Clint Eastwood as Prophet

Elijah ascends to heaven in his chariot of fire.

Several commentators are amazed at the prescience of Clint Eastwood. He imagined Obama as an empty chair in his speech at the Democratic convention, and that is just how Obama came across to many at the first Presidential debate. Suddenly there are all kinds of cartoons, including a New Yorker cover, showing Obama as an empty chair behind the debate lectern. It rings true. Then Eastwood, in the same speech, described Joe Biden as “a grin with a body behind it,” and now everyone is commenting on Biden's constant smirking in the VP debate. It rings true.

So what is going on? Is Eastwood clairvoyant?

Yes and no. Eastwood is an artist. Artists have a special, and an especially close, relationship with the imagination.

And the contents of the imagination are not random or meaningless. The imagination is a window on the spirit world.

I'm not the first to say this. It's not just my idea. Thomas Aquinas said it, and it is taken as a given in most cultures. Welcome to the real world: the spirit world.

The character type who becomes an artist in our modern Western culture is the same character type who would have been a shaman in an earlier culture, or, in ancient Judea, a prophet. He can see things hidden to the visible world.

You want another example of artistic prophecy? Did you know that Jack Kerouac's On the Road, written in 1949, at one point imagines its antihero, Dean Moriarty, driving relentlessly toward New York City, as an "Arab" intent on blowing up its towers?

Not all artists speak with the voice of God. There are false prophets. That does not mean they cannot prophecy. We know there are many spirits, good and bad. Jim Morrison, for example, believed he was possessed by the ghost of an Indian killed in a traffic accident. Phil Ochs believed he was possessed by a person named John Train. Bob Dylan, I recently read somewhere, believed he was possessed throughout the Sixties by a spirit who coincidentally had the same name as he did, Robert Zimmerman. No kidding. You may not believe it, but the artists themselves did.

These spirits in any given case might be benevolent, or they might be mischievous, or they might be malicious. It seems as though the spirits who possess rock stars are generally on the shady side. But all artists have a “genius.” That is a spirit guide—same root as “genie.” The greatest artists, surely, have God as their guide. These are the true prophets.

Not sure about Eastwood. Could be.