Speaking of Clint Eastwood
Posted on August 31st, 2012 in Uncategorized | 10 Comments »
Unquestionably, his bizarre “speech” at the final night of the Republican convention will be the most memorable thing about that collation of lies, dissembling and historical revisionism.
But there’s one part of it that particularly struck me which hasn’t gotten much attention: that final chant of “make my day,” Eastwood’s famous line from Dirty Harry Sudden Impact.
Maybe it’s because I believe that there’s a significant element of the current GOP which would like to see Obama assassinated…and because I find so much of the GOP rhetoric positioned to frame him as someone who should be killed (“we own this country”…”we need to take our country back”…”you need an American”…Obama is not a “real” American…the astonishing, appalling disrespect of pretending that you are talking to “Mr.” Obama, who is sitting down in a chair while you do so, pretending that he would tell Mitt Romney to go fuck himself…how many people in that audience last night would have referred to Obama as boy in that hypothetical situation?)
…but I found it downright ominous when 15, 000 white people, talking about an African-American president, shout at the top of their lungs, “Make…My…Day!”
You will remember what happens to the violent “punk”—a word implicitly attached to Obama in this back-and-forth—lying on the ground in the seconds after Dirty Harry utters that phrase….”boys” just seconds after Eastwood calls them out on thinking that they could get away with robbing America the diner…
It’s one of the reasons why I think Obama will go down in history as a truly great man; I think of him watching that scene, knowing exactly its implication, yet unable to come out and say so, and doing a remarkable job of remaining calm and apparently forgiving.
You just know that some Tea Party Person, somewhere, who thinks that Obama is an Africa-born Muslim socialist, is sitting in his basement thinking about what he will have to do if Obama wins in November.
The Republicans say that Obama is preaching disunity and division, yet they employ the rhetoric of assassination—and if anyone in public life were to come out and call them on it, they would scream bloody murder. This is as dangerous an election as I can remember.
10 Responses
9/1/2024 12:18 am
Speaking of Yale, speculation re Levin,s successor?
9/1/2024 5:02 pm
giant leap, rb. never entered my mind.
9/2/2024 11:18 am
Inclined to agree with Anon 2. Your observation has a compelling narrative, but rings a bit ….paranoid? Clint Eastwood is an icon and I think the attendees were likely more caught up
in the moment of having “Dirty Harry” up there saying “Make my day” and being a part of THAT more than some draconian desire
to assassinate the President.
9/3/2024 5:09 am
Let me clarify: I’m not saying that this is a conscious desire on the part of the vast majority of these people. But I do think that the way the Republicans think of Obama—as an outsider, a usurper, someone who is un-American—largely based on the fact that he is black, of course—both reflects and fuels the violent fantasies of some members of their party. So let’s not just brush off the mass chant of the phrase “Make my day.” Latent in it is profound violence. In Sudden Impact, the film where Eastwood uses the phrase (and my apologies, I had conflated it above with Dirty Harry), Eastwood has just shot four men who are robbing a diner and is pointing his gun at a fifth man who is holding a waitress hostage.
All the thieves are black. The waitress is white. All the patrons are white. One of the black men was on the verge of raping one of the white female patrons. (“You and me, we’re gonna have a little party…)
Race is at the heart of this scene. Black men are stealing from and raping white people who are just going about their business in a diner. And Eastwood kills them all. (Well, except for the one who’s smart enough to recognize the superiority of the white man and drop his gun.)
So don’t tell me that there isn’t something violent and ugly about 15, 000 white people chanting “Make my day” at the Republican convention.
Peggy Noonan does; in her WSJ column, she writes, “The crowd yelling, ‘Make my day,’ was one of the great convention moments, ever.”
http://professional.wsj.com/article/SB10000872396390443618604577622492547537590.html?mod=WSJ_hp_mostpop_read
Peggy Noonan is like William Hurt in Broadcast News…if the devil came up to Earth, she’d look (and sound) like that.
9/3/2024 5:23 am
Also, let’s not forget that Eastwood was speaking against a backdrop of himself as the “outlaw Josie Wales” holding two pistols n the air. Remember what that film is about? A Missouri farmer fighting for the Confederacy.
I mean, think about that—one of the country’s two major political parties presents an image of Eastwood from a film in which he’s fighting for the Confederacy. Either the convention planners didn’t realize what that implied…or they did. Fifty-fifty in my book. At the very least, they consciously chose an image of Eastwood holding up guns.
Remember too that when Eastwood spoke about what you have to do when you elect someone who hasn’t “done the job,” he said “you have to let him go” and drew a finger across his neck.
These things matter, and to say that Eastwood is an “icon” obscures what Eastwood is most famous for.
9/3/2024 8:29 am
Also, somewhat less serious, but I don’t think it’s coincidental that Kark Rove just joked about killing Todd Akin…
9/4/2024 12:57 pm
I can agree with you vis a vis the underlying racist component
to some of(sometimes A LOT of) the anti-Obama rhetoric out
there. But. I think you’ve over reached with the rest of it. Your
argument feels more academic than anything and there is a
place for that(hell, it’s YOUR blog), but I can’t help but want to
say “lighten up, Richard; you’re over thinking it”.
9/7/2024 11:39 am
Wow, talk about drinking the Kool-Aide.
Richard, you need to get out more, and take a deep breath.
