Hey, Alec
Posted on 10/25/2021 2:39:38 AM PDT by Kaslin
Alec Baldwin got to play his dream role last week, and unfortunately for an innocent woman, it was a method-acting version of Ted Kennedy. Now, you note that I am mocking a guy whose probable gross negligence killed a lady and maimed a man, and this raises an important question – do we really want to live in a world where our reaction to a tragedy caused by an enemy is not sorrow and compassion but mockery?
It doesn’t matter what we want. We do live in such a world, in large part due to the likes of Alec Baldwin. Besides his scuzzy abuse of the people – notably women – in his orbit, he is a particularly loathsome social media presence, and as a result, conservatives are gleefully resurrecting his old tweets about guns and his wish for them to be used on his many, many enemies in the wake of his horrible act. There are many, many such tweets. I am not a believer in karma and do not fear it, but I do try to keep a respectful distance from irony.
Note that arguments that this somehow hurts the families of the victims are weak – “My beloved relative has died – I shall seek solace on Twitter” seems far-fetched. Moreover, the families might be mortified to see people taking apart the architect of their pain? Doubtful. If anything, the practical effect of slamming Six Gun Alec is making people think, “Gosh, better not play with firearms lest people on Twitter roast me.”
But there is a legit question of how we should respond to this. There have been two different reactions among those on our general side of the fight to the reactions to Alec Baldwin’s fall from, well, not exactly grace. One is to recoil with horror at the accident and assert that this is a time when we should offer our thoughts and prayers for the victims and for Baldwin, who one would hope is devastated by what he has done. Nice people tend to have this reaction, those who want to live in a more genteel world than we do. I sympathize, in that I would like to live in such a world. I would also like a unicorn pony.
Then there was the opposite reaction, in which our folks ran up the score, skewering the gun control zealot’s failure to zealously control his gun. This is playing by the new rules of gladiatorial combat in the cultural coliseum. Those burned out on the lies and calumny we are bombarded with daily tend to go this way; they are angry, and they are more than willing to give Alec a good, hard dose of his own medicine. That’s certainly my inclination. A tweet for a tweet, so to speak.
So, I sympathize with both options, and I cannot get upset at people for choosing one over the other. If you want to go gentle, cool, and if you want to go hard, okay. After all, the rules are the rules, and there can only be one set of them. In the world I would want to live in, we would all be at Option A, whispering a silent prayer for the hurting – and I did. But this is not the world we live in, and none of us are under any moral obligation to pretend we do. This is a world where the rule is that you take an opening in the enemy’s line and you drive a couple divisions hard right through it.
Alec Baldwin is a bad person, but more than that, he is a bad person who hates us with a mortality rate thanks to his hypocrisy. And now he is vulnerable, and the rules say he is fair game – his rules. Is it significant that this amoral, leftist, Trumpophobic gun grabber has personally executed more mass shootings than any Christian conservative Trump-loving NRA member? Not in any kind of intellectual sense – it’s just a thing that happened – but it makes a helluva meme.
The argument for being nice is that 1) we should live the way we wish to live, that is, model the way we want the world regardless of how the world actually is and set the example; 2) we are better than that; and 3) Jesus tells us to. Of these, No. 3 is the most compelling – the hardest part of Christianity is loving your enemies. Perhaps you can do that even as you tweet that the fifth rule of gun safety is never give Alec Baldwin a gun. Jesus wasn’t a pinko hippie; he confronted and told hard truths. And despite the injunction to turn the other cheek, Christians are not pacifists. After all, many soldiers are Christian and they kill their enemies, so you must be able to be a Christian and point out through biting sarcasm that Alec Baldwin is awful too.
As for us modeling to the world, does that ever work? Has us not matching punch for punch with the cultural left ever made them hold up and think, “Gosh, the conservatives’ refusal to stoop to my level has made me rethink this whole pursuit of power thing – I will forgo it and return to the norms of yesteryear”? Of course not. George W. Bush famously remained above the fray and they only stopped vivisecting him when he joined them in vivisecting us.
As for us being “better than that,” I’ll take being just as bad as that and not being a cultural serf over the David French position, which is the converse.
The argument for Option B is that you can’t go back to the past paradigm where you didn’t hit ‘em when they were down without punishing them for hitting us when we were down. Pain is the teacher. Of course, this assumes a paradigm not in evidence; we were never quite that pristine. I remember that within days of the Challenger accident, cruel jokes circulated across campus. Gallows humor has always existed, and there’s no reason it shouldn’t – maybe we’d just prefer a scenario where we acknowledge it’s appalling even as we laugh in spite of ourselves.
The premise of Option B is that we have to fight fire with fire, though that analogy always puzzled me. Rather, in combat you use the necessary weapons. Nazis and communists used guys with guns to attack us; we used guys with guns to kill them. Was there a moral difference, since everybody used guns, asks the moral illiterate? Yes. The other guys were Nazis and communists, and shooting them was a moral imperative because they were Nazis and communists. Our mean tweets are in the service of light, theirs are on the side of darkness.
