It’s a weird thing about Clint Eastwood’s empty chair speech at the Republican National Convention. Most of us watched it and were a little bit embarrassed for Clint. As much as we might love him as an actor, that was not his greatest performance. For some of us more partisan types, there was a bit of schadenfreude mixed in, but we still felt bad for Clint. It was a doddering, old man performance coming from someone we all know and remember as the manliest man ever.
What a Stupid Person Does With Freedom of Speech
Nobody actually thought he delivered a great speech. Or, at any rate, I didn’t think so at the time.
But, there are apparently a few people out there (probably the same ones who obsessed for months over teleprompters and arugula, refer to the first lady as “Mooshelle,” and shared those e-mails with watermelons on the white house lawn) who seem to think Mayor Eastwood was absolutely brilliant.
A case in point is Laurie Mulholland, from Rochester, Minnesota. Outside her home, hanging from a tree, there is a noose. Hanging from the noose, there is a chair. She give’s Eastwood credit for that, but it didn’t really need to be said. This is not the first incident of someone, following Eastwood’s speech, lynching a chair. It is one of the more imaginative ones. The chair has been run through with a bayonet, and there’s also a golf club in there for some reason.
George Bush played golf. Bill Clinton played golf. Eisenhower played golf. What’s their problem if Obama has a golf game now and again?
The bayonet is, of course, a reference to Obama schooling Romney on the differences between our WWI military and that of the present day. Here, we see the mirror opposite of what happened with the chair speech. Whereas we saw the chair speech and cringed, they saw a piece of artistic brilliance, the birth of a meme. Contrariwise, when we heard the “horses and bayonets” line, we heard a firm, clear sighted, calm and intelligent commander in chief gracefully chiding a geopolitical neophyte. Teabaggers were horrified that this very urban gentleman was mocking a fine and historical weapon like the bayonet.
The noose, she said, was her husband’s idea.
She said, when interviewed by a local news station, that she is not a racist. Well, not against black people in general, but maybe a bit racist against Obama.
It’s not too surprising that she doesn’t see herself as a racist. These people just have a different view of the universe. There are some words which apparently don’t mean the same thing to them and us. Words like good, and bad, and smart, and stupid. And racist.
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