Searching for Harry Callahan
If there is a preoccupation that has slowly turned the Progressive Left and a good portion of the Classical Liberal base in the United States into raving lunatics for the past nine years it is the baffling reason a third of the country loves Donald Trump. There is the tired argument that they’re all racists (which is obviously in error considering his rising approval ratings from the non-white pockets of the country) and sexist (same with his increases in feminine approval). Likewise, they are mostly not college educated as if a college education indicates elevated intelligence (George W. Bush had a Harvard degree to quiet down).
I’ve read that our increase in political differences are less political and more cultural and I think there’s some traction in that idea. Then I caught this in Quentin Tarantino’s book:
“One of the most memorable tag lines for a modern movie at that time was the one that sold Dennis Hopper’s Easy Rider. “A man went looking for America, and he couldn’t find it anywhere.”
A great line, but it wasn’t true. If you responded to Hopper’s Billy the Kid or Fonda’s Captain America rather than the ugly rednecks in the cafe, you didn’t have to seek out representation. It was all over music, movies, TV, and magazines.
On the other hand, the generation that fought World War Two in the forties and bought homes in the suburbs in the fifties were the ones who went looking for their America and “couldn’t find it anywhere.”
What Richard Nixon called the “silent majority” were frightened.
Frightened of an America they didn’t recognize and a society they couldn’t understand.
Youth culture had taken over pop culture.
If you were under thirty-five, that was a good thing. But if you were older, maybe not.Many people back then watched the news in abject horror. Hippies, militant black power groups, killer cults that brainwashed suburban kids to drop acid and rise up and kill their parents, young men (the sons of veterans) burning their draft cards or fleeing to Canada, your children calling your policemen pigs, violent street crime, the emergence of the serial killer phenomenon, drug culture, free love, the nudity, violence, and profanity of the films of New Hollywood, Woodstock, Altamont, Stonewall, Cielo Drive. To many Americans it was a mosaic that scared the shit out of them.
This was the audience that Dirty Harry was made for.”
— Cinema Speculation by Quentin Tarantino https://a.co/fsI7Dh
The second decade of the 21st century is almost indistinguishable from the sixth decade of the 20th century—we are in the cycle of revolution, the hard push for progressive ideals in the face of generational rot, a very vocal segment of the kids are decidedly not alright and the McGovern rainbow coalition is swinging back, hellbent to flip the script on the hierarchies in place. Gaza is the new Vietnam, every broadcast and TikTok tells us the world is ending tomorrow, college kids openly hate America, and I saw a commercial on the Super Bowl that showed a woman shaving her pussy.
If you’re under thirty-five, this is a good thing. Those older simply feel left out and frustrated or acquiescent to buzz words they don’t fully understand but want to be on the right side of history so do their damnedest to use the correct pronouns and fly their flags of solidarity with the Maoist Revolution.
Nixon called them the Silent Majority in the early 70s. They could be called the same today. Older black folks who want more police in their neighborhoods. Hispanic folks who hate the idea of an open border and want you to stop putting an ‘x’ on the end of their ethnicity. Older white people who do not feel they are racist, older men who have never been predators, older people who are nothing but annoyed with the influencer economy.
This is the audience that Donald Trump was made for.
About Dirty Harry, Pauline Kael wrote that the film was "a stunningly well-made genre piece," but also "a deeply immoral movie." The film was "not about the actual San Francisco police force; it's about a right-wing fantasy of that police force as a group helplessly emasculated by unrealistic liberals... this action genre has always had a fascist potential, and it has finally surfaced."
It sparked debate over issues ranging from police brutality to victims' rights and the nature of law enforcement. At the 44th Academy Awards, feminists protested outside the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, holding up banners that displayed messages such as "Dirty Harry is a Rotten Pig."
Despite the outcry and the moralizing, Dirty Harry was the fourth highest grossing film of 1971.
Donald Trump is the 21st Century version of Harry Callahan—borderline racist, brutal in tactics, rogue against the system, sarcastic, and a direct response to a counterculture/pop culture shift that leaves generations in flux.
