Rust Never Sleeps

To distract myself tonight I turned on television... couldn't help checking in on this new Alec Baldwin reality show.  It's been so over-advertised-- teased, excerpted, meme'd and photo-bombed on various platforms, and yet we New Yorkers and NYC expats love seeing our city on camera, in nearly any context. Urban selfies.  

Years ago I double dated with Mr. and Mrs. Baldwin-- the first one, Kim.  We were at a long table in a trendy Tribeca restaurant with a few intimate friends.  They sat at opposite ends; it was obvious from their awkward interaction that either they'd not quite recovered from a pre-dinner argument or maybe they'd interrupted an intimate evening to come out.  Something was off.  I sat by her-- acknowledged one of the most beautiful women in cinema, at that moment.  Honestly, I couldn't stop looking at her face, with little make-up and ungroomed hair; she kept wrapping herself in a sort of shawl, as though she wanted to disappear.  He, on the other hand, was chatty and charming-- funny, using that voice actors learn to project confidence. Like a pointed tone.  

For some reason, that night, I was on the cusp of a new relationship and the tension depressed me. They were so familiar-- it was like a movie and I was somehow part of it. I couldn't shake her emotional shadow... which turned out to be sort of an omen.  I was a new mother and they were maybe not even quite married.

Seeing his aging, subdued persona tonight was surprising. His wife, obviously, was the host and star of the Baldwin show, despite the fact that her raison d'être is her famous husband. I realize he needs a PR renovation... and who wants to put the father of seven small children in prison for eighteen months? But Hilaria with her affectations and fake Spanish accent which she attempted to explain in the minutes I watched, well... I'm not a customer. Like most reality shows since the Loud Family era, it seemed scripted and planned and awkward and cringeworthy most of the time.  Yes, the kids are cute... and the looming cloud of the shooting incident which was clearly devastating was compelling... but it seemed somehow inappropriate for her to speak of it.  The family 'angle' is surely the most convincing plea for innocence... and as always, it is moot to keep on punishing for a tragic incident... but someone died.  The boundary between film and real life was crossed, and there is no happy ending here.  I felt manipulated by his terrible appearance, her perfect little stagey mother-moments. I can only wonder how the family of the deceased will view this.  I've had quite enough and it didn't sway me one way or the other.  At filming, the jury was still out.  Now that he's been found innocent, is there any relief? 

Lately I've been trying to find a way to honor my deceased father whose war record and heroism left him with lifetime psychological scars.  It was often tough simply being around him; as a father he was short-tempered and preoccupied. The more I read about Normandy, the Battle of the Bulge, his difficult path through the war, the more I wonder that he functioned at all.  The killings, the bloodshed, the constant danger and massive destruction. He witnessed not just mutilation and death but stepped on it, parachuted down into it... experienced wounds and undoubtedly overwhelming, unrelenting anxiety.

Yet here is a Hollywood-handsome man-- with a wonderful supportive birth family, and a brood of his own here... maybe a difficult older daughter from the first marriage... but here he is in this perfect Hamptons paradise... accused of manslaughter... from what.. playing with real guns on a fake set? Is PTSD  the same diagnosis as psychiatrists assign lifetime war veterans who were ordered to shoot at maybe innocent people who were simply on the opposite side, and therefore merited death?  Kill or be killed is a conundrum and the very crux of war.

What is wrong with all of us, we humans who settle international vendettas with death and violence... who make statements by destroying monuments, who negotiate with mutilated flesh and the killing of children? There are people just blocks away shooting one another, threatening... angry. It might be more compelling to have us consider these consequences.  Comparatively, Alec is just a broken man.  The spinning narrative is how can we punish seven innocent children by removing their father and leaving them to bear the stigma of this tragedy?  It doesn't seem productive.  Nor does this reality show which hopefully will not annoy the family of Halyna Hutchins with its stilted portrayal of the privileged, happy life she will never have.

A weapon of destruction is not safe in any hands... it's not the manufacturers, it's the people.  It's us.  There is film-- a movie-- acting.. and then there are guns.  It seemed the 'Rust' set was more of a horrifying reality show than anything we will see from the Baldwins this season.

