AP Photo/Charles Dharapak
Clint Eastwood addresses an imaginary President Obama during his Republican National Committee speech on Thursday night.
I have trouble buying his line about wanting the President to succeed, but there was one genuinely magnanimous moment which Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney offered in an acceptance speech last night heavy on rhetorical symbolism but virtually free of any substance. It was contained in this sentence:
"Every American was relieved the day President Obama gave the order, and Seal Team Six took out Osama bin Laden."
He followed this up with warmongering about Iran, which was problematic in and of itself. But given that Romney was following what our own Rachel Maddow called "the weirdest thing I've ever seen at a political convention in my entire life," the one-sentence olive branch ended up being as empty as the chair next to Clint Eastwood.
Sure, I have questions about just what in the hell was going through the mind of the octogenarian Hollywood legend when he delivered that speech, but I'm not interested in conducting amateur psychoanalysis. That story may be told someday not by the speechwriter he so clearly ignored, but hopefully by Eastwood himself or a mental-health professional. For now, we're left to account for the actions Eastwood took on stage last night, which included speaking and listening to an empty chair as if it were the President of the United States.
Given the way they treated George W. Bush this week, Barack Obama was hardly the only president Republicans rendered invisible. He's been called much worse by their nominee alone. But one of the tenets of racialized criticism of President Obama in the last four years has been to treat him as an illegitimate holder of the position, someone who didn't belong there. He's been called everything from an affirmative-action idiot to a socially-engineered superman engineered since birth to usurp the Presidency. Romney alluded to the godlike aspects of the largely Republican Obama myth in a clumsy climate-change joke, made at a moment when New Orleans was flooded once again by a hurricane. That said, the former Massachusetts governor has finally found a properly tuned dog-whistle, calling the President ill-prepared and all but patting him on the head for trying as hard as he can, but not doing well enough. Eastwood wasn't so delicate.
Eastwood may have been ignorant of the fact he was joining those who delegitimize Obama's very presence, but he's in that league now. As Jamelle Bouie said last night, an old white man arguing with an imaginary Barack Obama was an apt metaphor for how the Romney campaign runs against a Democratic record they've made up out of whole cloth.
Watching Eastwood reduce the President to an invented entity in a chair, I couldn't help but wonder what Ralph Ellison would say about all this. The author of the literary classic Invisible Man articulated the metaphor of black invisibility better than anyone ever did previously or since. My best attempt at describing it came in a collegiate column I wrote over 15 years ago:
Invisibility is hard to battle because it's not a construction of your mind, but of those who look upon you. As Ellison's title character states in the Prologue, it lies in a person's inner eyes, which they use to look upon and evaluate their physical reality. Invisibility is something a person can be the victim of and not even realize it.
That biweekly column was titled "Invisible Man" because of the experiences I'd had growing up, experiencing a social -- and at times, physical -- invisibility amongst my white peers. I say physical not because I possessed Harry Potter's cloak, but because I'd have people literally looking me dead in the face and walking into me as if they considered me an apparition and planned to pass through me. (Ellison's title character describes a similar incident on the novel's first page.) I've had the "n-word" sent in my direction a number of times, but at least that hatred necessitates a minimum level of recognition. Invisibility can be an even greater insult, unless the invisible use that to their advantage.
I have no doubt we'll see the President and his party attempt to do exactly that, at their convention next week and throughout the rest of the campaign. I say through the rest of the campaign because while Romney wasn't so clownish as to address an empty chair, but he has been running against an imaginary Barack Obama who doesn't exist, a neo-Jimmy Carter one who went on an "apology tour" in foreign countries, exploded the deficit all on his own, and more specifically, closed GM plants before he was even President and changed the welfare-to-work laws to give those lazy "welfare queens" a break. All that stuff is lies, invented to give Republicans the latest version of the Obama Bogeyman. That guy Romney and running mate Paul Ryan are running against sounds fairly awful in some respects -- but as Ellison might say, that Obama is like a ghost that haunted Edgar Allan Poe, or a Hollywood-movie ectoplasm, sharing more in common with fantasy than reality.
If this economy is so bad, and the absence of presidential leadership so stark, why is there a need to invent someone worse to run against?
