Interesting thoughts from Alexandra Petri about Alec Baldwin and the new-media culture -- and not just about AB

Tina Fey and Elaine Stritch were on hand to cheer on 30 Rock cohort Alec Baldwin when he was one of the Tisch School for the Arts's 2009 honorees for achievements and philanthropy in the arts.

by Ken

"Attention, everyone! Alec Baldwin is leaving the public eye!" So Alexandra Petri began her washingtonpost.com blogpost this morning, "The most important paragraph from Alec Baldwin’s farewell to public life."

There is, of course, an enormously rich vein of humor to be mined from AB's harrumphing declarations of intent to turn his back on: (a) New York and (b) the public eye, and everyone and his brother, sister, nieces, and nephews is accepting the invitation to jump sarcastic on poor Alec.

It would be unfair to ask washingtonpost.com's Alexandra, whose brief after all is to find the humorous side of the news to decline such an invitation, and she has some excellent fun with AB's New York Magazine "Vulture" as-told-to blogpost "Good-bye, Public Life." Like her note that AB has "a great deal to say -- about paparazzi, new media, his experience losing a TV show on MSNBC and being called out for homophobia, and whose fault all of it was (spoiler: not his!)."


BEFORE GOING ON, LET ME SAY TWO THINGS

(1) In the matter of X v. Paparazzi, where X = Just About Anybody on the Planet, in the absence of pretty clear evidence to the contrary I rule by default in favor of X. I don't want to see any of their damned pictures, so let them not claim that they do any of what they do on behalf of my right to see.

(2) I'm a huge Alec Baldwin fan. For the record, I wasn't always. In his earlier supposed hot-leading-man career, I didn't buy him. But over time I warmed to him, and in his years as Jack Donaghy on 30 Rock he gave us one of the stupendous characters to be created on a stage or screen of any size. I felt that way as the series unfolded, and felt it more strongly in years of watching syndicated reruns, and now that i've started working my way through my Amazon Gold Box Deal complete 30 Rock DVDs I can say it that much more emphatically. Every scene he played with every actor he worked with on the show is magic, and I couldn't begin to find words to describe all the years of his collaboration with Tiny Fey as Liz Lemon or the incandescence of the episodes he did with Elaine Stritch as the one and only Colleen Donaghy. (I hope it goes without saying that the collaboration included the brilliant 30 Rock writers. Clearly the writers were in turn further inspired by their discovery of what their stars could do.)

But AB's professional accomplishments of course have nothing to do with either his personal qualities or the rightness or wrongness of his pronouncements. So let's get back to that.


ALEXANDRA IS ACTUALLY RATHER GENTLE
IN CHIDING ALEC'S "NEVER AGAIN" STANCE

"I'm aware that it's ironic that I'm making this case in the media, but this is the last time I'm going to talk about my personal life in an American publication ever again.'

-- Alec Baldwin, in the NYM "Vulture" blog interview

To which Alexandra says:

Yes. Nothing says, 'Farewell, news media! I hate and distrust you with a blinding passion! I am a recluse now!' like 'Here I am on your newsstands, large as life!' "Goodbye,' in print, is so seldom "goodbye.' I say this as someone who has written possibly a dozen pieces announcing that I Will Never Write About Sarah Palin Again (And Next Time There Will Be No Next Time). This only goes one way.

MORE IMPORTANTLY, ALEXANDRA CREDITS
ALEC WITH MAKING "ONE INTERESTING POINT"

Alexandra directs us to this paragraph from the interview:

In the New Media culture, anything good you do is tossed in a pit, and you are measured by who you are on your worst day. What's the Boy Scout code? Trustworthy. Loyal. Helpful. Friendly. Courteous. Kind. Obedient. Cheerful. Thrifty. Brave. Clean. Reverent. I might be all of those things, at certain moments. But people suspect that whatever good you do, you are faking. You're that guy. You're that guy that says this.

She allows that she's "not sure Baldwin's own case is the best illustration of this principle (see Ta-Nehisi Coates in the Atlantic for an eloquent explanation of why)," but allows as well that "it still has a ring of truth to it."

Boy Scout values aside, is this what we're dealing with now? What are we judged by?

F. Scott Fitzgerald called personality 'a series of successful gestures.' And with new media, every single gesture has to be successful. One false move, one ill-thought remark, one Weiner picture, and -- there you go. It's always the worst story that floats to the top of your Google results. Even if you're a public figure like Baldwin, with years of goodwill at your back.

Alexandra goes on to make the point more forcefull with reference to people other than AB, on whom this fact of new-media life "comes to bear most painfully," since AB "was famous already" and "will be fine."

But many people want to be famous. Few people actually are, at least not the level of famous that most of us would consider to be worth the trouble. Famous is always 1,000 more twitter followers than you've got, just as drunk is one more drink than you've had. Still, everyone's living in public, never far from a camera or a smartphone. And all our unsuccessful gestures get caught -- in print, on tape, where they can stick.

The low point always pops back up. And there's countless examples of people saying one lousy thing -- be it racist, sexist, homophobic, too-soon-after-a-tragedy, or just downright ugly in another way -- and being shamed to the point where that will be the only thing that ever appears when you Google them, and some will even lose their jobs. Maybe some of these people are awful all the time. But you don't need a pattern. One -- as long as it sticks in the craw -- is all you need. And it's not just ugly remarks that can be your lowest point. Look at what happens with nude pictures or whenever it surfaces that a teacher had a porn career. No matter how hard you dig yourself out, you're that guy.

And not all of us can stuff a magazine article at the top of our search results.

Nice, Alexandra.

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