Clint Eastwood made my day. It happened during a recent interview with The New York Times in which the actor-director said he was baffled by the controversy surrounding his latest film, “Million Dollar Baby.”
What Eastwood finds frustrating is that a movie that isn’t really political has had to endure political fallout from talk-show hosts who insist that the film–in a plot twist already revealed elsewhere–pushes liberalism by promoting assisted suicide.
Given that Eastwood is the former Republican mayor of Carmel, Calif., and a movie star who once played hard-nosed police inspector Harry Callahan, a.k.a. “Dirty Harry,” the irony is palpable. But what caught my attention was what Eastwood had to say about the ruckus. He harkened back to an earlier time when politics were more cordial and the discussion of all things political wasn’t so all-or-nothing.
“Maybe I’m getting to the age when I’m starting to be senile or nostalgic or both, but people are so angry now,” Eastwood said. “You used to be able to disagree with people and still be friends. Now you hear these talk shows, and everyone who believes differently from you is a moron and an idiot–both on the right and the left.”
Bravo.
Eastwood has just zeroed in on one of the biggest problems with political discourse in this country. It’s a problem that needs fixing, and until it gets fixed, the political process will not work as well as it would without all the acrimony and accusations.
These days when they talk politics, a lot of Americans tend to demonize, dismiss and demand. They demonize anyone who disagrees with them. They dismiss anything their opponents have to say. And they demand that even those who agree with them do so 100 percent of the time. Many people refuse to give their opponents any credit for good ideas, and they blast away with anger at what they think are bad ideas.
I hear it all the time from liberals and other critics of the Bush administration. You never hear people say that they disagree with the president on the war in Iraq but they like his approach to education or reforming Social Security. You have to be against it all. Conservatives do it too. Many of those who support the president seem to feel as if they have to support the war. And many of those who support the war seem to feel as if they have to support Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. Only rarely do you hear a nuanced view like the one presented by Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), who has said that he supports Bush and the war but that he has “no confidence” in Rumsfeld.
Good for McCain. Human beings are an advanced species. Most of them don’t see the world in black and white, and they’re known to have mixed feelings about tough issues. They might be pro-choice on abortion but also receptive to restrictions such as parental notification laws. Or they might oppose affirmative action, but not because they buy into the argument that it hurts white males as much as they believe it hurts the minorities it intends to benefit.
Complexity is a good thing. And it’s a shame you don’t see and hear more of it in our political debates.
That was the lament of the reader who wrote me a few months ago. He sent his sympathies and said that he imagined it couldn’t be easy writing an opinion column in this environment, with so many on both sides so locked into the extremes and so firmly convinced that what they believe is right that they won’t tolerate an alternate point of view.
He’s right. I recently wrote a column saying that I was proud of Alberto Gonzales for becoming the first Latino U.S. attorney general but that I was also concerned that Gonzales seems to believe that the government has the power to hold terror suspects indefinitely. I got hit from both sides. Liberals demanded to know how I could be proud of someone who–according to them–had contempt for the Constitution. And conservatives wrote in to say that Gonzales’ views with regard to terror suspects was perfectly reasonable, and that I should be ashamed for impugning his integrity.
Nonsense. You can be proud of someone for accomplishing something significant and still critical of him for positions on which you disagree. To maintain otherwise is to make people out to be less complicated than they really are, and politics a lot less interesting than it ought to be.
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E-mail: ruben.navarrette@uniontrib.com