Eastwood's speech will be ridiculed by many for its incoherence and crude jokes, and probed by pundits for telling statements like "We own this country." As such, the invisibility he conferred upon President Obama may go undetected outside of newborn Twitter parodies and hashtag trends. As in so many instances of ignorance, it now falls upon those targeted to explain the problem to those causing it. Whether Eastwood gets it seems irrelevant at this point. The Romney campaign feels compelled to make the actual President invisible, so it only matters whether they and their supporters succeed in that effort.
An additional read on Republican racial denial which I found useful was Tim Wise's new post. You can watch Eastwood's and Romney's remarks after the jump.
UPDATE: I've added the video of our own Chris Hayes referencing Ellison and invisibility today in a discussion on "NOW with Alex Wagner" this afternoon, adding an important point about Eastwood literally talking down to the President. Check it out, if not only for Chris' remarks, but also "Inside the Actors Studio" host James Lipton's surgical breakdown of Eastwood's performance (art).
"Inside the Actors Studio" host James Lipton joins a conversation about, of course, Clint Eastwood's performance on the final night of the RNC. Lipton said the performance was improv and Eastwood did President Obama a great disservice.
Hollywood legend Clint Eastwood speaks at the RNC Thursday in Tampa, Fla.
Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney addresses the RNC Thursday in Tampa, Fla.
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Beautiful commentary connecting race and invisibility. When I read the headlines about the empty chair stunt, my first thought was, "They didn't like having a black President, so they tried to make him disappear."
Funny that they can't decide what to do -- make him the big, bad enemy or try to render him inconsequential.
There's a lot of ways to look at Clint Eastwood's speech last night. But as Melissa Harris-Perry points out, when you consider the words of Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man there's an all-too familiar undercurrent to be found.
President Obama; the man who doesn't need to go to the Tanning booth like The Speaker of the House. A man of the times for the times.
Eastwood is an old man who doesn't know what he is doing, but does what people tell him. The chair was put there by someone, so someone told him to pretend Obama was sitting there, and then he showed his disrespect to the President and the Office of the President.
Romney/Ryan are from the 1800's and really need a time machine to go back there, to where they would not be the elite, but members of the lower classes and where they can learn how to act in this age.
Eastwood had to change his speech at the last minute. He was going to speak on Mitt's Bain Capital record, but then somebody brought up the subject of his own outsourced spaghetti westerns...
No? C'mon, that was better than any of Eastwood's jokes.
Q: Why didn't we see Sarah Palin, Michele Bachmann, Christine O'Donnell, Ann Coutler, George Bush, Dick Cheney, or Allen West at the RNC?
A: The Etch-a-Sketch ate 'em.
And a little news piece from the American Family Association, the organization that supported Rep. Akin's decision not to throw himself under the bus...
http://mweaver1.newsvine.com/_news/2012/09/01/13605467-american-family-association-links-gays-to-hurricane-isaac-destruction
Life-imitates-bad-jokes-department... Just a few days ago I wrote that Democrats were handicapped because they couldn't say things like that to their constituents.
Here's the deal! Romney is a Liar and a Racist. We are just learning that even though he professes to be a man of faith; he is a Liar. He will stop at nothing to fill the GOP Agenda!! The Mormon Church still teaches that All African American People are a Cursed People!! So, Romney was raised a Racist!! I believe that the; GOP + Romney (The Largest Racist Hate Group In America)!!!! Poor Eastwood, it looks like he is going senile!! Somebody needs to help him get some sense!!!!
Excellent piece. I agree, and only wish there were more discussion of the erasure of our president (a Black man) through language and presentation. But please let's not dismiss the mental acuity of a person due to their age. I have heard and read now, following the horrible Eastwood debacle (it was painful to watch because it was insulting as well as a bad schtick), many, many comments that include words like "old man" and, as in your piece above, "octogenarian," which are meant to imply an erosion of mental faculty. I agree wholeheartedly with your points about the not-so-veiled racism in Eastwood's speech, but want to make the point that prejudice is also seeping through in your language in the form of ageism.
