Clint Eastwood about political correctness and p****y generation

http://www.mirror.co.uk/3am/celebrity-news/clint-eastwood-reveals-support-donald-8561147

It seems to me, that political correctness is reaching hysterical levels in USA and in West Europe, but unfortunately only few people dare to speak about it to avoid being medially lynched by media and activists.

 

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The man is 87 years old - that's older than my father would be if he were still alive. Yes Clint, it isn't 1950 any more. Doo wop music, ducktail haircuts, dancing the jitterbug, all things of the past, just like him.

I will never watch another Clint Eastwood movie. I couldn't stomach it after reading this.

 

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It seems to me that anti-political-correctness hysteria is reaching ridiculous levels.

If you want to call people niggers and coons, do so. Then man up and face the consequences.

Here in the US we have the right to free speech. We also have the right to call people who do that racists. That's not "political correctness" - that's just recognizing bigotry.

 

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Gee Ivan
Does that mean that you're hysterically politically correct?

 

In Gran Torino, which is mentioned in the article, Eastwood's character starts out as a bigoted idiot but his attitude changes in the end.

I tend to agree with Eastwood about Trump. He should say what's on his "mind". An asshole like that should be a public asshole.

 

When did he say those things? You sure you aren't just quoting Gran Torino?

I read the Esquire article and I'm not seeing that he said anything racist, just that he lambasted political correctness. Can anyone enlighten me as to what he said that was so bad?

 

Is this the guy that talked to a chair?

 

PC is neo-prudishness that fixates on the mere etiquette of social discourse, rather than shutting debate down completely. Whereas the actual, rising media star is one of the many offspring that falls out of identity politics. In which you have no right to examine, evaluate or critique a group's activities, habits, policies, motives, strategies, goals and internal regulation of themselves if you don't share their life experiences, self-conception, distinct attributes, and heritage (i.e., lack that group identity -- don't belong to that population with common ancestry, that culture, that ideological club, etc).

 

Yes, well, Clint Eastwood is the sort of tough-talker who needs to feminize people in order to abuse them.

When people like that speak of political correctness, it does well enough to wonder what the hell they think they're talking about.

• • •​

It's a good point that illustrates the problem. From the outset, I've heard far more about the tyranny of "PC" from people who were upset at notions like not being able to say nigger and bitch in the workplace than I have from the alleged Thought Police.

And then, once this illusion of demon political correctness is established? Well, if all you've got is a flame, everything looks like sosobra.

Because sometimes it's just about the disappointment of learning what an admired artistic paradigm actually involves. Here, I'll even give you an example from youth:

• In the late eighties, I heard this wild punk demo on a local radio show, about a teenager wandering through the house murdering his family; it was very nearly the lines from the Doors song turned into a punk single. Absolutely wild, and then I didn't hear from them again. Well, okay, I did. These were the days when plenty of households only had broadcast television; we got back from vacation and my brother rolled the tape because Soundgarden's new video was out. On the same episode, this band I had once heard on the radio suddenly returned, playing thrash and looking slightly glam. "911"↱, to this day, sticks in my head. I used to call it one of my favorites; I still would, except ....

But that's the thing; these guys were from my area; I recognized most of what they were doing. Like the song, "Devil's Night Out"↱; the sample at the end is televangelist Bob Tilton (Success 'n' Life), who was the one we all saw flipping between sitcom reruns and Divorce Court while looking for daytime talk shows―Tilton is my favorite televangelist, and the one I imitate on the occasions I need to pretend to be a televangelist.

And that's the thing. They have this other song, see. And, yeah, when you're in high school and these are the days, it doesn't stand out so much because regardless of all else, you know approximately what they're on about. And maybe you have the albums on cassette, and over time they wear out. And maybe one day years later you find the album on the internet, and you so desperately want to stand on knowing what they're on about. And maybe every couple of years you keep meeting this or that memory at this or that intersection, and each time, yes, you think about it.

So in the end it took something like fifteen years to actually admit what I was hearing and let that fact settle the issue. That is to say, after several encounters, I could no longer justify the song. It's not a matter of political correctness; over the years I tried making every excuse I could.​

The skies are filled with crows, a sun blotted out by the black winged maggots. Then they woke me up at five, and I thought about gettin' my gun, but there's more deaad crows than there are damn bullets. Schemin', lyin', spy versus spyin'. A crow always smokes your last cigarette. Every crow I've known drank way too much, was a real bad tipper, and spit and stuff. Yeah, a crow's about as low as you can get ....

.... How the hell can you tell them apart? The crow's the one with the shit on his face and the fucked up Pumas, hangin' out with his buddies, ptichin' pennies in your backyard.​

Yeah. "Blackfeather Shake"↱ is exactly what it sounds like. And it's emblematic; this manner of "there are black people, and then there are niggers" was pretty much the tacit baseline zeitgeist. In the context of the times, the song stands out as some manner of [something about admirable subversion and avant garde suggesteing artistic merit] coming right out and saying the unspeakable. In the end, the song has historical value as a relic indicating where our society has been, but that's about it: This was one of the things people believed but knew they weren't supposed to say out loud except in reserved company. And to that end, my experience is emblematic of American society.

