"I'm a certified jerk, AND I play one on TV!"

Like Ashton Kutcher and Charlie Sheen, Alec Baldwin is a mega-jerk actor who plays mega-jerks superbly.  Designating him as an Ethics Dunce is like shooting fish in a barrel. Still, there is a material difference between portraying a fictional jerk that people laugh at and behaving like one in real life without apology. Baldwin’s stunt on an American Airlines flight yesterday and his subsequent comments about it mark him as a very special breed of self-entitled jerk, and should, in a culture that understands that admiring jerks is the equivalent of endorsing their warped values, lead to his decline in popularity.

We shall see.

Baldwin was quite properly tossed off an American Airlines flight when he repeatedly defied a flight attendant’s request, then command, that he turn off his iPad, on which he was playing a game. The actor, like the arrested development case he apparently is, retired with his game to the plane’s bathroom, slamming the door, and also verbally abused the attendants.

His arguments that the plane was at the gate and he really shouldn’t have had to stop playing go beyond irrelevant to irresponsible and asinine. Air passengers need to obey the directives of flight attendants without argument; that’s the culture and the rule on airplanes, without which everyone is in danger. If someone can argue about putting away their little game and get away with it, then someone else will try to get away with not buckling their seat belts or moving to the exits. The fact that Baldwin would abuse attendants for following regulations shows that he is one of the dues-paying member of the “Do You Know Who I Am?” Club, all of whom are arrogant, narcissistic creeps by definition. Baldwin’s tantrum when he was not a given special dispensation to keep playing is game resulted in delay and inconvenince for his fellow passengers, not that he cared.

Baldwin, whose Twitter communications have long provided a frightening glimpse into the toxic ego of a man who fancies himself politically astute and harbors ambitions of running for office, lavished several tweets on the incident, including this one:

“Flight attendant on American reamed me out 4 playing WORDS W FRIENDS while we sat at the gate, not moving. #nowonderamericaairisbankrupt”

…and this one:

“Now on the 3 o’clock American flight. The flight attendants already look…..smarter.”

This from the genius who gets thrown off a flight because he didn’t want to stop playing a game. Why did American Airlines then agree to book Baldwin on another flight? The company is either extra-ethical in the classic “turn the other cheek” sense, or confused. Any passenger who forces an airline to have him forceably removed because of misconduct should be forced to post a substantial bond and submit a written apology before being allowed to fly on that carrier again.

Alec Baldwin then announced that he was endorsing Barack Obama, which should help the President significantly as he vies with Newt Gingrich for the not-insubstantial jerk vote.