By Kevin D. Williamson
Sunday, January 03, 2021
Oh, Hillary Hayward-Thomas!
First, a word of sincere thanks: It is an absolute relief
to be writing about a Hillary who is not Herself, last seen scrounging around
the metaphorical trash-heaps of our nation’s hideous capital like some kind of
political hobo hunting after an imaginary can of beef stew. This
Hillary is going to be a lot more fun, for exactly two minutes.
Hillary, now “Hilaria,” Baldwin, née Hayward-Thomas of
the Boston Hayward-Thomases, is the social-media hate object du jour, having
used a partly invented biography, an entirely invented accent, and perhaps a
bit of cosmetic derring-do to pass herself off as a Mallorca-born Spaniard,
when she is in fact the Boston-born daughter of a Harvard professor and a
Georgetown-educated businessman-lawyer, a family with pre-Revolutionary roots
in New England. Mrs. Baldwin recently was profiled in Latina magazine
(which describes itself as “100 percent Latina”) but turns out to be about as
much of a Latina as John Quincy Adams. Her stepdaughter Ireland Baldwin
recently undertook a ritual public apology for describing Mrs. Baldwin as — in
the voguish terminology of the moment — “Latinx.”
One sympathizes.
Really. That’s not a set-up for a joke. Who among us has
not wished, at times, to be something other than what we are? In its healthy
form, that impulse produces ambition; in its poisonous form, it produces
ingratitude, frustration, and dishonesty.
One does not sympathize without limit: Mrs. Baldwin’s
escapades express a very familiar kind of rich-kid ennui, one that I observed
from time to time living near the campus of Haverford College, where Mrs.
Baldwin’s father received his undergraduate education before proceeding to
Georgetown Law. Haverford is part of “the Main Line,” one of the last of the
old-money, blue-blood WASP enclaves, although the society of Dodo Hamilton and
Thacher Longstreth, of Dressage at Devon and the Radnor Hunt, already had been
in decline for more than a generation when I worked in that part of the world
some 20 years ago.
Back then I knew a fair number of trust-funders in their
late 20s and early 30s, intelligent and interesting but often listless people
who didn’t know what they paid in rent for their apartments or what an airplane
ticket cost, because someone else took care of those kinds of things. Their
families had abandoned the old WASP culture of purposeful civic engagement,
and, worse, they also had failed to satisfy the one iron law of the American
aristocracy: the conservation of capital across generations. So they ended up
having enough money to get by without regular work but lacking the kinds of
substantial incomes and ambitions that would support a career of a
nonremunerative kind. They were almost all embarrassed to be idle young people
living off of a family allowance, and so they invented businesses for
themselves, generally without customers or products, or else discovered other
notional occupations that did not take up too much time or involve reporting to
someone.
If the desire to be other than what one is tempts the
idle rich, it is no less tempting for the scrambling poor and the mediocre
middle. And that can sometimes work out brilliantly: Tupac Shakur wasn’t a hard
man from the streets — he was an effeminate theater kid who studied ballet at
the Baltimore School for the Arts. His “thug life” persona was entirely
invented.
And you’ll be shocked to learn that John Wayne was
neither a war hero nor a cowboy.
(Nor Genghis
Khan.)
Sometimes, a persona is forced on a public figure:
Leonard Nimoy wasn’t an especially intellectual man, but at the height of his
fame his views were sought out on all sorts of public issues, because people
thought that he was, in some ineffable way, actually Spock. Sometimes, the
force comes from within: Many of you will remember Madonna’s unfortunate
British-accent period.
Sometimes, leaning on the alter ego is purely commercial:
“I’m not a doctor, but I play one on TV.”
The invented persona is part of the celebrity package, or
at least it was for many years before the advent of our current ghastly
social-media-driven popular culture, that horrifying digital panopticon whose
inmates believe that they will cease to exist if they cease to be looked at, in
which the liberty of egotism becomes the tyranny of self-consciousness. Many
luminous careers of the past would not stand up to today’s close scrutiny: Rock
Hudson, John Kennedy (or Bobby or Teddy), John Lennon, Hunter S. Thompson.
