If you were alone in a lift with POTUS, what would you ask him? At the Republican National Convention, Clint Eastwood came on stage to play a version of this game. Except that the Hollywood star formerly known as The Man With No Name (TMWNW, Spaghetti Westerns) didn’t actually ask a question of ‘invisible Obama’ (headline, Reuters). He said he was going to, then turned the phrase round to challenge the president’s record on unemployment. Referring to ‘the 23 million unemployed in this country’, the actor-director sounded short of breath. Was he choked by barely suppressed anger and sorrow, or just acting? Either way, in his cameo role he called into question the high level of emotion surrounding Obama’s election (‘Oprah was crying, even I was crying’), compared to the low grade attention doled out to the unemployed. Clint Eastwood is an old man now but he did not appear out of date. The eyes are set back further, weakening his famously unstinting gaze; his hair is un-seriously wispy and the perfect nose is just too damned perfect. But there’s still the grain of his voice and that fascinatingly implacable face – long and hard as the faces of Easter Island. When the camera panned round, however, to the RNC delegates applauding him, boy, were we thrown back in time? On the money, of the moment, yet TMWNW was addressing the past.