Clint versus Spike: I’m with Mookie.

I’ve got to start by admitting that I’m a serious fan of cowboy movies.

That being said, the worst thing about the public dispute between Spike Lee and Clint Eastwood, is that, as a black man, it makes me question my support for William Munny. I never thought this day would come.

William Munny was the character Clint played in the classic cowboy flick, “The Unforgiven.” Munny was the reformed, drunken, gunslinger and assassin who had finally met the right woman, had two kids, and left “the life” to move out to a ranch, far away from “town,” to raise his family.

You always knew William Munny had the potential to “go absolutely off,” at any time during the movie, but, with his new family, he had found a reason to have self-control, and he simply didn’t do so.

My kind of cowboy.

What really convinced me that Munny was one of the best cowboys who ever “lived," was that he also had “Ned” as his best friend. Ned was played by Morgan Freeman, who had also stopped “terrorizing the West” when Munny did, and who had settled down with his own wife, on a small farm.

I knew Clint, who also directed the movie, was “the man” when the film depicted a scene in which Munny confronted a bunch of vigilantes, led by “Little Bill” (Gene Hackman), who had killed Ned and who had put his body in an open casket, on public display, outside the town saloon.

That, of course, was “it” for William Munny. He walked into the saloon, “wasted” Little Bill, and about eight or nine others, and the rest of the vigilantes ran for their lives, out into the rain.

When asked why he had shot the unarmed owner of the saloon, first, William Munny famously said, “Maybe he should have armed himself before he put my friend, Ned, in a box outside his establishment.”

Right then and there, I thought I’d be a Clint Eastwood fan for life.

But, then, recently, Eastwood got involved in trying to defend himself against Spike’s charges that his two World War II – themed movies had virtually excluded the important role played by African Americans during the War.

Clint crossed the line for me – permanently – when he implied to reporters that Spike Lee, somehow, didn’t have the authority to disagree with him, and that it would have been historically inaccurate to include black soldiers in a movie about Iwo Jima.

In fact, Clint was quoted as saying about Spike: “A guy like him should shut his face.”

“A guy like him?” What exactly does THAT mean?

It was fair, then, in my opinion, for Spike to respond by saying to reporters about Clint: “First of all, he’s not my father and we’re not on a plantation, either.”

It was, of course, “on,” at that point, and it still, apparently is.

The issue for me is that, in this society, even a well-meaning member of the general population can be insensitive to the impact on black people when images about us are distorted in movies or history books and when our true participation in the establishment of virtually everything that has taken place in this country is casually overlooked.

Spike clearly understands that for far too many people in this country, what they see on the movie screen is an important part of their reality. And, there is virtually no part of America’s history in which black people did not participate.

There are millions of people in the U.S. who believe that Cleopatra of Egypt was a European woman and that Egypt, somehow, is not in Africa, because Elizabeth Taylor was cast to play that role in the movie and all of the other “leading Egyptians” in the film were also European or European–American actors.

There are still millions of Americans who believe that Hannibal, who brought elephants across the Alps, out of an African country, Carthage, to attack Rome, was a great European general, because the character was played by old-school actor Victor Mature.

And, even worse, I remember, as a very young man, going to the old “Booker Movie Theatre,” in the 1000 block of Fairmount Avenue, and watching the old Tarzan movie re-runs that they seemed to show at least once a month in that old North Philadelphia movie house, as part of their Saturday matinees.

I remember to my great embarrassment, now, how every one of us in that all-black movie audience would stand and cheer at the top of our lungs as Tarzan, the European "King of the Jungle,” turned the lions, elephants, rhinos, and apes against the indigenous Africans, beat entire black tribes into submission, single-handedly, and made them all look simple, savage and dishonest, in the process.

I remember feeling that, perhaps, the worst thing a person could be on earth was an “African native.” We all felt that way. Given a choice between Tarzan and all the black people in Africa, we chose Tarzan – every single week.

That’s how those movies were written and directed. That’s what we believed.

So, maybe Clint needs to “check himself” before he starts believing that Spike is over-reacting about the true role that blacks played in World War II.

Maybe like the overwhelming majority of “educated” Americans, Clint was never taught in high school or university history courses that more than 5,000 black soldiers fought on the Colonial side during the Revolutionary War and that many thousands more also fought on the British side during the same war, because the British promised to free the slaves in this country, if they won.

Maybe like most Americans, Clint never learned that more than 186,000 black men served in the Union army during the Civil War.

Maybe he doesn’t know how sensitive we are about the fact that they don’t teach in schools that more than 350,000 African Americans served in the American army during World War I.

Maybe he doesn’t realize that we’re still sensitive about the fact that people have somehow forgotten that 2.5 million African Americans registered for military service during World War II and that one million actually served, even though the U.S. army was still segregated until 1948.

Maybe he doesn’t realize just how anxious we are to see Spike Lee’s new movie, “Miracle at St Anna,” because it will finally depict the heroic role played by black soldiers who served in Italy during World War II.

Yeah, Clint, even though I used to be a big William Munny fan and I probably watched “The Unforgiven” about nine times, this time I have to “pull a Mookie” on you.

You remember the character Mookie; he was played by Spike, himself, in his classic film, “Do the Right Thing.”

At the end of the film, faced with the choice of supporting his employer, an Italian pizza shop owner, or a justifiably angry black community that had turned against the store’s owner, Mookie casually walked over in the middle of the standoff, and threw the first, large, metal trash can through the pizza shop’s window.

That’s how I feel about the “Clint-Spike thing.”

I’m with Spike. 100 percent. Let’s start seeing and hearing the whole truth about the black experience – even in the movies.



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