The UDC, Usual Deleted Commentator, has objected to my blaspheming HIS New York-Hollywood media canonized Clintness, naming a list of his less culturally influential movies to exonerate the pioneering and far more culturally potent influence of his role in Hollywood fascist chic. The soft side of Clint, the chick-flick Clint, "THE BRIDGES OF MADISON COUNTY, MIDNIGHT IN THE GARDEN OF GOOD AND EVIL, UNFORGIVEN , BRONCO BILLY, JERSEY BOYS and BIRD". um hum, and those are supposed to exonerate him from his career in Republicanfascist politics, counting back from his racist, senior moment at the last Republican convention through the Dirty Harry epics in police brutality and fascism, the paranoid, violence of the High Plains Drifter movies and such great pieces of the genera as Hang Em' High, And that's not even beginning to bring up the heroic rapist-clearly while vagina phobic roles in such movies as The Beguiled.
Clint Eastwood is a fitting poster boy for the incoherent, irrational and peculiarly American mix of fantasy horse opera libertarianism with strong-man fascism, summary-justice police violence with rugged-conformist-individualist maverick, and a dozen other strands of the pathological neo-fascist irrationality. All made whole through the make believe of movies, sex appeal through assertion, psycho-pathology, worship of power and, over all of the rest, that quintessential movie virtue, violence. American movies generally do only two things, violence and violent sex.
I really, really wish it were possible to know how many of the cops who have been shooting black people at such an alarming rate are Clint Eastwood fans, Dirty Harry in their own avenging minds. Not to mention the fans of other fascist-chic media who are hoping to cash in on the same people who are addicted to his violent, fascist chic movies. Funny, I haven't noticed a huge outpouring of new fans for hard be-bop or post-bop jazz from his Bird movie. I haven't noticed much in the way of elevation of black jazz musicians coming from that pic.
Trump is a creation of the same entertainment industry that provided us with Ronald Reagan and which has turned the popular culture of the United States to fascist chic with a steady stream of violent macho movies since the brief and mostly culturally impotent entities like the TV show M*A*S*H. Hollywood traffics in a stream of fantasy in which ideas don't have to cohere, stories don't have to match reality and lies are as good as the truth if they'll get you what you want and they have the cinematic-business virtue of not having to conform to real life. That, bunky, is why Trump gets away with lying, just as Bush II, Bush I, Reagan and Nixon did. I haven't thought it through as to how the reality denial of Susan Sarandon and Michael Moore fit in but they are part of the same thing.
The friggin' Bridges of friggin' Madison County? You really want to go there?
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