Having your conservativism and eating your liberalism too

The only reason for letting Kelsey Grammer blather on about his politics in this interview in New York Magazine is the irony of a Conservative Republican playing a cheerfully out and happily married gay man in a musical comedy that gets a lot of its laughs from making fun of the French version of a Conservative Republican’s discomfort at discovering his daughter’s future mother-in-law is a female impersonator who goes by the stage name of Zaza.

But that’s acting.  Grammer has played George Washington, and that was probably far more of a stretch for him, which isn’t a knock on Grammer.  Washington is a stretch for any mere mortal to have to play.  Grammer was never less than brilliant on Cheers and it’s amazing how fresh and alive he was able to keep the character through the many years that followed on Frasier.  I’ll bet he’s very good as Georges in La Cage aux Folles.

So given the context---it’s an interview with an actor talking about the ways he’s not like the character he plays and how he deals with that challenge---I’d expect a reporter to treat Grammer’s glib summaries of his political views the way he’d treat other actors’ remarks about their passion for French cooking or how they’ve been Cub fans since they were kids or the ways Scientology has enriched their lives or how their work for PETA is so rewarding, as amusing eccentricities that humanize the subject, and not quiz him on the fatuousness of some of his opinions like:

He’s pro-choice but he “doesn’t advocate for abortion.”

Really?  And who does?

He doesn’t think the Stimulus has stimulated anything.

Have you bothered to look at the statistics, Kelsey?

He’s “unmoved” by health care reform because “If it takes six weeks to get a license plate, imagine what they’ll do with an MRI”.

First, who’s they?  The Feds?  License plates are given out by individual states.  Second, What state takes six weeks to get you your plates?  Here in New York you only need new plates when you buy a new car and aren’t trading an old one in, in which case you can transfer the plates new one, and the turn around on new plates is practically overnight because the dealer wants you to be able to take the car home right away, unless you want vanity plates, in which case if you insist on plates that say “IMLSNNG” you deserve to wait.  Third, when was the last time you personally applied for new plates for your car or visited the DMV as opposed to sending one of your people to handle it for you?  And fourth, most people already have to wait for an MRI, it’s called making an appointment when one’s available, and a lot of people have to wait longer because their insurance company has to think over whether they’ll allow it, and many people can’t get one at all because they don’t have  insurance and they can’t afford it so that if they have something that will kill them unless an MRI finds it they will die from it.  Asshole.

Oh well.  At least he doesn’t think Sarah Palin’s ready to be President, although he’s a jerk for saying that the reason Palin polls so abysmally among women---that is, even more abysmally than she polls among men---is that other women hate her because she’s attractive.

But there is one issue on which I think the reporter, Adam Sternbergh, would have been right to press him, considering the themes of La Cage aux Folles and the fact that Grammer was the only straight man in the main cast of Frasier.  The reporter mentions David Hyde Pierce, who played Niles.  But John Mahoney, who played Marty Crane, and Dan Butler, who played the sports talk radio jock Bulldog Briscoe, are also out, having taken considerably more of a risk to their careers than the one Grammer thinks he took by “coming out” as a Republican in Hollywood.  Hasn’t hurt Clint Eastwood much, has it, Kelse?  I’d like to know what Grammer supposes they think about their friend and former colleague stumping for the political party intent on denying them their rights?

On gay marriage, Grammer says he thinks the government should stay out of it.  But that’s a position that only makes sense if you believe that that means the government should get out of the marriage business altogether and not give legal sanction and the rights and benefits and status attendant on it to any marriages, straight or gay.  And that’s not a serious part of the debate.

The debate is between those of us who believe the government shouldn’t discriminate between straight and gay marriages when it gets involved and those who believe that the government should get more involved to the point of banning gay marriages and denying gay couples all the rights, benefits, and status that straight couples enjoy.  So, Mr Kelsey I’m An Out and Proud Republican Grammer, which party supports the former course and which party supports the latter to the point of actively getting bans against gay marriage on state ballots and regularly nominating outspoken homophobes for public office and shaming its own gay members into barricading themselves into steel-doored closets?

There are Republicans who actively oppose their own party’s stand on gay marriage and rights for homosexuals.  They are out and they’re proud of their stand for civil rights for all Americans.  Why isn’t Grammer?

There is a point beyond this.  Grammer doesn’t live as if he believes in his own political views.  It’s not just that he travels in circles where gay people and their spouses aren’t just tolerated but welcomed without a second thought.  He clearly isn’t homophobic himself.  And it doesn’t stop there.

