Let me start by saying that there are a number of things that I like about Clint Eastwood.  He is a Jazz lover and so am I.  He has also expressed this love in a number of his films.  He is a talented film director who in his later years has made a number of really fine films—films that seem  to be something of a penance for  his  really lousy Sam Fuller- like Rogue Cop and  camp cold war films, along with some of his nihilist Westerns. 

It is true that he was Mayor of Carmel, California,  a central California town that is the Country Club Republican’s dream of Heaven on Earth, where the elite meet to play and watch golf, travel in luxury to and from luxury. 

 But even then I was willing to cut him some slack, forgive him his many transgressions, and wish him well in the future. I had once been to Carmel and pocketed a stray golf ball.

                Yesterday, though, he became the highlight of the Republican convention—a mellowed Clint Eastwood talking gibberish and engaging in a deeply racist exchange with an empty chair supposed to be the President of the United States. And this had nothing to do with Ralph Ellison’s classic novel of the African-American experience, Invisible Man.

  Interestingly enough, the media, while either smirking at  Eastwood’s presentation or, following Anne Romney, respectfully calling it “unique,” haven’t picked up on the racist subtext.

                Clint remembered 2008, watching Obama’s victory.  Everyone was crying; “Oprah” was crying.  The audience howled when “Oprah” was mentioned even though she is a hugely successful African-American business woman whose wealth didn’t derive from “venture “capitalist leveraged buyouts, looted pension funds, and “outsourcing” of jobs ala Romney.

 But in the old racism that Clint and  his Republican   audience can’t overcome, she, like Obama himself. is an “uppity” Black person, a “coon” pretending to be one of us, competent, successful, worthy even of Carmel, California, which  for Eastwood and his audience is hilarious.

                But Clint was just getting going.   He seemed, although it was hard to tell, to be against the U.S. involvement in Afghanistan.  So am I and so are most of our readers I am sure.  But Eastwood was saying this to a convention of Republicans closing their eyes and pretending that he was the spirit Ronald Reagan. And he was scolding Obama about Afghanistan.

 Clint might try to make a movie where he goes back in time and warns his fellow actor, President Ronald Reagan, not to throw all that money and all those weapons into the hands of Osama bin Laden and his holy war “freedom fighters” in the 1980s against the Afghani  Communist led government and the Soviet Union.  He might also try to tell Reagan that all that support for Saddam Hussein against Iran might not in the long run be such a good idea. 

After all, he might tell Reagan, that Afghanistan and Iraq wouldn’t be the set up that Grenada was, both in his action adventure movie and the invasion by the same name—a tragic and brutal conquest of a small island, whose entire population, as former Senator George McGovern said at the time, could be put into the University of Michigan football stadium.

 But Reagan would probably counter by bringing up  the third Rambo movie, where Rambo goes triumphantly to Afghanistan.  That, Reagan would say, was much  better box office than Eastwood’s Grenada

                But Eastwood, even if he couldn’t get anywhere with Reagan, might  then warn George HW Bush in 1988 that he would sue Bush for using his famous “read my lips” line unless Bush  really accepted the negotiated settlement and stopped supporting the murderous War Lords and those who later became the Taliban. 

                But Clint couldn’t do any of that and probably wouldn’t if he could.  Later on, he might have said something to George W. Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, even McCain, about Afghanistan  and Iraq.  But it was too late then.  The  Reagan world of “movie truth,” of cowboy-gunslinger foreign policy and Hollywood wars, was receding. 

Eastwood couldn’t do a remake of Jet Pilot, that cold war jive turkey of a movie, where he shoots down both planes attacking the World Trade Center.

                But he socked it to the invisible Obama yesterday on the question of twenty-three million unemployed.  Now unemployment really is a central issue, but saying this to a convention of Republicans, who have fought tooth and nail against federal stimulus projects, against extending unemployment benefits, against any tax program that punishes corporations which “outsource” jobs, is like making a plea for ethnic religious tolerance at a Nazi Nuremberg rally.

                But Eastwood, whose forte was never comedy, high or low,  kept on snickering, insulting the invisible Obama, telling him to talk to his wife.

 It was time for the American people to fire him and replace him with a successful businessman who knew how to create peace and prosperity as the invisible Obama cursed him obscenely at the end and everybody laughed, feeling superior to the first African-American to become editor of the Harvard Law Review, who then become part of a firm representing working people on the South side of Chicago, and a law professor.

 Any Republican would tell you that someone who didn’t parley that resume into a multi-million dollar a year career as a corporate lawyer/shill for “venture” capitalists like Mitt Romney doesn’t understand the “real America” and doesn’t deserve to  live in Carmel, or even along the Chicago Gold Coast (Lake Shore Drive) much less be President of the United States.

                It really was both ugly and sad for Eastwood.  In 1980, when Jimmy Carter mentioned his previous opposition to the Civil Rights law of 1964, Ronald Reagan both put forward the usual states rights platitudes and reminisced about his youth in Illinois when no one even knew about such a thing as racism. 

Clint Eastwood, a much better actor than Ronald Reagan on Reagan’s best day, engaged at the age of 82  in 2012in a cheap racist Burlesque skit with an invisible Barack Obama, someone who in the skit was  pretending to be President the way that old Amos n Andy character, Algonquin J. Calhoun,  pretended to be a lawyer, an incompetent  joke President that  he and his fellow Republicans and movie fans can laugh off and fire for  Mitt Romney, who has the wealth that they dream of, pays the taxes that they would like to pay, and will enable them to play old  Ronald Reagan, Charleton Heston, and Sylvester Stallone movies on their smart phones in front of closed unemployment offices. They really wouldn’t like that many of Eastwood’s recent films.

                Maybe Eastwood, who directed the powerful Letters from Iwo Jima( letters from Japanese soldiers and a sort of antidote to his  not so “close to the vest”fellow Republican, John Wayne’s starring role in Sands of Iwo Jima)  might do some penance for yesterday’s racist reactionary  nonsense by ending his career with  one final “Dirty Harry” film.

This one would portray  an old “Dirty Harry” who loses his police job  and pension thanks to cutbacks, loses his home to foreclosure, and ends up living in a slum and working as a Wal-Mart Greeter to  make ends meet and pay the part of his health care that the vouchers don’t cover in the Brave Old New America of Romney and  Ryan.

 He might even use Dexter Gordon’s version of Round Midnight as the theme while Wall Street stock salesman  wake Harry  up around midnight and bombard the old and sick and now really “Dirty Harry” with phone calls offering him “investment opportunities” for his meager  social security "dividend."