Has a chair ever made its fortune by closing businesses and exporting the jobs to China then taken its ill gotten gains and hidden them in off shore tax havens? Has a chair, or any of our inanimate cousins, ever run for and won a election by lying about every issue from closing Gitmo to health care for all to taxing the rich to...it's a long list? No, in fact a chair is the epitome of a truth-teller, it supports a sitting person [or curled up cat] just it promises. It never says, like politicians in every democracy do, that if you vote for 'it' you'll be able to eat all the ice-cream you want, and then sit on your butt watching TV all day and never put on an ounce. No, an inanimate object is smarter than that.
Thankfully Romney's advisers so trusted the iconic Clint Eastwood that unlike with other speakers, they did not conduct rehearsals or insist on a script or communicate guidelines for the style or format of his remarks. It was Clint's decision to use the chair as a prop at the last-minute. The prop person probably thought he was going to sit in it. Team Romney simply gave Clint a time limit and flashed a blinking red light that told him his time was up. He ignored both as he rambled on criticizing Obama for not closing the prison that has been holding unindicted detainees for years at Guantanamo (a clear violation of U.S. habeas corpus law and international law) among other things.
As Tom Robbins explained the division we imagine between ourselves and the inanimate is an illusion of our own making based on our limited concept of time. We define the animate, the living, as those things that move and change at a speed that our senses can register. An incorrect assumption in that not only do our cousins change and evolve externally although at rates outside our normal awareness, but internally - at the atomic level - they move, change and evolve at exactly the same rate we do. In fact, internally and microscopically we 'the animate' and they 'the inanimate' are indistinguishable.
Today those we chauvinistically call the inanimate are proud of their cousin the chair, as we all should be. It stood its ground with equanimity and in the end stood it alone on the Convention's stage and received the applause it deserved. Thanks, Clint, you made my day!
