This Labor Day, the humidity in Washington was so intense, when I woke up this morning, all the windows were dripping with condensation on the outside. That’s because I had the air conditioning on the inside at a pleasant seventy-two degrees all night. We are expecting the remnants of hurricane Isaac, too, but the family Labor Day barbecue was scheduled for my place in Great Falls, Virginia nonetheless. Therefore, I set up the grills on the deck close enough to the house to allow me to extend a waterproof (and fireproof) awning over them if a downpour happened to hit while I was cooking the grass-fed Wyoming bison, Colorado venison, Manitoba elk, New Zealand South Island alpine meadow lamb, wild-caught Alaskan king salmon, Cabo San Lucas marlin, Kamchatka bluefin tuna, Chesapeake Bay rockfish, Cayman Island red snapper, free-range beer can chicken and organic bratwurst, weisswurst and boudin noir for my crowd of famished, celebrating guests.
My entire extended family was there, naturally, and as regular readers of this Web log can readily envision, the usual lively discussions of current events and politics ensued among my various siblings and in-laws while hordes of screaming children of every age scampered about, as expected, on the very edge of total pandemonium and chaos. In short, it was just the sort of atmosphere to spark one’s appetite – and thirst, for that matter. I was flipping Kobe beef burgers to feed the kids while sipping a Spaten Oktoberfest when Czerny, one of my neighbors and a pollster by trade, stopped by to chat. He complimented me on the food and ambience, and I returned the favor by asking how things were going with his business.
“Lots to do,” he vouched, taking a sip of his Macallan 18 on the rocks and contemplating my rose bushes for a moment. “As a matter of fact, the Democrats hired me for some extra work right after the Republican National Convention.”
“Really?” I wondered aloud. “What happened at the RNC that the Democrats are interested in you asking a random sample of the public about?”
“The Eastwood speech,” Czerny replied. “You know, the one he made the night Romney accepted the nomination, where Clint talked to an empty chair for ten minutes?”
“Ah yes,” I confirmed. “I remember that. Clint Eastwood started out his speech reasonably enough, reminding the delegates and the television audience that not everybody in Hollywood is a raving liberal, a point which he emphasized by introducing John Voight, who was also in attendance at Tampa that evening. Then, he recalled a particularly poignant moment from the Obama campaign – and declared that he hadn’t cried that hard again – until he found out there are twenty-three million unemployed Americans. Then Eastwood suggested that now might be the time for ‘someone else to come along and solve the problem.’ So far so good, I suppose, provided you can stay awake listening to such tepid rhetoric.”
“Yeah,” Czerny agreed, “up to that point, it was… well, acceptable, anyway. A bit boring, perhaps, but nothing… out of the ordinary.”
“Then, however,” I continued, “things suddenly got very strange. Eastwood introduced an empty chair as ‘Mr. Obama,’ and started talking to it, asking it about ‘how you handle promises you’ve made,’ complaining about Obama wanting to close Guantanamo and his administration attempting to conduct terrorist trials in New York City.”
“That certainly got my attention, anyway,” Czerny confessed. “I’ve never seen anything quite that surreal at a party convention before.”
“True,” I concurred, “although I don’t know if ‘surreal’ is quite the right term. I was thinking more along the lines of Da-Da actually, or perhaps something like Alfred Jarry performing Ubu Roi, because then Eastwood started an argument with the chair about Afghanistan, and upbraided it for not ‘checking with the Russians about how they did there,’ as if it was the chair that invaded Afghanistan without considering the lessons of history – not a Republican-controlled Congress, not the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and certainly not George W. Bush. After which, he asks the chair why, instead of setting a target withdrawal date – which is what the empty chair wants, apparently – that stupid empty chair doesn’t just do what Romney suggests and bring all the troops home tomorrow morning. Then Eastwood argues with the chair some more, saying no, he won’t shut up, it’s his turn now, followed by, ‘What do you want me to tell Romney? He can’t do that to himself. That’s crazy, you’re getting as bad as Biden. Of course we all know, Biden is the intellect of the Democratic Party – kind of a grin with a body behind it.’ Then Eastwood says he has never thought that it was a good idea for attorneys to be President, telling the audience, ‘They’re always Devil’s advocating this, and bifurcating this and bifurcating that,’ subsequently suggesting that ‘maybe a stellar businessman’ would be a better choice – totally overlooking the fact that Romney has a law degree. After that, Clint goes on to tell the empty chair that ‘it’s time to step down, but you can still use the plane. Maybe a smaller one, not that big gas guzzler you use when you’re going around to colleges talking about student loans,’ followed by another argument with the chair, something along the lines of, ‘Sorry, I can’t do that to myself, either,’ after which Eastwood tells the audience ‘We own this country. Politicians are employees of ours. You’re the best in the world and when somebody does not do the job, we got to let them go,’ accompanied by a cut throat gesture. Oh, by the way, do you suppose anyone watching Eastwood might interpret that move as an incitement to assassinate President Obama?”
“Interesting you should ask,” Czerny replied. “Actually, less than five percent of the voters we interviewed who saw the speech construed Eastwood’s gesture as a threat to the President.”
“How about the conclusion, then?” I inquired. “I’m referring, of course, to the part where Eastwood says, ‘We don’t have to be mental masochists and vote for somebody that we don’t even really want,’ then leads the audience in a chant of ‘Go ahead, make my day,’ which is, after all what Eastwood’s character says right before he shoots a man at the finale of Dirty Harry, the movie that made the .44 magnum handgun famous. What about that?”
