It has seemed for some time now that the world is hellbent on making campaigns of conversions -- not involving religion or philosophy, but making sure all normal and usual events are taken and converted into gibberish, transmuted into the surreal, then sprayed back at us like transmogrified clouds of pesticides.
Case in point: Clint Eastwood has come out for million dollar baby, Willard Romney, for President.
At first, I thought I'd accidentally tripped my bookmarked link for The Onion. I double-checked the page logos and address bar: Nope, the BBC.
Gravity did a squirrelly dip-and-dive just then, of the kind where, in getting a shock, there's a sudden impact -- the realization anything at all can happen, all physical laws repealed, events can come and go without explanation or reason.
* * * * *
The room dropped away. All of a sudden, I was Thelonius Monk, straight with no chaser, in a pink Cadillac, listening to Bird beat out the notes to some new tune called "White Hunter Black Heart," on the car radio, in the sizzling city heat.
I kept falling off all the bridges in Madison County, falling into the mystic rivers, all of my wet and multiple me's feeling like space cowboys: The stars fell on Henrietta, Casper -- a friendly ghost, seemed like -- and some of my me's.
My reassurances of sanity slipped: A swing band by the name of Kelley's Heroes introduced me to J. Edgar and Dave Brubeck: In his own sweet way, checking a baby grand, he was having trouble with the curve. They all helped me read letters from Iwo Jima, while I tried to dry-clean flags of our fathers.
Suddenly, I was blasting around town in a Gran Torino, shouting "Invictus! Invictus!" like Bronco Billy, Joe Kidd, and the outlaw, Josey Wales, all doing an escape from Alcatraz.
Then, even stranger: After an ambush at Cimarron Pass, I was trying to buy two mules for Sister Sara, over at the Eiger Sanction, a breezy and boisterous saloon, where eagles dare, over there, at the corner of Thunderbolt and Lightfoot.
Some mean drunk at the long bar was heavy into his cups, kept snarling and calling everyone "punk," like a high plains drifter on loco weed.
All this happened in a matter of seconds, like dreams go. Just as quick, the next second, it all stopped swirling around inside me at light speed, and I dropped out of warp...
* * * * *
... landing in the computer chair, hard, blinking real fast, racing through the story I was still scanning.
After a deep breath, I told myself reassuringly, "Maybe Clint just wanted ol' Mitt to be President of the Cayman Islands Offshoreman's League, or President of the Hypocrites Guild, or President of the Clueless Waffler's Consortium." Clearly, there had been some mistake.
I read it all again: Clint wanted Willard Romney to be President of the United States of America, and, as it used to be said, leader of the free world, to boot!
Talk about a true crime being in motion, about it being midnight in the garden of good and evil!
A rush of Romney's inappropriate, unpatriotic, dunderheaded, and borderline behaviors circling moral and legal ground, from the time of his youth to this very day... It instantly unspooled, all at once, in my mind: This bad reality film's take-up reel snapped, facts and information flashing, tons of water, under pressure, spewing from burst pipes.
I could feel my mind lurching and tripping forward, staggering and stumbling, searching for safe spots and grab-holds, in the rush and flow of fast-moving waters...
* * * * *
Later on, gobsmacked and winded -- after discarding speculations of early-onset dementia and a PR ruse for a new film -- I was forced to take Clint at his word. He was serious. He wanted Willard Mitt Romney as the President of us all, here in this pummeled and battered land.
If this was a gag, it really worked -- I had already done so, and was still choking, gasping for air.
To read Clint Eastwood's surreal opinion of Willard Romney's handsomeness, and how it applies to his being a governor or president:
