Clint Eastwood - my hero??

Neil Armstrong

There he is – the true American hero, Neil Armstrong; just like Davy Crockett. They have to have heroes in America and one of my heroes, over there, has always been Clint Eastwood. One of the greatest American directors of all time. Yes, he's up there with John Ford, Howard Hawks and Stanley Kubrick.

But now what has he done? Made a fool of himself at the Republican National Convention; he decided to support Mitt Romney but instead of making a prepared speech he spoke off the cuff as if he were John F. Kennedy or Winston Churchill and he made a right hames of it; I saw the speech, he was talking to an empty chair under the pretence that he was telling Barack Obama a thing or two and he even used the expression 'Make my day.' It wasn't a clean speech it was mumbled and stuttered with short pauses and when he said the magical three words the whole crowd chanted it.
I didn't expect him to support anybody else, as he has always been a Republican like James Stewart and Gary Cooper, but at least he has worked with left leaning actors such as Sean Penn in Mystic River, which is a true masterpiece earning an Oscar for Penn, and he directed Million Dollar Baby which won an Oscar for Hilary Swank.
So he's no slouch when it comes to directing and he has made at least four classic westerns: High Plains Drifter, Pale Rider, The Outlaw Josey Wales and Unforgiven and he was a far better actor than John Wayne.
But that's what he should have stuck to instead of making, what has become known as the empty chair speech. Sounds more like the empty head speech to me.
Early Friday morning, a tweet from the president's official account responded with a photo showing the Commander in Chief sitting in a presidential chair and the line: "This seat's taken."
Well there we are the Pres got his own back.
But isn't it terrible when someone you really admire lets you down? Why didn't he just keep his mouth shut? And what is a hero in any case?
I suppose it's someone who is brave and risks their life; all my heroes have been brave for doing something that isn't dangerous. In the space race I think Yuri Gagarin was brave – he was the first man into space.
Anyone my age will know that the TV was full of space rockets being fired into space and falling off their perches or even climbing to a few feet then falling back, then one day a man actually got into a rocket and it took off and that man was Gagarin. Okay so they tried monkeys first but it was still a big thing – then Alan Shepherd went up.
By the time Neil Armstrong went up they had it to a tee; he actually had to land the pod with Buzz Aldrin shouting out technical data to him and when they landed it was Buzz who was a few feet behind when they stayed on the moon for that two hours or so but up in the sky was the forgotten man of the Apollo 11 flight, Michael Collins. He kept the Mother Ship ready for the 2 boys on the moon to return as he orbited around it.

Michael Collins of Ireland (Mícheál Ó Coileáin)

Of course Michael Collins wasn't the only hero with that name; the other Michael Collins (Mícheál Ó Coileáin) is a household name in Ireland as he was a revolutionary leader during the civil war; he was the first Minister for Finance in the Republic of Ireland and one of the members of the committee who negotiated The Treaty, which partitioned Ireland and is the cause of the recent Irish Troubles. Even this week there are riots in North Belfast.
When he travelled to London to meet the British politicians, and consequently signing the treaty, he knew he was signing his own death warrant too and was killed while exchanging rifle fire with ambushers on August 22^nd 1922, eight months after signing the Anglo Irish Treaty.
And among my other heroes is Roger Bannister.
But getting back to Neil Armstrong, who recently died, and the other space pioneers. When space travel was on the television nearly every day of the week, week after week and being fronted by men with tiny replicas of the space ships and pods, a lot of us became bored by the same pontifications of these pundits with their same boring technical descriptions of what was going on . It wasn't until some time later, when we saw the beautiful photographs in the Sunday Magazines, that we realised how spectacular the views were that Neil Armstrong and the other astronauts and cosmonauts were experiencing.
I think it was Carl Sagan who said they should have sent a poet into space and maybe then we could have appreciated its beauty at the time. Maybe they should have sent an actor too as Armstrong is supposed to have fluffed his line on landing; he says he said – That's one small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind. And of course we only heard – That's one small step for man...
Armstrong said he was misquoted and we missed the indefinite article. So maybe an actor would have made sure we heard the a – but then he would have been telling stories about his time at Birmingham Rep or summer stock, so just as well - and look what the other actor did; he spoke to an empty chair.