The WaPo’s Stephen Hunter has a

worthwhile appreciation of the actor Charles

Bronson, who died over the weekend. Bronson made five “Death Wish” movies, and was a

truly emblematic star of an ugly era in American history. I don’t say that

to put him down; actually, quite the contrary: his 1970s “Death Wish”

movies, along with Clint Eastwood’s Dirty Harry pictures of the same era,

expressed the rage of the ordinary American who was sick and tired of

chaotic, amoral thugs getting away with murder in American life. In fact, if

it’s true that a neoconservative is a liberal who’s been mugged, then Paul

Kersey, Bronson’s character in the “Death Wish” movies, is cinema’s Neocon

Avenger. It’s probably going too far to make this claim, but I do wonder if

Ronald Reagan would have been possible without Bronson and Eastwood’s 1970s

work giving popular voice to the anti-liberal backlash that was to come at

the ballot box at the end of that low, dishonest decade.