Editorials/Budgetary Chaos/Clint Eastwood, Auteur
Tyrrell, R. Emmett Jr.
EDITORIALS BUDGETARY CHAOS It was in 1974 that Congress passed the Congressional Budget and Impoundment Control Act, vouchsafing the instrumentalities for finally getting a grip on the budget....
...What we have here is a Congress abounding with Warren Gamaliel Har-dings or worse...
...Well, what in tarnation does a Gothic cathedral have to do with the old West...
...It grew to 23 percent of GNP under Jimmy Carter and to a colossal 25 percent under the arctic Reagan Administration...
...He wants Congress to grant him the line-item veto, allowing him to scotch specific items in bloated appropriations bills rather than accept them, fat and all...
...Rather it is the spending of incompetents...
...Eastwood recently did something quite daring...
...Since then, alas, spending has fattened from 1974's $267 billion to 1985's $959 billion...
...Is it possible that the sensible Clint Eastwood-actor, producer, director- has become susceptible to the moonshine of these frauds...
...But there is no sunshine...
...These can be gorgeous creatures thrilling to the eye, especially if one is not concerned whether they win, place, or show...
...He made Pale Rider, a Western...
...It was an insult to the Indian, insensitive to the aspirations of General Antonio Lopez Santa Ana (1794-1876), and it stereotyped cows...
...But in these slumbrous summer days, as they tour their districts, will any of them take responsibility for it...
...Not only can our Hardings not say no, but into their august chambers they often bring their own dubious schemes...
...Yet, unlike them, history has passed the horse by...
...Throughout history, the horse has frequently served mankind loyally and far more usefully than the dog or the inscrutable cat...
...In all of Washington, the only elected official eager and competent to oversee the budget is the President...
...All that darkness merely put me in mind of the grim interior of a Manhattan celebrity joint like Mortimer's, places whose interiors have to be darkened lest the high-toned clientele glimpse the food congealed on its plates...
...Pale Rider offers the struggle between good and evil...
...It solemnly passes low-priority bills early in its session and holds high-priority bills for later when pressure has built to pass them whether or not they are in breach of budgetary resolutions...
...Finally, the Western is usually refreshingly straightforward...
...Obviously, the Congressional Budget and Impoundment Control Act of 1974 failed to get a grip on the budget...
...I suggest that all the liberals and conservatives on the hill would prosper if the President were granted this simple tool...
...The fact is that the Western has always been a lot of fun, and that is about all one should ever expect from the popular arts...
...The Western reminds us of his previous eminence, and some of Hollywood's horses have not been bad actors, at least when compared with the rest of the cast...
...Congress did give the President a limited version of the line-item veto in its 1974 Budget Act...
...Ronald Reagan's 1981 tax cuts merely brought federal taxes down to the level of a decade ago, 19 percent of the Gross National Product...
...New tools are needed to cut spending and to render someone responsible to the voters...
...He is an egotist, incapable of sitting back and appreciating someone else's work for what it is...
...Think of it: The present deficit is practically equal to the entire 1974 budget...
...All those trees and all that dust make some people sneeze...
...Adapted from RET's weekly Washington Post column syndicated by King Features...
...CLINT EASTWOOD., A UTEUR If there is a more obvious poseur practicing his devious arts in the Republic today than the critic of the popular arts I am unaware of him, and I have agents stationed everywhere...
...Actually the highfalutin pop critic is usually a dreadful show-off...
...We are told that the late Harding could not say no to the dubious schemes of his cronies...
...Then as the year passes and the money runs out, it quietly approves a budget-busting supplemental appropriation...
...Only the taxes became law...
...The budget grows because Congress spends...
...Clearly spending is the problem, and to get federal spending back to 20 percent of GNP Congress would have to cut more than $120 billion over and above its present promised cuts...
...It grew at an inflation-adjusted rate of 17.5 percent during the reign of the gentle Jimmy Carter, and it grew at the same rate during the first term of the heartless Ronald Reagan...
...Unfortunately, the pretentious pop critic is not without his influence, and when a popular entertainer falls under the critic's spell the results can be unedifying...
...Even in this year of lamentation over deficits, federal spending will probably exceed the fiscal 1985 budget resolution by more than $20 billion...
...Only another fraud needs their certification, and past behavior suggests that Eastwood is no fraud...
...Eastwood errs again when he portrays the supernatural as being utterly humorless...
...Liberals could brag of their generosity...
...Pale Rider has great strengths...
...It is the kind of stuff snooty pop critics insist on if they are going to certify a popular entertainment as duly "serious...
...and usually even the anarchists in the audience end up pulling for the good to triumph in the sunshine and open air of the great West...
...The gods laugh, at least occasionally, as when they peer down on the Homo sapiens disporting below...
...Moreover, approximately one-fourth of that corpulent sum is unfunded...
...In fact the movie is somber to the point of being depressing...
...conservatives could brag of their frugality...
...There is action, romance, and Eastwood brings us plenty of yokels...
...Some in Congress charge that deficits are a consequence of Ronald Reagan's 1981 tax cuts...
...There is good and there is evil...
...Meanwhile, at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue someone would be in charge: King Ronald I, the natural consequence of democratic leaders who will not lead...
...The inescapable fact of the matter is that growing spending is the root cause of the budget's blowsiness, and no one in Washington is in a proper position to be held accountable...
...For the past decade or so the Western was scorned by the critics, who often appraised it as too boyishly innocent and straightforward...
...Moreover, it was disdained for representing Yankee Manifest Destiny at its worst...
...Cognizant as we all are of the occasionally extraordinary strength of our many fine public servants on Capitol Hill, we can rest assured that all of them are duly distressed by this budgetary chaos...
...With deficits like this today and other equally gaudy deficits prophesied for the future those puny tax increases and budget cuts prescribed by our contemporary Jeffersons and Lincoins are true howlers...
...Well, Americans liked it anyway, as John Wayne proved to his dying days...
...Some say Eastwood did this to emphasize the struggle between good and evil, the pervasive darkness suggesting the hushed shadows of a Gothic cathedral...
...Yet all this gloom and symbolism goes too far...
...Like a true Western it is concerned with individual dignity and freedom...
...I fear he has...
...And he is at his most arsenious when he claims to be a sophisticate, that is to say when he covers a rock concert and brings in the contrapuntal Bach, or when he goes to the movies and returns babbling about auteurs...
...The budget grows under the reign of liberals and conservatives alike...
...It lumps pork barrel in with the necessities of government and hopes that the President will accept the bad with the good...
...Over the past five years Congress has outspent its own budget resolutions by an average of $28 billion yearly...
...Another of the Western's assets is the scenery...
...It underfunds new programs as well as old programs...
...The Western allows us to see its lovely purlieus without actually being there, for which many civilized people should be grateful...
...They seem to have forgotten that the following year he welcomed a tax increase with the understanding that he would be getting a two dollar spending cut for every dollar in new taxes...
...The critic of pop art spoils things for everyone, from high brow to low brow...
...The cuts were not made...
...Rather than scoffing at it or applauding it in terms that are relevant, he tries to hog the show by bringing in some elephantine theorizing utterly irrelevant to the popular piece of entertainment at hand but extremely useful in attracting attention...
...Congress is leaving a tab of some $222 billion for others to pick up, sometime, somehow...
...No one ever accused Harding of this sort of innovativeness...
...Among the Western's assets is that, along with actors and actresses, it usually features the noble horse...
...In those days, federal spending was at approximately 20 percent of GNP...
...Nor is this the spending of good Samaritans with big hearts...
Vol. 18 • October 1985 • No. 10