Grammer doesn’t live anything like a Republican-approved lifestyle.  He lives the life of the sort of big city liberal Republicans affect to despise.  And as far as I know he’s quite happy with that life and has no plans to change it.  He’s not about to move to any place Republicans regard as part of the “real America.”  He’s not leaving Hollywood or New York for Topeka, Biloxi, or Wasilla.  He’s not about to give up acting to start an oil company, become a hedge fund manager, or a cattle rancher.  I don’t know if he goes to church and I don’t care, but it’s pretty hard to imagine him in the front pew at St Patrick’s, although it isn’t hard to imagine him leading the choir at the nearest Baptist mega-church---but that’s Frasier I’m seeing bouncing around in a purple robe and singing it joyfully.  Grammer himself?  Religion doesn’t seem to be something he’s given much thought lately, an odd thing for a Republican these days.

Now, I don’t believe that any Republican should have to go live in Topeka, Biloxi, Wasilla, or anywhere else on Sarah Palin’s short list of places that count as the real America.  But I do believe that happy and contented East and West Coast elitists like Grammer---and conservative members of the punditocracy in Washington---should stop talking as if they believe that the lives lived in places like Topeka, Biloxi, and Wasilla are more “authentically” American than lives lived in Brooklyn, Brookline, Chicago, Seattle, San Francisco, or San Antonio and that the people in the one set of places are more American than the people living in the other.

And it’s probably too much to ask, but could they acknowledge that the lives they live in the most decadent parts of decadent Blue America have been made possible for them by liberalism?

Grammer could respond that Los Angeles and New York were built through the efforts and with the money of stalwart capitalists of a conservative bent, and that’s true to the degree that you believe that all capitalists are conservatives as all actors are liberals and that those capitalists intended the cities that got built up around them and you forget the people who did the actual physical labor to build them.

But those cities, all cities, have been made livable by the efforts of Progressive government of a kind that used to be practiced by both Democrats and Republicans but which the Republican Party now claims to oppose in any form.  Public works?  When did the government ever create a job? (Besides the one my brother now holds at the construction company that got the contract I steered their way?)  And artists and intellectuals can make livings in those cities because of progressive attitudes towards art, education, science, and culture that the base of the Republican Party practically equates with Satanism.

It’s very easy for Kelsey Grammer to be a Conservative Republican because so many people around him are busy at the hard work of not being one.

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Comments

[Nancy]

Nice rant, Lance!

I always liked David Hyde Pierce so much better - have I ever mentioned that I hugged him?

:)

[Marc]

He obviously lives in California, where it has always taken 6 to 8 weeks to receive a set of license plates for a new car (you drive around with the registration taped inside your windshield until then). Why can't they just hand you a set of plates when you go to the DMV to pay for your registration, like in just about every other state? It's a California thing, nobody understands...

[Victoria]

Wonderful rant, Lance. Most bracing and true!

[Rana]

It must depend on where you are, Marc, because I never had to wait for plates when I lived there. I remember once leaving my license as surety for the DMV screwdriver so I could change out my out of state plates right in the parking lot, when I got my California title. (This was in San Diego.)

[KLG]

Excellent! How can we get Frasier, oops-Kelsey, to read it?

[Cathie from Canada]

Well said. My respect for Grammer fell as I read what he had to say.

[actor212]

Lance, Grammer owns a house in Delaware County. I don't know how frequently he's there, however.

It’s very easy for Kelsey Grammer to be a Conservative Republican because so many people around him are busy at the hard work of not being one.

And yet, it's us libs who are accused of living off the public dole. Look, Grammer is an irrelevance, as can be seen by the ratings for "Hank". He shot his wad with Frazier (oddly enough, a fairly liberal elitist character given his profession and the advice he handed out to people, advice he himself often failed to take, which sort of is more indicative of Grammer's persona than this entire interview PLUS "An American Carol" combined).

I'm glad you vented this, but you can let it go.

[Dave]

Damn, Lance. Another home run. I didn't know Mahoney was out, but anyone with two functioning brain cells would have known.

[Ranylt]

I think I like the cut of your jib, Lance.

[Mike Schilling]

Of course Grammer's a conservative Republican -- he's been married three times, including once to a stripper and once to a Playboy model, and in addition has a child out of wedlock. Family values all over.

[KC45s]

And he's a recovering drug addict.

Thanks for the post, Lance. It provides yet more evidence that I need to enjoy the art but always beware of the artist.

[moe99]

Seattle certainly won't welcome him back.