Martin Sheen - Fundamentalist Minister-

Martin Sheen - Fundamentalist Minister- It's easy to forget, amid the protests and pronouncements and publicity, that Martin Sheen was once an excellent actor.

Andrew Stuttaford has a fascinating profile of the guy, his beliefs, and why he became what he is, in the National Review:

His authority reinforced by the fact that he portrays a president on an upscale soap opera, Sheen uses celebrity status to push his causes (fair enough — it's our fault, not his, if we take an actor seriously just because of the roles he plays). But "Jed Bartlet" has not been his only taste of office, either on screen (he has played other presidents and at least two Kennedy brothers) or off. In 1989, Sheen was named honorary mayor of Malibu. Naturally, His Honor marked his appointment with a decree proclaiming the area "a nuclear-free zone, a sanctuary for [illegal] aliens and the homeless, and a protected environment for all life, wild and tame." Interviewed more than a decade later by Hispanic magazine, Sheen relived the moment with obvious pleasure: "The reaction was what I kind of half-expected, and it wasn't favorable. I was considered a radical who sold out the city. It just shows you the power of words and the power of someone's convictions. It just scared the hell out of them."

Well, not really — it just shows that people don't like having a loopy mayor. But no matter: If Sheen had become a St. Paul, the rest of us were, to him, like so many Galatians, an errant people to be hectored, lectured, and generally harangued.

And there's more - about the "liberation theology" religious roots to his politics.

And, also, this telling bit:

One of the hallmarks of Sheen's activism is the number of times he has been arrested, around 70 at the latest count, often carefully choreographed for photogenic spectacle, which might include, say, prayer (yet another Nagasaki protest, this one at Los Alamos in 1999) or, for real excitement, fake blood (Fort Benning, same year).

There is another way in which these martyrdoms have been a touch theatrical. None were likely to have serious consequences. Now that there's a chance that they might, Sheen has seemed to shy away. Following a conviction for trespass at a demonstration at Vandenberg Air Force Base, he is on three years' probation and is taking care to avoid the police, handcuffs, and the judiciary. As he explained to Newsday last fall, "If I get arrested for anything now, I go right in the slammer." The actor's taste for martyrdom clearly includes neither the big house nor the loss of hundreds of thousands in dollars from his appearances in Aaron Sorkin's fake White House (Sheen reportedly earns around $300,000 for each episode of The West Wing, not so much less than the $400,000 that George W. Bush makes for a year in the real thing), but it's telling that it has taken this, rather than any change of heart, to stop — at least until his probation expires — the seemingly endless run of arrests.

Sounds like a lot of our local high-profile demonstratchiks. Anyone remember the "Honeywell Project"? The eighties/nineties era protest group, largely peopled by a pacifistic cult from Luck, Wisconin, racked up hundreds of arrests among them - all of them the sort of plastic-cuffed, in-and-out "arrests" that scarcely puts a dent in anyone's day, much less the day of someone who has no day job.

And I can't help but see the Soliah parallels here:

Most people accept that they have, at least temporarily, to live under some laws with which they may profoundly disagree. In his repeated recourse to (let's be euphemistic) "direct action," Sheen appears not to — an approach that is, at its core, undeniably undemocratic...Revealingly, when the law and his own notions of what is right coincide, Sheen is only too happy to don the jackboots. For example, driven in part, doubtless, by one son's painful battle with substance abuse, he was a leading opponent of a California ballot initiative designed to allow certain low-level drug users to receive treatment rather than jail. That shouldn't be a surprise. Sheen is a zealot: a man so convinced of his own rectitude that, for him, any compromise becomes a sin. Needless to say, such moral absolutism usually comes with a profound disdain for the points of view of those who disagree — to Sheen, I suspect, their opinions count for no more than their votes.

Now, some of you are going to ask "why are you doing a profile of an actor when you have such disdain for most of their opinions in the first place?"

Simple: Sheen's story illustrates that of many of our more workaday opponents. Whether the Highland Park marm who drives her Volvo to the WAMM rallies, or the Macalester brats who seem to be majoring in "social activism", there's an element in the fundamentalist left that sees itself as exceptionalistic, not only smarter than the rest of us, but whose agendas are so righteous they naturally trump everyone else's.

Posted by Mitch at March 15, 2003 10:35 AM