I and most of my friends have fundamental disagreements with Obama’s governing philosophy but none of us feel assassination is the means to settle political differences. Frankly, your extensive psychoanalysis of the presumptive mindset of an entire convention and political party, not just in the post but repeated in the comments after, presumably, a couple of days of reflection, border on paranoia and give credence to those who would brand you a wingnut of the left.
I’m a conservative (a small “c” conservative who believes in limited government) and a huge Clint Eastwood fan, and I’ve seen almost all of his movies, including Sudden Impact, more than once, but for the life of me could not recall how many people he shot in that scene or the color of their skin. I’ll bet most in the convention couldn’t either. Eastwood ad libbed the whole thing, Romney’s team had nothing to do with it - see http://www.pineconearchive.com/120907-1.html
You are taking four words out of context and conjuring a vast right wing conspiracy. Come down off the grassy knoll and consider the fact that many of us have fundamental philosophical disagreements with Obama and find his track record underwhelming at best. None of that makes us paranoid homicidal maniacs. Or racists for that matter.
Where we differ philosophically with Obama are on what have historically been some of the core values of the country such as a belief in the benefits of free enterprise as a core governing principle. Those of us who have started businesses and struggled to make a payroll abhor the notion that any president would say “you got a business, you didn’t build that” whatever the context leading up to it. This is a man who has spent his whole life in the employ of government or in an agency funded largely by it. He’s never worried about payroll, has no sense of the risks that entrepreneurs suffer in pursuit of their dreams to build businesses that grow the workforce. He’s never worked in a place that had to actually make a profit or face the risk of going out of business. In his world view, “the private sector is doing fine” and if only we would hire a bunch more government workers all would be well. We hear that, look at what has transpired and continues to unravel in Europe and blanch. I could go on, but I’ll leave it at that. We’ve got real issues with Obama and we’re calling him out on those. That’s politics and a healthy debate. If we can’t do that because he’s black, then we REALLY have problems in this country.
Two final thoughts.
One, apparently calling an opponent of a different race “boy” is a bipartisan offense. Might want to think twice before you pick up that rock in your smug glass house:
“the president spotted a woman he knew was close to Sen. Marco Rubio in a Florida hotel lobby. “Is your boy going to go for [vice president]?” the president asked her. Maybe, she replied.
“Well,” he said, chuckling, according to a person who witnessed the encounter. “Tell your boy to watch it. He might get his ass kicked.”
http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0812/79867.html?hp=t1
Two, liberals are apparently quite willing to employ actual violence, as opposed to an inferred or imagined threat, against Tea Party members when it suits their purposes:
http://www.redstate.com/tabithahale/2011/02/23/union-thuggery-descends-on-freedomworks/
Posts like yours do nothing to foster a conversation that might lead to some kind of consensus on a path forward for the country.
Grow up.
9/7/2024 11:55 am
I don’t recall an actual death threat against Obama at the GOP convention. Given your abhorrence of the inferential death threat that you have divined from the GOP convention, I’m sure you’ll join me in denouncing this tangible death threat, captured on video, from a delegate at the Democratic convention.
http://www.theblaze.com/stories/freak-out-moment-of-the-democratic-convention-woman-screams-mitt-romney-i-would-like-to-kill-him/
I await your outrage.
9/7/2024 1:21 pm
Brian-Of course Ms. Rodriguez’s remark is outrageous. Not particularly scary, but nonetheless, totally inappropriate and stupid. Still, it hardly compares to the people who shouted out “kill him” at Sarah Palin rallies, or the other assassination threats detailed here.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assassination_threats_against_Barack_Obama
As for Obama’s alleged “boy” quote—I’m not buying it. Doesn’t sound like him at all, particularly not using the word twice in two sentences. And Obama saying that Rubio’s “going to get his ass kicked”? I seriously doubt it. Note that the quote is attributed to an anonymous person “who witnessed the encounter.” For lots of reasons, this anecdote doesn’t pass the credibility test. I suspect that’s why, other than Politico, the only places that have picked it up are right-wing agitprop sites.
That said, yes, the use of the word “boy” by a white person when referring to a black man has a very specific social and historical context that makes it deeply offensive; remove that context, and the word, while still likely patronizing, is not nearly as ugly.
As for that video, you’ve got to be kidding—10 seconds of incoherence in which it seems like two obnoxious punks are getting in the face of a union guy? Pretty hard to draw any conclusions from that. Looks like the people provoked the guy and he knocked down a camera that was shoved in his face.
And by the way, I love that “I’m pretty sure I have a master’s” remark. Too funny. *That* guy should have been punched.
And finally, I’m also amused by the argument that Obama has never taken any risks in his life. Yes, he’s never started a business. But then, he came from a pretty difficult background and became the first black person elected American president. There are some pretty major risks there, and you know, some of them may be even bigger challenges than starting a business.
Also, if you want to argue, that’s fine, but try to stick to the facts. You know as well as I do that when Obama said “the private sector is doing fine,” he was referring to employment, as opposed to the public sector. Mitt Romney said pretty much the same thing a couple weeks ago. And while I thought it was tone-deaf at best of him to make the “you didn’t build that” remark, it’s clear he was saying that all entrepreneurs get some help from the government in one way or another. Which is true—but of course lots of entrepreneurs don’t like to think so, or just like to focus on the ways in which they think government bureaucracy is impeding their business-building.
In any case, welcome to the blog and thanks for posting.