After hearing so much about it, I just viewed
the video of Clint Eastwood’s speech at the Republican National Convention:
Since most left-wingers had expressed harsh
criticism of Eastwood’s speech and most right-wingers had expressed strong
support for the speech, I had strongly suspected that opinions expressed about
the speech were more influenced by one’s political persuasion than by the
quality of the speech! Being a “middle of the bird” man, myself, I have decided
to present my opinion about the speech in the hope that it is a more balanced
and objective opinion than those which I mentioned above.
Indeed, in my opinion, it was definitely NOT
Clint Eastwood’s greatest speech ever! Eastwood is an 82 year old actor-director
whose true “glory days” were 30 to 50 years ago, and he speaks slowly and sometimes
appears to lose track of what he wants to say next. I am also definitely NOT a
fan of foul language (like the “f-word” which was hinted at a few times in
Eastwood’s speech), especially when it does not add anything, as, in my
opinion, it did not add anything to the satiric speech that Eastwood was giving;
but, of course, an actor in modern times using foul language is hardly unusual,
and Eastwood didn’t even actually state the words, he just hinted (very
strongly) at them. So, on the whole, the speech definitely did not “make my day”.
On the other hand, for an 82 year old, he presented
a remarkably coherent satire of Barack Obama and his policies. Even when he
stumbled, as he did several times, Clint Eastwood got back on track reasonably
well and continued in a comprehensible manner! His speech definitely did not
appear to me to be a “disgrace”, spoken by a sad and pathetic old-timer who has
“lost it”, as those who oppose his political views seemed to think.
I am
certain that someone else could have put together a better satire, but that is
true about almost every satire, or speech (or anything else in the world):
someone else with a little more intelligence, a bit cleverer humor, or a little
more pizzazz, could have done it better!
Regarding the complaints about Clint Eastwood’s
use of an empty chair to represent Barack Obama, I found them kind of amusing.
The empty chair, like Doonesbury comic strip’s use of an empty cowboy hat to
represent George W. Bush, was simply a satiric method of emphasizing how little
actual content there is to the “satiree” (i.e., the person being satirized)!
You can agree or disagree with that assessment of the “satiree”, but it is
certainly not an illegitimate or crazy manner of making that point. Indeed, I
would not be surprised if the person who prepared Eastwood’s “right-wing” speech
got the idea from the Doonesbury “left-wing” comic strip.
So, all in all, I found Clint Eastwood’s
speech to be a reasonable effort satirizing Barack Obama, and indicating his
support for Mitt Romney, even though it was not really to my taste.
And, once again, with regard to the extreme
criticism (and some of the extreme praise) of Eastwood’s speech, it seems we
have an example of commentators’ political views affecting their assessment of
the quality of someone’s performance.
