Quote of the Day (Francis Fukuyama, on Anger, Inequality, and Disrespect)

“There are many people who are angry right now because they feel they’re not respected. They feel that people disregard them or look down on them. Capitalism is very good at fulfilling material desires, but it’s not so good as fulfilling the desire for others’ desires. It also produces a lot of inequality, and one of the problems with being poor is not only the lack of material resources but the problems it creates with regards to respect. If you’re poor, you’re not remarked upon. Politicians don’t pay attention.”—Stanford University political scientist Francis Fukuyama quoted by Cody Delistraty, “SOAPBOX: Rosamund Pike, Kaws and Francis Fukuyama on Desire,” WSJ. Magazine, Issue 126 (Spring 2021)

(The image accompanying this post, of Francis Fukuyama at Nexus Instituut, was taken Sept. 25, 2005, by Robert Goddyn.)

Quote of the Day (Adlai Stevenson, on ‘The Size of a Man’)

“You can tell the size of a man by the size of the thing that makes him mad.”—Illinois Governor, Democratic Presidential nominee, and U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Adlai Stevenson II (1900-1965), “Faith in Liberalism” (Address to the State Committee of the Liberal Party in New York City), Aug. 28, 1952

Quote of the Day (Charles Duhigg, on Why America Is Angry)

“One reason America is so angry is that anger works. When channeled by someone like [farmworkers union leader] Cesar Chavez, it can lift up the disadvantaged and reshape a nation. But its power is not reserved for the righteous. When less scrupulous leaders tap into our rage and use it for their own ends, the emotion can be turned against us, in ways large and small, often without us even realizing what is going on.”— Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Charles Duhigg, “The Real Roots of American Rage,” The Atlantic, January/February 2019 issue

Quote of the Day (William Shakespeare and John Fletcher, With Advice for a Hotheaded Leader)

"Heat not a furnace for your foe so hot

That it do singe yourself."—English playwrights William Shakespeare (1564-1616) and John Fletcher (1579–1625), Henry VIII (1613)

Boy, just when you think The Bard’s time came and went centuries ago and he doesn’t have anything to say to us, you come across something like this…

And these lines, from the Prologue to Henry VIII, may be even more pertinent to our present reality:

“I come no more to make you laugh: things now,

That bear a weighty and a serious brow,

Sad, high, and working, full of state and woe,

Such noble scenes as draw the eye to flow,

We now present. Those that can pity, here

May, if they think it well, let fall a tear;

The subject will deserve it.”

TV Quote of the Day (Groucho Marx, on Speaking When Angry)

“If you speak when angry, you’ll make the best speech you’ll ever regret.” — Groucho Marx, giving advice to contestants on his TV show “You Bet Your Life,” quoted in Eve Starr, “Inside TV” column, Greensboro (NC) Record, Nov. 3, 1954

Quote of the Day (Paul Rudnick, on Preschool Alec Baldwin)

“As Alec’s teacher, I can report that Alec pays careful attention to his personal cleanliness and grooming, especially regarding his hair, which he has repeatedly asked me to touch. For October’s show-and-tell, Alec brought in what he referred to as his ‘steely blue eyes.’ He stood in front of the entire class in silence for three minutes, and then asked, in his already surprisingly deep and raspy voice, ‘Am I turning you on?’ All the other children, including the boys, raised their hands. After another long pause, Alec smiled and said, ‘I thought so.’”—“Miss Kelli Schoopheimer,” Massapequa Elementary School teacher, as channeled in Paul Rudnick, “Shouts and Murmurs: Alec Baldwin’s Preschool Report Card,” The New Yorker, March 10, 2014

The second I saw the headline of this article on my Kindle, I began to laugh. As I read the rest of the piece, I had to stifle my guffawing in a doctor’s office. I wanted to use almost any passage from it in my “Quote of the Day,” but the piece appeared two months ago. When would I have the opportunity to write about Alec Baldwin again?

Not to worry. Whenever he gets around to writing his memoir (and that day can’t be that far off), the actor could do worse than use a play on words on a past Raymond Chandler title: “Trouble Was My Business.” The man with the “deep and raspy voice” never seems to have a problem finding trouble—it always finds him.

If you read his tweets, or his periodic pronouncements that he’s absolutely, finally done with someplace (America, under George W. Bush; New York, under whoever’s mayor), you get this image of one of those reluctant gunslingers (Gregory Peck, in The Gunfighter, or John Wayne, in The Shootist) forced to deal with someone again, whether he likes it or not. But, whereas Peck and Wayne rolled their eyes at yet one more young gun out to prove his manhood, Baldwin has to deal with another form of ambush: the 21^st century paparazzi.

That, or the police, as recounted in this blog post at The Gothamist. In the latest incident involving the actor, he was stopped by New York’s Finest for driving his bike against traffic on Fifth Avenue. Unable to produce ID upon request (and surely apoplectic that the officers, after all these years, had to even ask who he was), he appears to have gone into a rage, then been taken into custody for disorderly conduct.

Like millions, I’ve seen Baldwin’s superb comic turns on 30 Rock as well as his upteen guest-hosting appearances on Saturday Night Live—and, like a far more select audience, I’ve been lucky enough to see him onstage, in a 2006 Roundabout Theatre production of Joe Orton’s Entertaining Mr. Sloane.

I really wish, though, that he would save that vermouth-sounding voice of his for where it can do the most good: not just his acting gigs, but his “New York Philharmonic This Week” radio show. His self-regard has passed the point of being healthy, or even of Rudnick’s inspired satire. It’s now led him repeatedly and squarely into Anger Management Territory—and no good can come of that.

Quote of the Day (Emily Dickinson, on Feeding Anger)

"Anger as soon as fed is dead; 

'Tis starving makes it fat." - Emily Dickinson, LXVIII, Part One: Life, in Complete Poems (1924)