Baldwin Threatens To Quit Showbiz

In a post under his blog byline at The Huffington Post, actor and MSNBC host Alec Baldwin suggests that he would quit show business for the sake of his family: 

“I am concerned for my family. In Bloomberg’s New York, forty or fifty paparazzi are allowed to block streets, inconvenience homeowners, workers and shoppers, and make life miserable for my neighbors. Photographers have tripped and fallen on babies in strollers on my block. They have nearly struck my wife in the face with microphones. They provoke me, daily, by getting dangerously close to me with their cameras as weapons, hoping I will react. When I do, the weapon doubles as a device to record my reaction. And then, apparently, I lose every time. If quitting the television business, the movie business, the theatre, any component of entertainment, is necessary in order to bring safety and peace to my family, then that is an easy decision.“

The rambling, defensive, apologetic and, at times, aggressive article was published hours after MSNBC suspended Baldwin’s weekly show for anti-gay slurs he made to reporters earlier this week. 

Baldwin used his space at HuffPo to praise MSNBC, attack the media, blogs and, strangely, to blame the government for America’s obsession with celebrities: 

“This country’s obsession with the private lives of famous people is tragic. It’s tragic in the sense that it is so clearly a projection of people’s frustration about their government, their economy, their own spiritual bankruptcy. You have no voice in Washington. In Washington, or in any statehouse, no one actually cares what you think. So you post online, you vote with a Roman-esque thumbs up or down on the celebrity debacle of the day. That is your right. It’s also fatal misdirection of your voice and need to judge. Occupy Wall Street, on their worst day, had more integrity than the comments page of a website ever will.”