, as well as a small but perhaps telling factoid: from the time of his father’s death until the very end of his own days, Ian Fleming kept a copy of his father’s obituary, framed and signed by Winston Churchill, hanging proudly on his wall.

“Please, dear God,” Fleming would pray as a child, “help me to grow up to be more like Mokie.” Whether Fleming the Shiftless Cad believed at the end that his wartime service — and the literature it inspired — accomplished this is anyone’s guess.

Next week in For Conservative Movie Lovers: the man who brought Bond to life on screen, Sean Connery.

FURTHER READING and VIEWING

Ian Fleming: The Man Behind James Bond by Andrew Lycett. The best of the many biographies out there, heavily referenced for this article. Other books are valuable for various reasons, but Lycett synthesizes the rest while adding plenty of original research.

Interview of Raymond Chandler, conducted by Ian Fleming. Fleming became friends with the great Los Angeles mystery writer when the latter made one of his trips to London. This BBC Radio interview is not just a meeting between two genre greats, it also features the only known recording of Chandler’s voice.

Ian Fleming/James Bond Exhibition at the War Imperial Museum. A short tour of a great exhibition dedicated to Fleming and his famous creation:

For Your Eyes Only: Ian Fleming + James Bond by Ben MacIntyre. The print book that served as an accompaniment to the above-mentioned museum exhibition. A great way to see the displays up-close.

Centennial interview with Bond expert Brad Frank. Recorded for a local Tulsa, Oklahoma TV station on the occasion of Fleming’s centennial. Some good basic Fleming information from a knowledgeable fan’s POV:

Frommer says he’ll consider whether “tourists should safeguard themselves” by avoiding the crime-ridden hellhole that is the Grand Canyon. After I read about this, I decided to do a search to see if Frommer ever made similar pronouncements about other cities or states. I wondered if he had ever told people to avoid Washington DC, where, according to a US Bureau of Justice Statistics, 2004 report – that place topped the entire country in crime.

Zilch. Nor could I find any such commentary, regarding Detroit, Memphis or Miami – the only large cities in the US with more than 950 violent crimes per 100,000 people, according to FBI’s 2008 crime report. And what of President Obama’s very own Chicago, a city experiencing a dramatic uptick in shootings, muggings and other violent gang activity? Did Frommer warn travelers away from that bullet-ridden borough?

Nope. Fact is, Frommer went after Arizona, because it’s an easy target. It’s just a buncha white rednecks with guns, even if one of the white rednecks is uh, black. And it fed Frommer’s ego: voicing an opinion in sync with the liberal, like-minded media provides him, for a brief moment, an elevated sense of self.

But I sympathize. All he does all day is make travel guides.

Maybe he should get out more.

Tonight, we’ve got Jim Nortion, Faith Salie and Tucker Carlson, and Mad Men’s Rich Sommer!