How Dirty Harry Turned Commie

I picked this piece up via Cursor.

Frank Rich writes in How Dirty Harry Turned Commie

... Rush Limbaugh used his radio megaphone to inveigh against the "liberal propaganda" of "Million Dollar Baby," in which Mr. Eastwood plays a crusty old fight trainer who takes on a fledgling "girl" boxer (Hilary Swank) desperate to be a champ. Mr. Limbaugh charged that the film was a subversively encoded endorsement of euthanasia, and the usual gang of ayotallahs chimed in. ...

"What do you have to give these people to make them happy?" Mr. Eastwood asked when I phoned to get his reaction to his new status as a radical leftist. He is baffled that those "who expound from the right on American values" could reject a movie about a heroine who is "willing to pull herself up by the bootstraps, to work hard and persevere no matter what" to realize her dream. "That all sounds like Americana to me, like something out of Wendell Willkie," he says. "And the villains in the movie include people who are participating in welfare fraud."

What Clint Eastwood has not realised yet is that American Values now include blind obedience to power, and unquestioning support for whatever crimes are committed by the government. These "values" were not in the movie so Mr. Eastwood is now anti-American.

... My own experience is that knowing the ultimate direction of "Million Dollar Baby" - an organic development that in no way resembles a plot trick like that in "The Sixth Sense" - only deepened my second viewing of it.

Here is what so scandalously intrudes in the final third of Mr. Eastwood's movie: real life. A character we love - and we love all three principals, including the narrator, an old boxing hand played by Morgan Freeman - ends up in the hospital with a spinal-cord injury and wants to die. Whether that wish will be granted, and if so, how, is the question that confronts not just the leading characters but also a young and orthodox Roman Catholic priest (Brian F. O'Byrne). The script, adapted by Paul Haggis from stories by F. X. Toole, has a resolution, as it must. But the movie has a powerful afterlife precisely because it is not an endorsement of any position on assisted suicide - or, for that matter, of any position on the disabled, as some disability-rights advocates have charged in a separate protest. ...

Emphasis Mine

This is another view on what I commented on earlier in Piss on Pity. What worries me is the comment above - an organic development. Maybe for a fully-abled person, to have a disability means that it is natural for them to wish to die. It is not disability that causes these thoughts of suicide - it is the callousness of other fully-abled people that drives one to this end. This intolerance for imperfection (in thought, in deed, in appearance, in body) feeds off the insecurity of those pursuing it. These people resent every breath one takes, every sip one drinks, every morsel one eats - it is as if one is taking directly from their mouths. They think that if there were no imperfect people, then the world would be perfect.

Having read this other opinion about the movie, I am going yo have to see the movie and make up my own mind.