The line about crows and bullets, and the line about Pumas, are seared in my brain for the rest of my life. It's one thing to "walk away", but I will still bear some of the weight. I will remember how that felt, as long as I can, because that's how it goes, but maybe it's for the best because I have a feeling I'm going to need that experience soon; Americans are about to do a bunch of this stuff all over again.​

Honestly, the last Eastwood film I recall actually seeing was Unforgiven. By the time I got around to reading Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, perhaps a decade later, I was no longer interested in anything Clint Eastwood was doing. And this was because his films were stupid, boring, or both. I don't know, I never turned against him for being a Republican; I just stopped giving a damn about certain trends in cinema. Thus, by the time we witnessed the venerable actor and director losing an argument with an empty chair, I couldn't even make the joke about, "Okay, that rips it, I'm off Eastwood!" Much like a chicken restaurant chain, it's hard to make any demonstrative boycott when I don't give custom in the first place.

Every once in a while, though, these artistic questions do have some consequence. There is an incredibly important book I read some years ago, and it's extraordinarily well written. And the fictional story tells us a great deal about a particular set of issues, thus reaching from the character in the story on up to genuine geopolitical significance. Quite frankly, it's a book that should be taught; indeed, it was at least during the couple years I spent at university before dropping out over twenty years ago.

Few people teach it anymore. Very few discuss it.

The reason doesn't have to do with political correctness. The reason has to do with people's inability to reconcile the fact of a story with incredible analytic skill and tremendous implications long ignored, say, by my own society, being written by a serial rapist. I honestly wouldn't know how to justify teaching the book insofar as I would have to answer female students. But that's not political correctness, either: If I'm about to make a case that a person who happens to be a serial rapist is admirable for other reasons, I don't get to ignore the fact of serial rape. If, for instance, this story is an admirable product of an attempt to communicate a perspective―i.e., what makes it worth teaching in either a literary or historical context―how do I reconcile that the perspective includes validation of rape and systematic sexual abuse? Where does this fit into these otherwise lofty existential considerations? Because I must account for this, I would have no idea how to teach the book. Still, it's not at all striking to me that if I look at the top ten from the Modern Library editors' list of the one hundred best English-language novels of the twentieth century, that's the one that nobody ever seems to recognize.

 

Yep. And the chair didn't object to anything he said, indicating it agreed.

 

Censoring people's speech

It's not what Clint himself emits for verbiage, but what behavior he defends: the monopoly of public discourse by racists, bigots, and fools, in positions of political power.

It's the power imbalance in the public dialogue - not the specific content of an individual's utterances - that is central. It's one thing to have - say - anti-Semitic bigotry from a particular source; it's another thing entirely to have it from - say - a US Senator attempting to legislate according to these opinions, to corral public opinion and force behind his legislative endeavors without a correspondingly loud and powerful source of sanity and reason available. Likewise on the radio airwaves, or dominating the TV "fair and balanced" news.

Clint himself is open to reason, apparently. To a degree. The political forces and factions he defends and abets are not. They dominate, is the problem. And he makes little allowance for that actual state of political affairs.

 

I think this is good example of political correctness reaching hysterical levels:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tim_Hunt#Controversy_over_lunchtime_toast_at_WCSJ_2015

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/art...ing-dubious-claims-career-told-update-CV.html

http://www.skepticink.com/lateraltruth/2015/08/01/connie-st-louis-delusional-or-dishonest/

http://www.breitbart.com/tech/2015/...britain-in-defeat-after-feminist-fibs-he-won/

https://medium.com/@LouiseMensch/the-tim-hunt-debacle-c914395d5e01#.nd6q2qa76

 

It was a really dumb-assed thing to say. But it was a man saying something dumb about women, so society scrambled to clear his name. You want political correctness, there it is.

 

So called conservatives are using political correctness as an excuse to justify the unjustifiable.

 

It seems, that you havent read the links, because over time the situation changed and now it is clear, that Hunt was medially lynched because of short remark, which was intended as joke. And this militant feminist Louis was obviously lying when reporting about his speech. So this small joke resulted in huge and ugly campaing agaist him and his wife and it was completely inapropriate to what he actually said and in which context.

 

Clint Eastwood has been around a long time, I respect his observations regarding the p***y generation. He's right, Trump is anything but PC. Oh, the horror.

 

What are you talking about?

The past generation didn't have internet.

 

That's because oppressors don't label themselves as oppressors. However, if you aren't seeing the PC itself and only the reaction to it, you haven't been picking-up the news cycle quickly enough. First comes the news (Princeton students protest...), then the reaction to it ("idiot children"...).

 

I wonder if I'm going to get a response to this or if we can just skip the offense and go straight to the bashing? (Yes, already started.)

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No response because your question didn't make any sense. He did not say anything racist in his talk; not sure where you got that.