Clint Eastwood is a cultural icon. He has acted in and directed some of the most important films in the American canon of cinema. Clint Eastwood is also, like John Ford and Howard Hawks before him, a military-build-up conservative, with old-timey bootstrap racism politics. He might not think Donald Trump is the greatest but nobody’s the greatest to Clint Eastwood, except maybe Clint Eastwood.
“He’s said a lot of dumb things,” the actor and director said of the man who has pilloried Mexicans, Muslims, immigrants, women, and the list goes on. “So have all of them. Both sides. But everybody – the press and everybody’s going, ‘Oh, well, that’s racist’, and they’re making a big hoodoo out of it.”
Eastwood’s advice to America: “Just fucking get over it. It’s a sad time in history.”
Most of the things Clint Eastwood says outside of the context of cinema is basically the same things he says within the context of cinema. Unfortunately, those two things are wildly different.
Do you feel lucky, punk?
This is a hilarious, balls-to-the-wall line, from 1971’s Dirty Harry. It’s fantastic, except it’s about a cop willing to be judge, jury and executioner of any and all criminals. It’s a major theme of most Clint Eastwood’s characters—outlaws or lawman who must bring vigilante justice to the American frontier, because we citizens need a strong leader and are unwilling to do what is “necessary” to protect the children.
Trump, the actor fumed, is “onto something, because secretly everybody’s getting tired of political correctness, kissing up. That’s the kiss-ass generation we’re in right now. We’re really in a pussy generation. Everybody’s walking on eggshells.
“We see people accusing people of being racist and all kinds of stuff,” Eastwood continued. “When I grew up, those things weren’t called racist.”
When Clint Eastwood was a kid, your mom and dad beat you if you gave them lip, your pastor might diddle you but you shut the fuck up, and no one was racist … because you didn’t have to care what black people thought or said! Damnit, black people, Clint Eastwood is sick of you questioning what people say about you!
In Eastwood’s defense, he is consistent. He has been provocative concerning race for decades in his films. Over time, his provocations have become more and more idiotic and less interesting. In 1993’s A Perfect World, the outlaw character played by fellow conservative Kevin Costner uses a big rope (tied into a noose at one point) to bound an old black couple up, in the South. The scene is not played with any dialogue about race, but the drama of the scene is heightened solely on this fact. In 2008’s Gran Torino, Clint Eastwood just spews an endless barrage of racist pejoratives towards the Hmong community around him; but don’t worry, most of the Hmong in the film are as crappy as the Eastwood character says they are.
Eastwood is right about one thing, Trump does speak to people who feel like the one thing they had, while big money interests continued to disrespect and humiliate them over the years, was the “right to” speak badly of other groups of people with zero blowback in order to feel better about themselves. Unfortunately for them, those days are over, but the anger and frustration of having been let down by the political party you’ve entrusted is not, and Donald Trump is there to say exactly all of the things your Republican Party always told you they were saying while they winked and winked and winked and then sold you down a river.