“Again, only a tiny percentage of viewers saw ‘Make My Day’ as a threat,” Czerny related, “probably because Eastwood did it in reaction to a Republican delegate in the audience yelling, ‘Say “Make my Day!”’ at him while he was talking to the empty chair.”
“Interesting. What other statistics did your staff collect on Eastwood’s speech?” I asked as I began handing out burgers to a line of children which had formed during our conversation, each standing there expectantly with an open bun in hand. “How did it play with women voters, for instance?”
“Nineteen percent of women voters,” Czerny revealed, “still think Eastwood’s so sexy, it doesn’t matter what he says, just as long as it sounds like he’s saying it to them. On the other hand, only six percent – which is about one third of them – said Eastwood’s speech makes them more likely to vote for Mitt Romney.”
“Then who do the other thirteen percent want for President?” I wondered.
“Clint Eastwood,” Czerny dryly stated.
“And how about the remaining eighty-one percent of women voters who saw the speech?” I continued.
“Forty percent,” Czerny informed me, “or just under half of them – said they thought Clint Eastwood was sexier than the empty chair. The rest said they thought that the Barack Obama who wasn’t there – and which, consequently, they were required to imagine on their own – was much sexier than Clint Eastwood; and of those, about three quarters of them also said they thought their imaginary Obama won the argument.”
“How about male voters?” I prodded.
“In general,” Czerny told me, “they didn’t get the empty chair thing at all. Thirty-nine percent suggested that Eastwood should have substituted an Obama cardboard cutout, and twenty-three percent said Eastwood should have sat down in the chair with a Barack Obama dummy on his knee and done a ventriloquist act instead. Only fifteen percent – all of whom informed our interviewers in one manner or another that they were familiar with Sergio Leone and/or spaghetti Westerns – said that they understood what Eastwood was trying to do with the empty chair; and of them, only one in eight said they thought he did a convincing job.”
“And what kind of reaction did you find,” I queried, “among African American voters?”
“Well…” Czerny slowly intoned, “of the ten thousand randomly selected individuals contacted for our survey since last Thursday, one thousand six hundred and twelve of them self-identified as African Americans. None of them, however, actually watched the speech. But after they learned from our survey researchers that Clint Eastwood had gotten up on the stage at the Republican National Convention and picked a fight with an empty chair, nine hundred and seventy eight, or sixty-one percent, expressed an avid interest in viewing the video.”
“How about the Hispanic community’s reaction?” I asked.
“Of the survey respondents who self-identified as Hispanic and watched the speech,” Czerny said, “forty seven percent said it was hilarious; and of those, roughly half said it was the funniest thing they had ever seen a gringo do. Of the remaining fifty-three percent who took it seriously, one in five was outraged and concerned about negative effects on the Romney campaign, while approximately four in five were absolutely delighted because they’re Democrats – of those, one in seven stated that it was a manifestation of their prayers to Jesus, the Virgin of Guadalupe, or both.”
“So how were the other reactions to… shall we say… Eastwood’s apparent mental state?” I probed.
“Twenty-four percent of the voters aged 35 and up who watched the speech,” Czerny noted, “thought Eastwood was drunk. Twenty-one percent concluded he must have stopped taking his anti-psychotic medication. Another thirteen percent figured he was high on prescription drugs, about evenly split between those who attributed his antics to side effects and those who blamed intentional abuse. And seven percent,” he continued, lowering his voice so the children could not overhear, “said it was obviously a Democrat conspiracy and somebody had slipped Eastwood a whopping dose of LSD.”
“Well,” I shrugged, “any of those could explain him swapping insults with an empty chair. Some better than others, of course. Didn’t anyone say they thought maybe Eastwood has simply turned into a senile old coot?”
“Yep,” Czerny confirmed. “Nine percent said they believed that’s what it was.”
“Leaving twenty-six percent,” I calculated, “who thought what?”
“That Eastwood’s behavior was… ah… a very clever, insightful and entertaining performance,” Czerny sighed. “Very few of those folks live in zip codes located on the coasts or urban areas, though, and, of course, I’m paraphrasing what they said, since their typical responses tended to contain primarily words consisting of only one syllable. Of those, twelve percent, or slightly less than half, did, however, wonder how Obama managed to make himself invisible, and of that twelve percent, roughly a third of them speculated that UFO and/or alien technology might be involved.”
“So, what about the voters under 35?” I asked
“Oh yeah – that,” Czerny shook his head and grimaced. “In the 18 to 34 demographic, of the thirty-seven percent who recognized the RNC speaker arguing with an empty chair as Clint Eastwood, only thirty-two percent could name a television show or motion picture he had been in or directed, and the vast majority of those were either Grand Torino or episodes of Mrs. Eastwood and Company. Only twenty-one percent could correctly identify ‘Make My Day’ as a phrase from a motion picture and of them, only one in three knew the title of that motion picture was Dirty Harry, and only one in five knew that Clint Eastwood was, in fact, the actor in the starring role. Otherwise, sixty-three percent of the voters aged between 18 and 34 who watched the speech had no idea who that crazy old guy was, much less why he was talking to a chair.”
With that, Czerny pointed at the grill. “Say, is that antelope porterhouse steak over there ready, by any chance?”
“It is,” I smiled, “if you like your antelope medium rare.”
“That would be just fine,” Czerny assured me, “accompanied by a baked potato topped with chived creme fraiche and some of your grilled asparagus with roasted red bell peppers and toasted pine nuts.”
“Sure,” I replied. “Want some morels, black trumpets, chanterelles and shallots in a cabernet sauvignon reduction on the side?”