CSotD: Refutation, rather than disagreement
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Sometimes more is more, as witness the latest K Chronicles, in which Keith Knight takes on the "in my day" statement of Clint Eastwood.
He's not the first cartoonist to go after Eastwood's remarks, and it should be noted that the statement itself is so overwhelmingly foolish as to invite both refutation and ridicule.
There are a couple of questions to start with, the first being, who cares what some actor thinks? And the controversial quotes are only a portion of a much longer Esquire interview with Eastwood and his son; they might have slipped under the radar had someone not pulled them out in the first place.
As it happens, I watched "The War Wagon" this past weekend, and went to imdb.com to see who some of the minor actors were, whereupon I found, among the trivia, the statement that Burt Lancaster declined to be in the flick because he didn't want to work with John Wayne.
It doesn't say why, but we all knew Wayne was a rightwinger, and Lancaster was not. This may be irrelevant, but I'd just streamed Trumbo the week before, so it made me think.
Still, the rightwing factor was offset somewhat by the fact that, until later in his career, Wayne didn't push his politics with rightwing projects, and, by the time he did, the cartoonish aspects of things had somewhat taken over anyway.
By contrast, for instance, Bob Hope pushed his politics in his standup, and certainly Eastwood has, since his Dirty Harry days, pushed a purposeful, heroic disregard for individual rights as part of his public personna.
So it's not as if his personal beliefs were, well, personal.
A number of cartoonists have pointed out the same thing Knight points out, which is that "in my day" refers back to a time when women and minorities were expected to stay in the background and accept whatever crusts and crumbs, and abuse, came their way.
It wasn't a conspiracy so much as thoughtless acceptance of the default, but, as in other unfair situations, the question of character is not in that default but in what happens when the unfairness is pointed out, because you can only defend the status quo to a very limited extent, by which I mean you can deny there was evil intent in the first place, but you can't defend maintaining it.
Not that people won't try. As Jen Sorensen points out, Eastwood is hardly the only conservative who insists that it's wrong to call people out on their intolerance. She properly derides "political correctness" as hypocritical nonsense.
And "political correctness" is at the heart of what Eastwood says has made us a "pussy generation."
(Disclaimer: I will admit to having a rather positive attitude towards pussies. I'm not sure why conservatives feel otherwise about them.)
But, language aside, there is fair and unfair criticism, and, if Eastwood didn't have a substantial investment built up over several decades in celebrating intolerance and unfairness, his absurd comments in the Esquire interview might best be ignored.
Here's a contrasting example: When Minnesota Vikings player Adrian Peterson was reported for using a switch to punish his son, I was willing to argue that he had no evil intent. He had been raised that way and so assumed that it was part of normal parenting.
Could he have been more insightful? Sure. Absolutely.
Did his ignorance justify his actions? No.
Explain it, yes. Justify it, no.
The critical argument is that he wasn't trying to be abusive. The important part was what happened once the abusive nature of switching had been pointed out, and I felt he passed that test. Others disagreed and insisted he be held accountable for what he should have known.
That's a conversation worth having.
By contrast, Eastwood's recalling, not just of a simpler time but of a better time, is more sweeping in nature than whether and how you discipline your kids, and the issues it raises are not only more numerous but are things we have discussed ad nauseum not simply in magazine articles and at coffee klatches, but in Congress and the Supreme Court.
You can't not know this stuff. You have to have considered, and rejected, it.
Which, getting back to Keef's cartoon, is why a multi-panel refutation is far more effective than a single-panel commentary.
The one-panel responses limit themselves to "is not!"
By using six panels, Knight is able to say "This is why … and this … and this … and this …"
That's how you turn disagreement into refutation, and Eastwood's deliberately stubborn, blind attitude does not invite "disagreement."
It demands refutation.
And while we're going long-form
Boulet hasn't translated a cartoon into English for quite a while, but he now offers this, of which I offer only two panels, leaving it to you to go read the whole thing, which is appallingly funny and brings a number of dimensions to the term "bad taste."
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