Ralph Lifshitz of the Bronx became Ralph Lauren for a reason.
Mrs. Baldwin, by occupation a yoga instructor, is a
creature of the shadow world of pseudo-celebrity. In her case, she possesses derivative
celebrity thanks to her husband, Alec Baldwin, who is a genuine movie star of the
old school. She is a celebrity by marriage, which is something like having a
trust fund of celebrity. She has made a great deal out of it. She married
Baldwin in 2012, and in 2013 she put out an exercise video, @Home with
Hilaria Baldwin: Fit Mommy-to-Be Prenatal Yoga, and was written up in Us
Weekly and People. She published a self-help book in 2016 and got a
notice in Vanity Fair.
Mrs. Baldwin’s career strategy was not really all that
different from that of young Elizabeth Warren, who inflicted self-help books on
the reading public (All Your Worth: The Ultimate Lifetime Money Plan)
and misrepresented her ancestry — Cherokee cheekbones! — in an attempt to build
a reputation and make herself seem more interesting than she is. But Warren got
started some years before smartphones were ubiquitous and social media had
displaced reality for so many people, and she wasn’t married to a movie star.
Mrs. Baldwin is not the first Hillary we’ve heard do
a corny fake accent.
Alec Baldwin is, we have reason to believe, not quite the
charming man in private life he is in public. But his celebrity was not built
on being a good man, or any particular kind of man, in his private life. His
celebrity is built on performing, and he is one of the best in the business.
The strange pseudocelebrity of social media is an invitation for everyone to
become a performer, but not everyone has the kind of chops that Baldwin has.
(Most professional actors don’t.) Social media can be a platform for genuinely
gifted performers who take to a digital platform rather than a traditional
stage (all those great guitarists on YouTube); but it also involves users in
the worst aspects of celebrity culture, without imposing the entry fee of
talent and only rarely offering the rewards that go along with it. The would-be
celebrities of social media chase the paparazzi instead of being chased by them
— that’s the sign of our times.
The desire for fame corrupts as much as the desire for
power, in part because, in our culture, fame is power, something that
shouldn’t need too much explaining in a country that for the past four years
has had a game-show host for a president. That is a trend that is likely to get
worse: In no small part because of her 143 million Instagram followers, Taylor
Swift’s political views are considerably more influential in American life than
are those of, say, Senator Ben Sasse or Bill Kristol. Kanye West has 30 million
Twitter followers; the chairman of the government department at Harvard has
1,801.
What’s disheartening is not that the chairman of the
government department at Harvard has such a small social-media footprint — it
is that he has any at all. But the pull is strong.
It’s not for nothing that the social-media hit song of
our time takes the form of an imperative: “Dance, Monkey!”
The rise of digital culture is a part of what we call,
for lack of a better word, “globalization.” Globalization has produced enormous
benefits for Americans and for the rest of the world, particularly for the
world’s poor. But it also imposes costs. We Americans do not move as often as
we used to (or as often as we should) for work, but the global elites who set
the cultural tone and dominate the institutions are very footloose, or at least
they were before the plague. Americans attend church less often than we used to
and are less religious than we once were; we get married later in life and have
children later in life, and we are more likely to forgo marriage and children
altogether than we once were. Changes in the nature of business firms make the
once-mighty corporations increasingly ad hoc collections of labor, intellectual
property, and conventional capital, with the average corporate lifespan in
decline and likely to keep going lower — meaning that people inclined to work
for one company for all of their lives have fewer options for doing so. It is a
great time to be creative and adventurous, and a tough time to be a risk-averse
localist. That has left many Americans, and many people around the world, with
a void at the center: The things that once gave people a sense of meaning,
relation, and fixedness are either diminished, eliminated entirely, or
reconfigured beyond recognition. And so they go looking for substitutes.
The longing after a sense of significance that causes
Hillary Hayward-Thomas to reinvent herself as the more exotic “Hilaria” is the
same force that powers social-media hate mobs and shallow hashtag activism,
cults like QAnon and the anti-vaxxers, and the relatively new but almost
ubiquitous phenomenon of partisanship as a form of identity politics.
Every society worships something, and we have decided —
disastrously — on ourselves.
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