SHOOTING FROM THE LIP
Trump has spent the last week offending almost everyone. And that’s exactly why his fans love him
MAYBE we’ve been calling millennials by the wrong name. Maybe Clint Eastwood is right. Maybe they’re just a “pussy” generation. So Generation Xhas given way to Generation P.
Asked by Esquire magazine whether Donald Trump had borrowed his trademark killer scowl, the 86-year-old Eastwood upped the stakes by suggesting the two had more than that in common.
“He’s onto something, because secretly everybody’s getting tired of political correctness,” Eastwood said in the September edition of the magazine. “That’s the kiss-ass generation we’re in right now. We’re really in a pussy generation.
“Everybody’s walking on eggshells. We see people accusing people of being racist and all kinds of stuff. When I grew up, those things weren’t called racist. And then when I did ‘Gran Torino,’ even my associate said, ‘This is a really good script, but it’s politically incorrect.’ And I said, ‘Good. Let me read it tonight.’ The next morning, I came in and I threw it on his desk and I said, ‘We’re starting this immediately.’ ”
Eastwood pinpoints what may be the principal attraction of Trump: that he seems to be the only person in public life who is willing to speak frankly, even if some are offended. You don’t have to agree with everything that Trump says — you don’t have to agree with anything Trump says — to respect his candor.
“What Trump is onto is he’s just saying what’s on his mind,” Eastwood continued, adding, “I haven’t endorsed anybody. I haven’t talked to Trump. I haven’t talked to anybody. You know, he’s a racist now because he’s talked about this judge. And yeah, it’s a dumb thing to say. I mean, to predicate your opinion on the fact that the guy was born to Mexican parents or something. He’s said a lot of dumb things. So have all of them. Both sides. But everybody — the press and everybody’s going, ‘Oh, well, that’s racist,’ and they’re making a big hoodoo out of it. Just f---ing get over it. It’s a sad time in history.”
Practically every time Trump opens his mouth, there’s a mass outbreak of pearl- clutching. Can you believe he said that? Everybody have a heart attack, he made a joke about a screaming baby!
Generation X, the generation that had political correctness beaten into it at college, is now in charge of huge swathes of the media. Generation P, which is even more easily offended, is rising to positions of influence. Together they’ve brought to the nation the campus mindset of going completely bonkers over random remarks — even if meant in jest — deemed insensitive to one group or another.
Just as Eastwood’s comments were being published, the chairman of a major advertising company, Kevin Roberts of Saatchi & Saatchi, lost his job for saying women don’t occupy as many leadership roles as men because they don’t have the same “vertical ambition,” for saying that a prominent advocate for gender balance in advertising, Cindy Gallop, was exaggerating the extent of the problem to raise her own profile and for other remarks along the same lines.
Never mind that it takes all of two seconds to locate a Harvard Business School study (written by three women!) that supports Roberts (Just Google “compared to men, women view professional advancement as equally attainable, but less desirable.”) As is always the case, the P.C. shock troops showed little interest in arguing the issues. They simply demanded Roberts’ head on a platter, and got it.
These days a Nobel laureate (Tim Hunt) can lose his job for making a joke about women overreacting to criticism, a Twitter user (Milo Yiannopoulos) can be permanently banned from the service for razzing an actress and the co-founder of Mozilla (Brendan Eich) can be chased out of his own company for having held the same position on gay marriage that Barack Obama had at the time.
The establishment media thinks political correctness is either a good thing or no big deal. The public doesn’t agree. Seventy-one percent of Americans think political correctness is a problem today, whereas only 10 percent disagree, according to a Rasmussen poll released last August.
A president is not the commissar of culture, but as the face of America, he or she sets a tone. Seeing Trump giving the back of his hand to P.C. orthodoxy provides his supporters with the same frisson of energy that President Obama delivered by invoking hope and change.
Trump fans are willing to forgive his being crass because they can see the underlying value in expanding the boundaries of what we’re allowed to talk about in public.
That he’s still within striking distance of Hillary Clinton (and held a small lead as recently as two weeks ago) is an indication that dozens of supposedly campaign-ending instances of political incorrectness weren’t seen that way by the public.
Trump might not have gotten this far if it hadn’t been for political correctness creating an ideal environment for him. He’s like the lightning bolt that struck the rotten, dry old wood. You can’t have a forest fire without both of them.