Paul Newman is dead.* Clint Eastwood lives...

Remember Walt Kowalski?
The working-class white helping his immigrant neighbors help themselves, with a leg up, a safe and fair playing field, and a loan of the tools needed to get started on the job(s)?

Not handouts.
Not lowering standards.
Not bitter resentment against working whites.

Not the embrace, as his children had done, of a skewed and deadly status quo that permitted them to personally benefit, then hide their eyes from the damage systematically being done the country, Walt's home community ...

If you haven't seen it, you ought to rent it.

If you've lived, or you're living it, you might understand Eastwood's endorsement **:

“Now more than ever do we need Governor Romney. I’m going to be voting for him…”

Eastwood also added to the room full of Romney backers that the presidential hopeful would restore “a decent tax system that we need badly… so that there’s a fairness and people are not pitted against one another as who’s paying taxes and who isn’t.”

Or,
who's breeding and feeding their children on another man's daily work, children that naturally will need special education, nevermind a morning breakfast, to meet their needs of a basic functional education.  Standards slip for everyone.

When education is scorned, when violence enters the classrooms, when excuses are permitted ("my boy just can't sit still, keep his hands to himself for hours at a time"), standards fall.

When you lose the school districts  ("F" schools with low test scores; only the motivated individuals learning), property values fall.  Can you get out?  Where will you go?  Will the representational boundaries simply be redrawn to artificially empower the (former) minorities, who apparently could not compete electorally, in more than one district, without the continual artificial help? 

(The idea being to spread out the "minority" domination by keeping just enough of the white population captured essentially;  if through relocation they begin to regain political power in another district, simply redraw the boundaries so there is continued "minority" representation -- from the likes of say, Jesse Jackson Jr. -- in the Congressional districts.  It stinks when it's deliberately skewed against whites, just like it stinks when it's redrawn to deliberately skew against other numerical minorities.)

In short,
will the rules once again change in the middle of the game, so that the sacrifices one made to prepare himself and his children will be discounted, in order to artifically empower preferred others, who have grown fat and powerful themselves off the workingman's efforts and tax redistribution that pays for another man's  childbirth bills, daily food needs, and shelter for his women and children.


When will the liberal elites begin to personally pay -- in terms of mass displacement, loss of schools (though the physical structures still stand) and community decline via the sudden, almost violent, destability that the anti-poverty policies and government finance interventions of the past decades have wrought?

We can pretend, as many sociologists and pundits prefer, it's simply a loss of discipline and values in working-class whites.  Poor choices. 

Not running away, apparently, early enough from a stable community in fear of what the future collectively holds.  But the losses are there for those who remain.

No denying.

------------------------------
* For Maureen Dowd.

**

Reuters reporter Sam Youngman made a reference to a Super Bowl ad about Detroit starring Eastwood, which at the time stirred speculation he might be supporting President Barack Obama.

"Is this your second act of half time in America endorsing Romney," asked Youngman, to which Eastwood replied, "Maybe."