Melissa - You are blaming the hurricane that hit New Orleans on Global warming? Interesting. You also blame global warming on man-made emissions when there is absolutely ZERO scientific evidence that supports that claim. I am sure that you are also aware that Mars is also going through global warming as we speak, and Mars only has ONE SUV on the entire planet. The polar caps are melting on Mars as we speak. There are NO men on Mars. What could possibly be causing the warming trend there? You see the planets like Mars and Earth go through warming and cooling periods -
Habibullo Abdussamatov, the head of space research at St. Petersburg's Pulkovo Astronomical Observatory in Russia, recently linked the attenuation of ice caps on Mars to fluctuations in the sun's output. Abdussamatov also blamed solar fluctuations for Earth’s current global warming trend. His initial comments were published online by National Geographic News.
“Man-made greenhouse warming has [made a] small contribution [to] the warming on Earth in recent years, but [it] cannot compete with the increase in solar irradiance,” Abdussamatov told LiveScience in an email interview last week. “The considerable heating and cooling on the Earth and on Mars always will be practically parallel." -
You see, the Earth has had significant cooling and warming trends for MILLIONS of years before humans ever existed on this planet. Man is NOT capable for altering these trends. To think that we are capable of controlling the Earth's warming or cooling trend is beyond ridiculous. Blaming hurricanes on man made emissions is beyond ludicrous, as they have been occurring since the dawn of time. You're knee jerk, left-wing liberalism on virtually every issue, and every phase of life reveals that your politics and beliefs are not truly heartfelt and sincere. Simply and mindlessly siding with the far left on every issue under the Sun flies in the face of true objectivity and real intelligence - You, Ma'am, are a MORON.
Go get a basic science lesson. The sellouts at the Heritage Foundation (who were also telling us there was no danger to second-hand tobacco smoke) used some silly pseudo science to deceive enough folks on that subject. You've been punked. Worse, they used chemistry, and not physics.
Larger molecules in the atmosphere--carbon dioxide and methane are two examples--diffuse the reflection of sunlight which means it is not reflected out into space, and the heat generated is thus retained.
And there's no evidence one way or another that "Mars is warming." We have barely a quarter of a century of data to go on, if that much. Take those silly dishonest Talking Oinks® back to the Koch head crowd where got them and ask for a refund.
As a so-called "method actor" since 1975 with my own "inside the Actors Studio" experiences at the Actors Studio, I have a great respect and admiration for James Lipton. One thing is missing from his critique of Romney's speech, and for that matter, everyone's critique of the speeches given by Romney, Ryan and Rubio (what wicked alliteration there).
The speakers have teleprompters placed left, right and center. The one center is directly in front of the camera lens, to give the appearance the speaker is speaking directly to the listener, and not reading.
When you go back to watch the three R's, notice this: They each speak to the left and right "audience" served by the left and right teleprompter for a given period of time, but when it is time to hit a home run with a thought, they look directly into the camera lens. Every time. They are attempting to connect with the viewer by looking the viewer "straight in the eyes". People generally feel they can trust someone who looks them "straight in the eyes".
These guys do not have to be "method actors" to be the great liars they have become when speaking. Any dialog coach with extensive experience in on-camera technique can accomplish the same goal. These Republicans did not do anything any accomplished television commercial spokesman can do with some good training in their tool box.
Now, watch President Obama speaking, and you'll often see him turn his head from left to right while reading from the teleprompter. I believe he needs to address the center prompter more often - especially with his home runs. Yes, it's a matter of on-camera technique for both parties. Nothing wrong with it. The difference is in the message.
The three R's use their technique to sell proven lies. The more often the lie is repeated, the more a certain segment of the population will believe the lie. I would hope to see the President use the center teleprompter more often - use it to dispel the lies of the Republicans, and to further gain the trust of the American people with a continuing message of hope and change and looking forward for our country.
Thank you so much for these remarks, Jamil. Very well written and these are such important points that need to be brought into the discussion, made more VISIBLE, as it were.
Thank you, Melissa, for picking up on this theme. Your point is extremely important, yet has gotten lost, as you say, amidst all the jokes surrounding Eastwood's empty chair routine. I think people should be much more upset than amused by Eastwood's stunning lack of respect for the President and his projecting his own crudeness onto the President. Obama would never tell anyone to go f-- himself, as Eastwood implied, or tell anyone to shut up. Eastwood might. But those kinds of remarks are much more accurately ascribed to disrespectful people on the right, such as Dick Cheney and Bill O'Reilly.