The New Mean America
I can pinpoint the exact moment America turned mean. Of course, we always had many pockets of extreme meanness — Harriet Beecher Stowe didn’t make-up Simon Legree. Slavery and disenfranchisement of people of color and women made fertile ground for the deployment of differential power. We began with inexcusable flaws: the United States Constitution allowed for slavery and the undervaluing of the humanity of enslaved people as well as the exiling of women from the political process. But those flaws, though immoral and heinous, do not equate to the idea of meanness as an admirable trait or a marker for masculinity.
In 1971 when Clint Eastwood snarled, “Do you feel lucky, punk?” in Dirty Harry, American boys began imitating him, and that was game, set, match. He reinforced the idea with “Go ahead, make my day,” in 1983’s Sudden Impact. For many after that masculinity in America was mean and swaggering. Masculinity became sadistic. Eastwood is still around with the ideology that made him rich and powerful. His support went to Trump because the rest of us, in his words, are a bunch of pussies, including many of his own sex. “Make my day,” and die seems a good descriptor of the administration’s prevailing ethos because for those of us who don’t have health care that may just be what we go ahead and do. Only a pussy would complain and only a pussy would care.
His example displaced those of the earnest Henry Fonda, the righteous Gregory Peck and the dependable John Wayne. Perhaps Wayne is the best case in point. Before Eastwood’s juggernaut, he represented the extreme pole of masculinity — silent, rural, and physical. His horse and his fists were his companions in a world he was born to keep order in. In his most iconic role in The Searchers he does display extreme racism with his hatred of “The Commanch,” but the film critiques his bigotry, and it’s not an essential feature of the feisty cowboy who wants to do good. (John Wayne’s own public persona and his ongoing involvement with justifying the Vietnam War showed him to be ultra-conservative and certainly wrong-headed, but not disrespectful and arrogant.)
In 1967 The Graduate introduced a new vision of masculinity and films of the late sixties suggested a more nuanced take on hyper-masculinity. Sure, Butch and Sundance were thieves, but they were funny, too, and good friends. John Wayne’s Rooster Cogburn was self-parody, and Clint Eastwood sang in the musical Paint Your Wagon. Just as the United States began seeing itself through anti-heroes and ethnic heroes, Harry arrived in the nick of time to restore the true Anglo-Saxon hero, only this time he came as a mean killer.
It’s challenging to reconcile the director of Letters from Iwo Jima with the strutting, snarling misanthrope who castigates his fellow Americans for having sensitivities toward the lives of others, but the meaner Eastwood’s characters are, the more iconic they become.
In a world in which meanness is a positive value being called a deplorable is a compliment, particularly to Anglo-Saxon males. The very things that most of us find despicable, and even heinous — racism, misogyny, extreme jingoism, prejudice, the pussy grabbing, the tax evasion, the despotism, even the charlatanism and criminality of the current president — evoke admiration. He’s mean, and that’s how they like him. They admire predators, and they revere the mixture of corporate greed and self-serving instincts that seek to devour the carcass of America and leave us only the bones.
Let’s reappropriate Harry’s words. Go ahead, make my day: be empathetic; be compassionate; be just. Resist.
