Now that he's no longer speaker, Nunez addressed the subject head-on this week. "Everyone's done it like this," he told his interviewer. "The difference is there are some in politics who want to judge me in a certain manner. Because of the fact I am Mexican, they think I have to sleep under a cactus and eat from taco stands.
Really? Over the last 10 years, there have been six speakers of the Assembly. Three have been Latinos -- including Antonio Villaraigosa, the current mayor of Los Angeles -- two have been African Americans and one was a white male. None of them required the services of a Catalan translator or felt the need to hold meetings surrounded by aging barrels of Bordeaux. Nunez's attempt to attribute any objections about his thoroughly objectionable conduct to his ethnicity is a perverse moral reductionism -- a mirror image, in fact, of the sort of racist view that categorically denied a person's achievements because of his race.
People criticized Nunez's extravagance for a simple reason: They resent seeing public office used like a personal ATM, no matter what language their parents spoke at home. Moreover, they find this sort of conduct particularly hard to accept when the elected official comes out of the labor movement, as the former speaker proudly does, and belongs to a party that claims to represent the interests of working people.
Hypocrisy, it turns out, is colorblind. While Nunez's toss of the race card was transparent and self-serving, Lee's was both those things -- and something slightly nastier. The director was in Cannes, serving on one of the film festival's minor juries, when he took the opportunity to slam Clint Eastwood for the absence of African American characters in his critically acclaimed films on the bloodiest battle of World War II's Pacific campaign, "Flags of Our Fathers" and "Letters From Iwo Jima."
"He did two films about Iwo Jima back to back, and there was not one black soldier in both of those films," Lee said. "Many veterans, African Americans, who survived that war are upset at Clint Eastwood. In his vision of Iwo Jima, Negro soldiers did not exist. Simple as that. I have a different version."
You bet he does, which is why his next picture just happens to be the story of four soldiers serving in an all-black Army division in Italy. Controversy makes good publicity, and envy of Eastwood's success is an understandable, if not particularly admirable, trait.