To not engage on the terms that reality has set before you is to accept defeat. You might not like the rules, but there they are. In a society that has made the rule that you pummel your opponent when he is down, to not play by the rule is to unilaterally disarm.
Those nice folks on our side don’t see it that way – they see it as embracing decency. But lately, “decency” has translated as submission and, not being Bulwark staffers, we’re not into that scene.
The bad guys want us to be “decent” too – but not because of decency but because it makes their lives easier when we are hamstrung in response to their cultural aggression. We’re not supposed to make jokes about Alec Baldwin’s idiocy for the same reason we’re not supposed to make jokes about men pretending to be women pretending to be admirals. Humor, especially mean humor, is subversive. The leftist joke stasi wants the potential for subversion off the table.
Think of it as the Cold War. Option B is mutually assured destruction – if you launch social media cruelty at our misfortune, you will pay in spades, so don’t. Option A is unilateral disarmament. Nice people on our side want us to disarm to make us better people; our enemies want us to disarm to make us better targets.
So do as you wish about Alec Baldwin. If you want to remain in the light and offer your condolences, do so. Like I said, I’ve muttered a prayer for him and his victims because my faith tells me to do so and loving only your friends is kind of a meaningless exercise. I don’t like Alec Baldwin (though I really enjoy his acting). He’s awful. So I’m also going to talk bad about him and his hypocrisy and negligence.
Those are the rules we’re playing by today. I didn’t make the rules. I don’t like them. I’m even willing to return to the old ones, once enough pain has been inflicted to teach the necessary lesson about changing the rules. But I am not willing to play by a different set of rules that limits me at the expense of my opponents.
That’s the conundrum. I want a nice world, but I can’t get it just by being nice. So leftists, let me know when you want to change the new rules back. Until then, they are in effect.
If I had the capacity to write, I would have much less to say.
Awesome piece by Kurt!!!!
Worth a full read.
Thanks for posting.
Very well thought and clearly stated! Kudos!
Kurt failed to list how many rules of gun handling were broken before the fatal shot was fired by the doofus who should have know better, but obviously chose to ignore the rules. I’ll bet the doofus is still ignorant of the rules or the reason for them.
A somewhat interesting message has been diluted in impact, because his article is about four times longer than was required.
Hey, Alec
The problem with Alec Baldwin is he is a bully. How many rules of basic gun safety were violated? Any private in the US Army has better ability to manage a gun than Baldwin. Baldwin lectures us, yet we are far more proficient at common sense than Baldwin ? Baldwin deserves ridicule not for shooting someone, but for his hubris.
Alec Baldwin, like all leftwing communists, is above the laws & rules.
He can do anything he wants...even kill someone and get away with it.
Guns dont kill people,Alec Baldwin kills people,,,
He fights to destroy everything I (and maybe you) believe in and attacked Trump viciously every day for years. I harbor plenty of ill will towards him.
The doofus Baldwin thinks government laws are enough to make us safe.
Liberal scum like Baldwin excuse personal responsibility when it is convenient and use it as a weapon when it is convenient (Trump’s mean tweets)
So, I have ZERO compassion for filth like Baldwin. He advocates for gun control while not taking any personal responsibility when he is handed a gun.
Of course, everyone feels for the family of the woman murdered and the man who was injured. We are pro-life.
To Baldwin, he just carried out a late term abortion like he would have advocated for Trump and any one of us.
” skewering the gun control zealot’s failure to zealously control his gun”
There ya go
“Baldwin never did anything to hurt me or anyone I know, so I have no ill will against him”
Oh, please. Every dollar he’s donated to liberal causes and candidates has hurt you and people you know. Every time he opens his pie hole to say certain good politicians should be harmed hurts you and people you know.
Rush put these 1525 words into ONE SENTENCE: “The aggressor sets the rules”. Kurt does an excellent job of explaining what happens when you don’t abide by that.
I remember posting here a few years ago that since basically all minorities are now tribal in this country, it is time for whites to do the same - unify (other than the freaks, that is). One person responded to me that he would not stoop that low...and so we don’t, and guess what - the Left is able to roll right over us, and even steal a US presidential election.
Anti-gun....but Balwin writes a western aka a shoot'm up...about a man who accidently kills someone....yes with a G U N.
“...especially when he doesn’t really mean that much to me in the first place.”
He may mean more to you when he leads the charge to take away your guns (or turn you into a felon if you try to keep them), and has the judges needed to do so.
(and no, the Second Amendment only means something to Republican judge, and then only sometimes).
Today’s conservatives are like the minute men of old. We just want to be left alone. If we are dragged into a scuffle, yeah we fight but the very instant the fighting is over, we are gone back to our own farms and families.
Liberals will fight day and night for their entire lives for something and bring the whole country down if they don’t get their way.
Conservatives need to re-think their aloofness and get some skin in the game.
I agree. I loathe the guy, but feel sorry for him. Yes, his arrogance most likely contributed to his making mistakes in this incident, but I can’t help but feel some compassion. Innocent people were hurt and killed in this tragedy.
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