Plato’s Beard » Movies

No black in the red, white and blue

There are a bunch of folks I like to think of as Ostrich Republicans (a bit unfair to Ostriches) — a group that includes naive libertarians, subconscious “End of History” believers, individualist types, and typically a combination of these traits (a hypothetical defence of the position: “Yes there were all sorts of bad things like racism, lack of women’s rights, etc. But that’s behind us now and if I do or did not believe in or participate in such things, I should be left alone and the government should get out of it”) — a textbook member is Clint Eastwood, who can strangely reconcile the slumming with bluesmen activities with his homegrown conservatism. What this leads to is the sort of schizophrenia that the following two news pieces bring out. On the one hand, he stands guilty of leaving out (and ignoring when reminded) black participation in WW2, in his new movie:

On the other, we have his fellow conservatives unhappy with his historical revisionism and bleeding-heart liberalism:

The Australian article ends with a quote from Unforgiven that immediately came to my mind too:

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