I don’t know why I did it, but I read Alec Baldwin’s long farewell to public life. I don’t really have strong opinions about the man, and I don’t much care about his public life. I heard the recording he made seven years ago when he said unforgivable things to his daughter. I’ve read about various run-ins he’s had over the years with the paparazzi. I noticed the recent brouhaha over anti-gay (some merely alleged) remarks he made that cost him his job at MSNBC and his contract with Capital One. Sometimes his behavior has disgusted me, and other times I’ve felt sympathetic.
I don’t think he’s a homophobe, although he has learned the hard way that calling people “cocksuckers” and “little queen” will make people think you have a bad attitude about gays. I enjoyed the hit-show 30 Rock, although I’ve probably seen no more than a half dozen episodes. Off the top of my head, I can’t even name more than two movies Baldwin has been in, although I have enjoyed some of them. Over the years, he’s done a great job of hosting Saturday Night Live. I thought he was great interviewer during his brief stint with MSNBC.
In short, Alec Baldwin just doesn’t mean that much to me. I understood and agreed with most of what he wrote in his farewell piece, but I was put off by how much he made it about himself and his career and the axes he wants to grind. I don’t give a shit about why his Broadway play failed. for example. I don’t care about the shortcomings of the management at NBC, for another.
By all means, he should defend himself and point out his many philanthropic activities. It’s good that he reached out to a Hawaiian LGBT group to better understand how his actions have been hurtful. I certainly understand that he feels unfairly maligned and that an incomplete and unbalanced picture of him has been promulgated. But he still comes off as a complete narcissist.
If he were less self-consumed, he’d realize that the best course of action is to continue to do the good things and to stop using anti-gay epithets to denounce people who are critical or irritate him.
Maligning New York was unnecessary, but if he can’t handle the cameras everywhere, maybe he should move to a gated-community in L.A. If it causes him fewer problems and less stress for his family, that might be the right solution for him.
Overall, I’m not going to say that he shouldn’t care what people think of him, but he should learn to care a lot less than he does. He managed in this piece to cement my impression that he’s a dick even though I didn’t disagree with most of what he had to say.
No one likes the “I’m-taking-my-ball-and-going-home” editorial, and this piece didn’t succeed where others have failed.