One of the weirder things I found on the blogs was how may people on the alleged left used to have some kind of affectionate regard for Clint Eastwood and his movies. It's as if his presentation of a sort of gangster-fascism and a clearly psychotic, parnoid vision of life since at least High Planes Drifter was OK because it was THE MOVIES. That they didn't get that he really meant it in those Dirty Harry movies and every other one I saw led some of them to being shocked at his senior moment at the Republican Convention in 2012. With American Sniper a lot of them are expressing outrage at what is reported as misrepresentations of everything from the relationship of the unprovoked invasion of Iraq to 9-11 to presenting lies Chris Kyle has told about killing people in Iraq and in the United States as facts. And there is no question about it, Chris Kyle was a documented and adjudicated liar who was successfully sued for lying.
My conclusion is that Clint Eastwood is nuts, he has been nuts for a long, long time, he is nuts in an especially unattractive way and has expressed and promoted his nuttiness in a long series of films, the non-stop psychotic paranoia and frankly fascistic movies punctuated by a few which tug at the most easily tugged heart strings. And, for a lot of people, those made up for the unrelenting promotion of the Drifter, Dirty Harry, and all of those other characters he played as heroes. Which wouldn't be nearly as bad if people kept it in make believe but I don't have any doubt that real life psychotic, paranoid, fascists have benefited from his promotion of that personality profile, several of our more infamous chiefs of police and county sheriffs, among them. The extent to which policemen take him as someone to emulate is the extent to which those guys should not be given a gun and a permission to use it. [Update: Not to mention the "make my day" ravings of Ronald Reagan.]
That it took so many alleged liberals seeing him insanely ranting at a chair, in what I entirely consider a manifestation of racism, something he would never have done if Barack Obama were not black, to know him for what he has been as long as he's been in control of his movies, only shows that a lot of us need to grow up and stop playing let's pretend.
Hollywood dealing with history and important topical material produces distortions, when it's not producing ideological lies. It's an industry that sells images and make believe to push peoples' buttons and change their behavior. first and foremost to buy tickets and movies, putting the lie to the most incredibly transparent of all lies that what the media sells has no effect on behavior. That someone like Clint Eastwood would have the power in the film industry that he does should make anyone seriously worried about its effect in the wider, real world. The lie that what happens in entertainment is above question on account of it being called "entertainment" is so obvious now, with more than a century of the use of movies politically, generally for the worst of motives, even many of those cartoons, proves that's a self-serving lie told by the entertainment industry and its hired liars in the legal profession.
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