Sunday, January 3, 2021

‘Hilaria’ Baldwin and the Allure of the Invented Persona

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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