"Nonsense from Clint Eastwood, anti-people Hollywood actor, in defense of Mitt Romney, the Right’s candidate for the U.S. elections. For friends who know English, if you understand what this guy said, let me know too.”
-- The caption from the above picture circulating throughout Iranian media circles this morning, translated back into English
Look, I noticed quite a few people on the left, particularly in a couple of choice columns at the Huffington Post, giving Clint crap not about anything he said or the fact that he was willing to appear in front of the RNC at all, but about what it all supposedly says about him as a person. In other words, there was a lot of denigrating of a guy who's undisputedly a Hollywood legend and a cultural icon just because he happens to be Republican. It was petty, it was foolish and it was a flawless example of just how ridiculously all-or-nothing our political discourse has become. I don't particularly love Eastwood's politics across the board, but that doesn't mean I can't have a hell of a lot of respect for who he is and what he's done throughout his career -- and I'm certainly not going to try to pretend that his political affiliation somehow lessens or cheapens his accomplishments. That's fucking stupid.
That said, his speech was admittedly really bizarre -- although I do think it added some much needed life and a sense of tightrope-walking danger to the otherwise tediously boring proceedings. This was, after all, the staircase-descending coming out event for the world's most uninteresting debutante, Mitt Romney. In fact, I kind of think Clint may have purposely punked the GOP. Maybe he's been tapped to replace Dunn in the Jackass crew and this was his big introduction. Also, like all of Eastwood's work, his speech was slow, had a lot of unnecessary pauses and was about twice as long as it needed to be.
No comments:
Post a Comment