Mark Wahlberg, awash in delusions of competence
Actor Mark Wahlberg has already apologized, but it’s too late: he has ascended into the Valhalla of Ethics Alarms icons, and henceforth those who repeat his offense will be referred to here, and undoubtedly elsewhere, as having “done a Wahlberg” or perhaps, for simplicity’s sake, “wahlberged.”
The act of proclaiming, after a disaster or misfortune, how an individual involved could have prevented the situation has always been infuriating. My father’s favorite term for the practice was “Monday morning quarterbacking,” and he despised it. Psychologists identify the roots of the phenomenon as hindsight bias, but it’s more pernicious than that. What Mark Wahlberg did, however, is worse still: not only second-guessing those involved, but announcing that he personally would have saved the day if he had been there. Mix Monday morning quarterbacking and hindsight bias, blend in a distorted belief in one’s own ability to handle difficult situations that caused others to fail, add the eagerness to blame someone and make them feel as guilty and incompetent as possible, and add dashes of arrogance, lack of empathy and unfairness, and you have it: a perfect Wahlberg soufflé!
This is what the furrow-browed star of “The Perfect Storm,” “Fear” and “The Fighter” did. Instead of falling on his knees every day to thank Lady Luck that on September 11, 2011, he switched his ticket on doomed American Flight 11 from Boston to Los Angeles to another flight, Mark Wahlberg informed an interviewer with Men’s Journal that he could and would have stopped the plane from slamming into the World Trade Center had he been on board. He says, in the magazine’s February issue:
“If I was on that plane with my kids, it wouldn’t have went down like it did. There would have been a lot of blood in that first-class cabin and then me saying, ‘OK, we’re going to land somewhere safely, don’t worry.’ ”
Suuuuuure, Mark. Obviously Mark’s agent, mother, psychiatrist or keeper read this dumb boast after the fact and ordered him to apologize quick-like-a-bunny before he felt the full power of 9-11 fury and blog-flaming, and he did. But the issue, and his interview, remains.
I thought we had seen the worst of this kind of thing last year, when everyone from grandmothers to obese middle aged-sportswriters were saying or writing that if they had been in Penn State assistant football coach Mike McQueary’s position, seeing Jerry Sandusky naked in a locker room shower with a ten-year old boy, they would have dashed in and kicked his butt. But no. A former underwear model declaring that the long-dead passengers had to be weenies, because he could have single-handedly saved the plane and one of the Twin Towers wins the prize, and the label.
It’s called wahlberging.
And it’s wrong.
Ethics Alarms 
While I agree that his saying this is wrong. I also think that he must also be haunted by the fact that he was supposed to be on that plane and all sorts of things have to be running through his head.
I think that’s a sensitive insight, Bill. I hadn’t even thought of that.
Everybody likes to think they’re cool and in control. In The Right Stuff, Wolfe writes about test pilots who would badmouth those who had died. He interpreted it as their attempt to reassure themselves that their own survival was not a matter of chance, and that they couldn’t possibly die the same way because they would have known what to do. So we reassure ourselves — I would have stopped the hijackers, I would have known how to control the skid, I could have put out the fire before it spread, I would have dialed 9-1-1 right away… It’s not an attractive response, and it’s hurtful to the people you’re implicitly criticizing, but it’s understandable.
I agree Mark—all of us fool ourselves that we are braver, fairer, more ethical and less subject to corruption than we really are. The vast majority of Americans think they are the most virtuous people they know. It is very human, which is why we need to be on the look-out for it, and be ready to control the impulse.
Up until that day, the conventional wisdom was that the best way to handle a hijacking was to sit tight and wait it out.
I find it odd that Walhbergh thinks he would have been able to tell that the 9/11 hijackings were going to end differently than all the previous ones without any information to indicate that and then been able to convince enough passengers what would happen if they didn’t act.
I don’t doubt that he would have tried to do what he says, it’s just that he would not have known what the future held and would have sat there like everybody else. I agree with Bill, I think he feels some form of survivor’s guilt.
Flight 93 shows us that regular passengers can and will stop hijackings on flights, once they know the plane will be used as a guided missile.
One of the problems with written quotes, is tone. I dont know how he meant it. Read the interview a few times. It almost seemed intentionaly over the top. Like when you tell your buddy you could take mike tyson. I dont know.
Sure, it may be bravado, but if so it was uncommonly stupid and thoughtless bravado. Actors spend their careers getting interview…it part of their job. I won’t give them the same leeway on tone that I would a normal person—they project what they want to project, and if they don’t, they better learn.
In the Sixties, John Wayne did an interview with Playboy in which he made many tongue-in-cheek, over the top comments, playing a role for what he thought was a friendly interviewer. He said, for example, that the Indians “selfishly wanted to keep the land all to themselves.” Wayne was often an advocate for Native Americans, and respected them greatly, but that quote still is cited to prove he was a racist. He learned his lesson after that. Marky better learn his.
9/11 can’t happen again, as has been proven by regular folks’ actions on flights since. NO ONE on any plane is going to sit tight and wait when they think something is amiss, especially any Amurrican male. But from all reports, until the flight 93 folks knew what had ALREADY HAPPENED that day, no one could have imagined it. There was also a report of an actor, name escapes me at the moment- James something- who took that flight a few weeks before. He told the FBI that men sitting apart were acting weirdly in concert at certain points in the flight. No one knew what to make of it until after it was too late. But I’ll bet Wahlberg, Wahlberging as he was, heard what was coming out of his mouth and a part of his brain was trying to figure out what he was doing… And a tidbit of survivor guilt.
James Woods is who you’re thinking of.