The Empty Chair

Almost a decade ago, Clint Eastwood got up on stage at the Republican National Convention and spoke to an empty chair. Eastwood explained to the audience that the president was sitting in the empty chair. And then he addressed himself to the empty chair. It was weird. “So, so, Mr. President, how do you, how do you handle, how do you handle promises that you’ve made when you were running for election,” he said, and added, “and how do you handle, how do you handle it?”

I found the whole thing baffling. But some people, I’m told, really liked the speech. They “got it,” they reported. It had something to do with how Obama was hardly there at all. Eastwood remonstrated with the empty chair. “You’re getting as bad as Biden,” Eastwood said, then turned to the audience: “We all know Biden is the intellect of the Democratic Party. Just kind of a grin with a body behind it.”

Well, ouch. There he had a point.

I’ve been thinking about that idea of an empty chair a lot lately. When a pope dies in the Catholic Church, we say that the chair of Peter is vacant: sede vacante. There is even a group of cranks referred to as “sedevacantists.” They are a set of traditionalists who believe that there is no valid pope, and maybe there hasn’t been one since 1962. But now popes don’t die; they retire. We have more popes than chairs for them now.