Clint, just shut-up

I have to admit that I’ve never really been a fan of Clint Eastwood and his squinty-eyed, laconic, tough-guy vigilante persona. “Play Misty for Me” I sort of liked, mostly because he was placed (or he placed himself, since he directed the film) in a situation the tough guy couldn’t control. Although Eastwood—like Jon Voight and Sylvester Stallone—is a self-described conservative who tries to “prove” by giving jobs to token black actors in his films that not all Republicans are xenophobes and bigots, he has let slip the true nature of his societal beliefs on occasion.

Take for instance two films he directed, “Mystic River” and “Million Dollar Baby.” Sean Penn somehow won an Oscar for playing a Mafioso-type thug (Jimmy Marcus) suffering from manic rages, convinced that a recently released sex offender played by Tim Robbins (David Boyle) is the man who murdered his daughter. The problem is that the audience knows that the pathetic Boyle is likely innocent of the crime, and so does detective Sean Devine, played by Kevin Bacon. But Marcus refuses to allow for due process, kidnapping Boyle and while holding a gun to his head promises to let him live if he “confesses” to the killings. The distressed Boyle “confesses,” but Marcus shoots him anyways. Moments later Devine shows up and announces that he’s arrested his daughter’s actual killers; Marcus, however, shows no regret for shooting an innocent man. Somebody had to die. Even more despicable was the last scene, where Devine and Marcus are seen waving and smiling at each other, like it’s all good. What exactly was the message Eastwood was trying to convey here? The only one that makes sense to me is Dirty Harry-type vigilantism that sanctions murder is acceptable under certain situations. I, frankly, find such reasoning appalling.

In “Million Dollar Baby,” which incomprehensibly won the Best Picture Oscar over “The Aviator,” I couldn't help but observe a certain disturbing element: blatant racial stereotyping. To wit: Black fighter is ungrateful to his white "benefactor." Black punk bullies sympathetic white redneck with speech defects--the principle one his frequent use of the N-word. Brutal black female boxer sucker punches white heroine after bell during fight. Stupid Hispanic corner man places stool in corner with legs up so that white heroine can crack her skull on it after being sucker-punched by brutal black female boxer. Not even the Morgan Freeman character escapes unscathed; after all, it was he who convinced the unwilling Eastwood character to train the white female fighter, and then didn’t show for the Big Fight, which obliged Eastwood to employ the stupid Hispanic man who (along with the brutal black female boxer) was responsible for the white heroine's demise. Like "Mystic River" this film is marred by certain imaginings emanating from Eastwood's right-wing politics, and that bitter aftertaste is the only thing that lingers with me long after the fade to black.

Interestingly, the film was scripted by Paul Haggis, who went on to write and direct “Crash,” another vastly overrated film which allegedly examined race in America; perhaps Haggis was aware of criticisms of the racist undercurrents of “Baby,” and wanted to make “amends”—or perhaps that film was just a prelude to the “grand statement” he wanted to make on race in this country. Instead, “Crash” is such a jumble of infantile racial stereotyping that it is almost beyond belief that someone could have the gonads to make such a movie. It is true that many whites believe that all blacks (and Latinos) are potential thieves, even those dressed like college students; and so Haggis obliges the racial bigot (Sandra Bullock, playing your stereotypical white female victim) by confirming the "truth" of just that very stereotype. Matt Dillon portrays another white "racist"--except that he really isn't a racist, just some guy with "issues." Haggis even goes so far as putting views that would more likely come out of white supremacist's mouth into a black man's. Heck, if blacks are as racist as neo-Nazis, why should we concern ourselves with the latter? Haggis’ apparent suggestion that most people, regardless of color, are racist completely ignores the relativity of one to the other, and the inequality of effect.

So it was perfectly natural for Eastwood to join the assemblage in Tampa, where a black female cameraperson working for CNN had peanuts tossed at her by Alabama delegates, because “This is how we feed animals.” One delegate, when asked to explain the dearth of blacks in the Alabama delegation after he claimed that 20 percent of blacks in Alabama supported Romney, he hummed and hawed before claiming that there were two or three who might be “alternates.”

Eastwood opened his “speech” at the convention by telling the audience that contrary to popular opinion, there were many conservatives in Hollywood. “It is just that the conservative people by the nature of the word itself play closer to the vest. They do not go around hot dogging it.” Or maybe they just want to keep a low profile, for fear of being asked to explain the extreme social beliefs of some in the party—which seems a bit hypocritical and cowardly, especially since Eastwood followed this up by stating all Hollywood conservatives “are all like-minded, like all of us.”

