Let's Hope Somebody Learns From Actor's Mistake

Every day, I try to remember to thank God for life's many blessings. It's a checklist of sorts:

Health is good.

Check.

Kids are great.

Check.

Never married Alec Baldwin.

Check.

Check.

Check.

Whew. Some blessings just bring on a boatload of gratitude.

Actor Alec Baldwin is getting lots of attention this week, but I suspect it's not the kind he was hoping for after he left a vicious voicemail message attacking his 11-year-old daughter for not answering their pre-arranged call. He packed a lot of vitriol into two minutes and 19 seconds of voicemail, and it's a message that his daughter surely must be trying to forget. That seems unlikely now that millions of Americans have been able to hear her father's rant, too, on an endless loop of broadcasts on TV, radio and the Internet.

Over and over again, we got to hear Baldwin rant with breathtaking hostility toward his daughter, Ireland. His rage, peppered with profanity, was all her fault, he said. He told her he didn't care that she was a child, and after adding that she didn't have "the brains or the decency of a human being," he ended his poor-Daddy diatribe with this snarling indictment: "You're a rude, thoughtless little pig."

The first time I heard that phone message, my own eyes started to sting. It's the rare woman who can't conjure up memories up her own pre-adolescent insecurities -- my own list could wrap around the Earth and end in a bow -- and at that moment I wanted to hit the delete button before Baldwin's daughter could check her calls. An irrational response, of course, but you don't call any female a pig and expect logic to reign.

How is it that we even know about Baldwin's nasty voicemail message? Well, an unidentified somebody leaked it to the celebrity Web blog TMZ.com. Baldwin's ex-wife, actress Kim Basinger, denies that she is that somebody, but suspicions abound in the wake of their publicly contentious custody battle that has raged since 2002. After five years of their high-flying dirty laundry, the only obvious finding of fact is that an innocent child has become a pawn in yet another ugly divorce.

Now is as good a time as any to remind all you fathers of young daughters just what power you have.

The studies are done, the findings conclusive: No matter how much a mother praises her daughter, if a father regularly tells her that she is beautiful, smart and precious, she is far more likely to believe it. In fact, she'll not only believe you, she'll look to marry a man just like you. That ought to scare Baldwin into anger management real fast.

Baldwin apologized for his tirade on his Web site. "I'm sorry, as everyone who knows me is aware, for losing my temper with my child," he wrote. "I have been driven to the edge by parental alienation for many years now."

Someone needs to point out that steering wheel in Baldwin's hands and remind him that he's the one who took the U-turn off the high road. No matter how cruel an ex-wife gets -- and some ex-wives rival the spawn of Satan when it comes to cruelty -- no one can drive a father to badger and belittle his little girl. He makes that trip on his own.

As for his public apology, it's wasted on us. We aren't the victims here, and the real victim needs a lot of mending. As my mother used to warn, some things you say you can't take back. Your tongue lets loose, and from then on you're performing triage, hoping that someday the bleeding will stop.

Of course, the public does have a role here. We have a long memory when it comes to other people's stumbles, which means there's an 11-year-old girl named Ireland who will never be allowed to forget what her father said to her just as she was toeing the cliff of adolescence. That plunge leaves a teenaged girl's confidence bruised and battered with the best of leaps. It's a lot harder when you're pushed by the guy who's supposed to catch you on the way down.

We don't know what, if anything, Baldwin has learned from his mistake. But maybe, just maybe, some other fathers will take the lesson to heart.

Connie Schultz is a Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist for The Plain Dealer and author of two books from Random House, "Life Happens" and " … And His Lovely Wife." To find out more about Connie Schultz (cschultz@plaind.com), and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, please visit the Creators Syndicate Web page at www.creators.com.
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