{"id":288,"date":"2012-08-31T16:23:10","date_gmt":"2012-08-31T16:23:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/geneseymour.com\/?p=288"},"modified":"2021-08-22T12:08:46","modified_gmt":"2021-08-22T12:08:46","slug":"clint-am-us-or-us","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/geneseymour.com\/?p=288","title":{"rendered":"Clint Am Us (or US)"},"content":{"rendered":"

I didn\u2019t witness Clint Eastwood\u2019s ride into Samuel Beckett territory last night<\/a> as I had tickets to see the Best Team in Baseball play the Defending World Series Champions.\u00a0I heard about it, though, the minute I came home from Nationals Park and patched into the digital hive-mind. And the chatter continues well past dawn (Oh the humanity!): The bitter laughter, the gnashing of teeth, the told-you-so smugness from the Clint haters juxtaposed with the exasperated Clint acolytes who have for decades defended his work despite his politics and whose reactions to last night\u2019s monologue-with-empty-chair range from bemusement to avowals that they\u2019ll never watch his Blu-Rays again.<\/p>\n

As Marie Windsor, that great Mormon character actress, once muttered to a randy Jeff Bridges in Hearts of the West<\/em>, \u201cLie down and cool off!\u201d Those taken aback by Eastwood\u2019s woozy-looking appearance should have taken the time yesterday afternoon to consult Christopher Orr\u2019s astute preview <\/a>charting the peripatetic course of Eastwood\u2019s politics. (Note: I said \u201cpolitics\u201d, not \u201cideology.\u201d We\u2019ll discuss the distinction further along.) As Orr recounts, Eastwood has always been the Republican equivalent of a \u201cyellow-dog Democrat\u201d, i.e. someone who\u2019d vote for a Democrat even if it were a yellow dog. Indeed, Clint\u2019s been truer to the GOP than many a so-called Reagan Democrat\u00a0insisting on being the \u201ctrue\u201d voice of the legacies of FDR, Truman, JFK and so on.<\/p>\n

Still, for a lifelong Republican, Eastwood\u2019s made some funny noises over time; the most recent of them coming in a Super Bowl commercial for Chrysler this past February with his \u201cHalftime for America\u201d narration that was so reminiscent of a Joe Biden pep rally that Karl Rove called him out for it. (All Eastwood had to do, apparently, was squint back at Rove to make Ol\u2019 Turd-Blossom say nothing more about the matter.) He cops to being fiscally conservative, but is also pro-choice, pro-gay-marriage and, as his movies, musical tastes and inter-personal relationships prove, sympathetic to multi-cultural concerns.<\/p>\n

In short, he\u2019s a lot of things at once and no one thing in particular. When you smile and say, \u201cHello\u201d, to Mr. Eastwood, you are greeting the American electorate itself whose politics are considered a personal, even an intimate matter because they come not from the brain, or the heart, but from the glands.<\/p>\n

The extremist-libertarian Republicans who seek to squeeze Eastwood and, for that matter, the voters into their ideological camp are in for profound disappointment, no matter what transpired last night or will happen over the next couple months. This is because \u2013 and let\u2019s read along slowly because some of you have trouble accepting this \u2013 America is not now and never has been an ideological country. Let me summarize:
\nAmericans?<\/em>
\nIdeological?<\/em>
\nAntithetical!<\/em>
\nNo way!<\/em>
\nAint Happ\u2019nin!<\/em>
\nWhat do you want on your pizza?<\/em><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Those liberal Lefties in whose consequentiality Newt Gingrich continues to invest a near-poignant belief stumbled into the aforementioned conclusion decades ago, but have yet to figure out what to do about it. Paul Ryan and company will assuredly discover the same thing. The only question being how much damage to Truth and Justice will be done by then<\/a>.<\/p>\n

As confirmation for the glandular state of political life, or at least, the perception of political life, one need look no further than Veep<\/em>, the HBO sitcom starring Julia Louis-Dreyfus as a self-aggrandizing, self-sabotaging VPOTUS. As with many critics of the series, I had misgivings early on about the show\u2019s sly avoidance of fixing\u00a0 Dreyfus\u2019s Selena Meyer in any political party or (of course) ideology. Her pet causes \u2013 filibuster reform, the environment \u2013 are non-controversial and vaguely ecumenical enough not to distract from the office slapstick that\u2019s the show\u2019s principal attribute.<\/p>\n

After several episodes (which I watched in repeats this past week mostly as refuge from Tampa\u2019s muggy rhetoric), even these \u201cissues\u201d become less relevant than Selena\u2019s slow-burning sense of personal affront at every staff blunder, mismanaged transaction and embarrassing gaffe. It\u2019s not about oil or filibusters, dammit, it\u2019s about me! How much more perfect the country would be if everybody was like me! No, not like me! Me<\/em>! The late Gore Vidal, in his serene vanity, could relate to Selena\u2019s frustration. And so, for that matter, could his old antagonist, William F. Buckley Jr. More to the point, so could most American voters for whom \u201cissues\u201d matter less than whatever it is matters to their own immediate needs.<\/p>\n

I\u2019m not saying there aren\u2019t politicians whose actions, unlike Selena\u2019s, are set in motion by something greater than their personal gratifications. I do think, however, that\u2019s what the majority of Americans believe. And they will vote this fall out of the same soft-clay visceral instincts that, apparently, guide even a rock-ribbed, yellow-dog Republican like Clint Eastwood, who, like the Jazz Guy he is, makes his mind up as he goes along. So laugh or howl at the geezer babbling to an empty chair. Just know that you\u2019re also laughing and howling at yourselves.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I didn\u2019t witness Clint Eastwood\u2019s ride into Samuel Beckett territory last night as I had tickets to see the Best Team in Baseball play the Defending World Series Champions.\u00a0I heard about it, though, the minute I came home from Nationals Park and patched into the digital hive-mind. And the chatter continues well past dawn (Oh […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[812,368],"tags":[51,49,50,55,58,52,56,57,53,54],"class_list":["post-288","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-politics-other-disappointments","category-tv-reviews","tag-2012-gop-convention","tag-christopher-orr","tag-clint-eastwood","tag-hbo","tag-hearts-of-the-west","tag-ideology","tag-julia-louis-dreyfus","tag-marie-windsor","tag-selina-mayer","tag-veep"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/geneseymour.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/288","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/geneseymour.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/geneseymour.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/geneseymour.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/geneseymour.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=288"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"https:\/\/geneseymour.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/288\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3258,"href":"https:\/\/geneseymour.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/288\/revisions\/3258"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/geneseymour.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=288"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/geneseymour.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=288"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/geneseymour.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=288"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}