Then he went off the rails by “addressing” an empty chair next to the podium. “So I -- so I’ve got Mr. Obama sitting here. And he’s -- I was going to ask him a couple of questions. But -- you know about -- I remember three and a half years ago, when Mr. Obama won the election. And though I was not a big supporter, I was watching that night when he was having that thing and they were talking about hope and change and they were talking about, yes we can, and it was dark outdoors, and it was nice, and people were lighting candles. They were saying, I just thought, this was great. Everybody is crying, Oprah was crying. I was even crying. And then finally -- and I haven’t cried that hard since I found out that there is 23 million unemployed people in this country. Now that is something to cry for because that is a disgrace, a national disgrace, and we haven’t done enough, obviously -- this administration hasn’t done enough to cure that. Whenever interest they have is not strong enough, and I think possibly now it may be time for somebody else to come along and solve the problem.”

One problem here is that Romney only proposes to “solve” the problem by repeating the mistakes of the Bush administration that initiated the worst recession since the Great Depression. Another problem is that the 23 million is actually a made-up number that Republicans are bandying about. The official number is 13 million, which is still too many, certainly. There are no doubt millions more who have dropped-out of the work rolls, but we could have mentioned them as well when the Bush administration created a net of 2 million jobs in his eight years—compared to 22 million during the Clinton years. As for someone who alleged has a “record” of job creation, a 2010 Wall Street Journal story noted that during Romney’s term as governor, “The Massachusetts jobs growth over that period, a pitiful 0.9 percent, badly lagged other high-skill, high-wage, knowledge economy states like New York (2.7 percent), California (4.7 percent) and North Carolina (7.6 percent).” The AP reported that “It's part of Mitt Romney's core narrative: Massachusetts, in the throes of a fiscal freefall, fell back on his CEO skills and turnaround wizardry to spark -- in his words – ‘a dramatic reversal of state fortunes and a period of sustained economic expansion.’" The reality was that “According to state unemployment numbers, the net number of jobs added during the four years Romney was in office was 24,400 -- a fraction of the total of about 200,000 lost during the recession.” Which begs the question of why we should we take the advice of an actor, anyways. We had an actor who was president, and wasn’t that bad enough?

Eastwood rambled on. “I mean, what do you say to people? Do you just -- you know -- I know -- people were wondering -- you don’t -- handle that OK. Well, I know even people in your own party were very disappointed when you didn’t close Gitmo. And I thought, well closing Gitmo -- why close that, we spent so much money on it. But, I thought maybe as an excuse -- what do you mean shut up? OK, I thought maybe it was just because somebody had the stupid idea of trying terrorists in downtown New York City.”

Obama could teach Eastwood a thing or two about “cool.” He would likely have just sat in that chair and listened to Eastwood make a complete buffoon of himself with a bemused smile. I wonder how many people even in that adoring audience were quietly asking themselves, “When is this guy going to shut-up?”

“So, anyway, we got—we’re going to have—we’re going to have to have a little chat about that. And then, I just wondered, these—all these promises. And then I wondered about, you know, when—when the—what? What do you want me to tell Romney? I can’t tell him to do that. He can’t do that to himself. You’re crazy. You’re absolutely crazy. You’re getting as bad as Biden. Of course, we all know Biden is the—Biden is the intellect of the Democratic Party, so, you know. Just a kind of a—kind of a grin with a body behind it, you know, and just kind of a thing.”

Will he shut-up already? He’s turning us into idiots just listening to this:

“But I just—I just think that there’s so much to be done, and I think that Mr.—Mr. Romney and Mr. Ryan are two guys that can come along. See, I never thought that it was a good idea for attorneys to be president, anyway, because it—yeah, I think—I think attorneys are so busy—you know, they’re always taught to argue everything and always weigh everything and weigh both sides. And they’re always—you know, they’re always devil’s-advocating this and bifurcating this and bifurcating that. You know, all that stuff. But I think it’s maybe time—what do you think—for maybe a businessman. How about that?”

You have to give Eastwood some credit, however. He’s actually tried to “intellectualize” the issues here—which only proves that most Republican voters are woefully short in that department; the less thinking involved the better. Eastwood also manages to break down the problem with right-wing solutions in the midst of all this incomprehension: The right doesn’t want to look at “both sides” of a problem. But he still completely misses the boat on Romney, who was less a “businessman” than a broker, who made his money not in creating jobs, but in financial gambling.