CARTOON: “Growing Up Eastwood”

From Clay Jones on his political cartoon “Growing Up Eastwood,” Clint Eastwood’s racist remarks to Esquire, and his unbelievable cultural insensitivity

Clint Eastwood is a brilliant artist. I’m not talking about his skill as an actor but as a filmmaker. “Unforgiven,” “Million Dollar Baby,” “Flags Of Our Fathers,” “Letters From Iwo Jima,” “Gran Torino,” and “Trouble With The Curve” are all movies where you would think the creator was a person with a sophisticated mind.

Then that creator goes to the Republican National Convention in 2012 and argues with an empty chair. He then made the film “American Sniper,” which was a decent enough movie but was very loose with the truth and fed right-wing propaganda.

You wonder what Eastwood believes about race having made a movie like “Gran Torino” and then giving an interview like he did with Esquire last week where he tried to tell us that racism isn’t racism.

In the interview, Eastwood says the stuff we call racism today wasn’t called racism when he was growing up. Of course it wasn’t. It was normal and, most of the time, legal. Discrimination, segregation, white lunch counters and drinking fountains, and making blacks ride on the back of the bus, were all legal. Interracial marriage was illegal. Just because they didn’t call it racism doesn’t mean it wasn’t racism.

Referring to Donald Trump, Eastwood said: “He’s 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. When I grew up, those things weren’t called racist.”

So basically, the guy who retweets tweets from white supremacists should be given a pass and we should all get over it. Eastwood actually said it’s a sad time in history and people should get over stuff instead of calling racism for what it is, because aw, shucks … the days of Jim Crow were awesome for everybody. Well, everybody with the same skin color as Clint Eastwood.

He didn’t stop there. He said Hillary Clinton will be “a tough voice to hear for four years.” It’s OK when men shout, but woman should know their place, I guess.

On parenting, he said, “For a man, once you’ve sired your pups, you’re done.” Raising kids is left to women while the men have careers. If he thinks he had to struggle with a black president, he’s really gonna have a hard time with a woman in the Oval Office.

According to Eastwood this generation is a bunch of wimps (I’m not using the word he actually used) and we’re too politically correct. Political correctness is really about being a decent person. You don’t have to walk on eggshells, as Clint suggests. It just means you shouldn’t walk on other people.

It’s hypocritical for a geezer clinging to the methods of the Jim Crow era to accuse this generation of being a bunch of wussies (replace the “w” with a “p”) while he’s the one being a great big crybaby.

I’m starting to think the old man in Gran Torino is semi-biographical on Eastwood. If the racist old man doesn’t like the changing colors of his neighborhood, perhaps he should just move.

claytoonz.com/2016/08/07/growing-up-eastwood

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