On Point

It's closing in on a year since Matthew Perry's death... and the trail of blame unravels: the unscrupulous doctors and enablers, the greedy parasites who attach themselves to celebrities who are emotionally disabled.  I've seen this-- rockstars who struggle, actors between successes hanging out in bars, drinking themselves into a kind of crippled charisma.  It has an appeal, this state of manic hilarity, of self-effacing confessional deprecations and desperate nightly dramas of carousing.  While some pick up their career and dust themselves off, all too often this ends in tragedy.  It's very hard to measure quantities of alcohol or meds when one is just intent on blurring out the demons.  The failure we fear is too often simply the fear of failure. It's complicated.

Still, in the very sensitive aftermath of a tragic death, there is unprecedented sympathy.  Where were these mourners and criers during crisis?  Matthew was not in an appealing state, and I've argued in vain (pun intended) with addicts and junkies at the midnight hour when nothing but a needle makes any sense.  But after the fact, as a sort of clearance for the victim, there is this blame game... sometimes valid, sometimes a consolation narrative.  Where life insurance is concerned, there is a financial reason to morph a suicide into an accident or a manslaughter scenario.

And then there is the chain reaction-- those who are on a kind of edge and are so derailed by the sad ending of someone who struggled, as they do-- especially when that person was a 'someone' whom they admired.  If this man couldn't manage, one thinks, how can a loser like me ever get clean or sober or 'happy'-- that evasive human nirvana?

Granted, there was a hideous sequence of heinous people who profited from the pseudo-medical art of prescription peddling, especially common among well-known people who want to keep their vices within a more private circle.  But it helps to exonerate the deceased and attribute his errors to an evil little machine of individuals which took away his choices.  The consistent popularity of Law and Order and varieties of Dateline exemplifies our human obsession with blame-attribution.  We want justice for the innocent, and we often want the guilty ones we love to seem less guilty. The dead cannot defend themselves; we must unravel and discover.  

While I find mass shootings (and all random shootings) horrifying, I'm not sure the gun makers are culpable.  For someone strangled with a silk tie, well-- nearly anything in the wrong hands can be transformed into a means of killing.  Of course guns are made for this... and what is wrong with our culture and all past cultures which decided that wounding human bodies was a way of solving massive conflicts? All guns aside, it was God Himself who weaponized rain in Genesis. 'The fire next time,' He warned, in the traditional spiritual which inspired the James Baldwin title.  This always frightened me, like a premonition of firearms, nuclear war.  Summer wildfires are terrifying enough.

We named my very first band The Blame.  Blame it on rock and roll; something like that.  Blame and guilt go hand in hand in adolescence, in bad relationships, in family dynamics.  We grow up pointing fingers... even the dog gets involved as the fallguy-- eating homework, breaking expensive china, etc.  And then there was the pandemic-- the ultimate culprit in stalemating lives, creativity, social connections.  It caused depression, isolation... it had no end, no boundary... for many of my peers this became a new way of living. Come to think of it, was not the great flood of Genesis the ultimate cancel-culture event?  

August always brings with it a kind of nostalgic regret-- the end of summer is sad for children; they must go back to the grind of school, and leave the freedom of unscheduled days and jacket-less afternoons.  We adults carry this with us... the cusp of September seems always harsh for me... as though I no longer deserve a day of respite, of freedom.  We are grown ups-- we must take responsibility for our failures and lapses. Jews have a day of atonement; I wonder how many in Israel will be thinking about the Palestinians whose children will be vaccinated against polio, but destroyed as a people. It's downright ironic, this priority to cease warfare just to insure that these babies in the line of fire are inoculated. 

Not to deny the back-and-forth between our political candidates. Leaders are generally held responsible for the ills of their regime, but the blame game goes far beyond culpability in an election year. Finger pointing and accusations far eclipse the vulnerable reality of policies which are only as solid as theory or hindsight witnesses. We are all to blame for sins of omission, for selfishness, for failing to reach out and empathize.  Too often the burden gets transferred and passed down to the one who has least power to defend.  Like the tastelessly loud guitarists who blame their sound crew-- the venue-- acoustics-- or band members for volume issues. All we have are tools of prevention, and our own hearts and minds which will hopefully embrace some kind of universal truth and move this world forward into not just a foreseeable but an accountable future.