Father of the year?

THE only thing about Alec Baldwin's tirade I don't understand is that everybody keeps calling it a "voicemail." Is that the same thing as what I call an "answering-machine message"? I am not offended by the way he spoke to his daughter, it's just that I have Luddite tendencies and want to know if the Upgraders have been going behind my back again.

Some things should never be upgraded, and one of them is a fire-breathing father who gives his erring daughter what used to be called "a good talking-to." Unhappily, this once universal family event has already been so relentlessly upgraded that fathers have gone the way of the 300-baud modem, regarded as quaint at best, mocked and scorned by the one-gender-fits-all zealots of Wireless Parenting.

Whatever we may think of Alec Baldwin's leftist politics, the ironic fact remains that his current troubles have found him holding a traditionalist fort virtually alone. The moment America heard him call his daughter "a rude, thoughtless little pig" he was transformed into the universally condemned Angry White Male, liberalism's quintessential spoiler whose anger, whiteness, and maleness have for decades been associated with conservative father figures. From feminism's catch-all patriarchy to Big Daddy in his many incarnations to Paul Newman's line in The Long, Hot Summer--"The world belongs to the meat-eaters"--the Angry White Male has been first and foremost a father.

Until now. We have finally managed to separate them by inventing the male parent. To remove all anger and hierarchy from father we avoid the very word, preferring "my dad" even in formal political addresses. The last time it was widely used--and then only as a buzzword--was in the '70s, when men were urged to discover their softer side and show their emotions, which led to the faddish boast of being "into fathering." What we were really into was our usual deep doo-doo, so the invention of parenting was a foregone conclusion.

Alec Baldwin may think of himself as a flaming liberal, but in fact he is coming across as a reactionary father in a sea of progressive parents. The "family judge" involved in his divorce case was so alarmed by the way he raised his voice to his daughter that she temporarily barred all contact between him and the girl. Worse, unlike the boyish, delicately built Larry Birkhead who parented Anna Nicole Smith's baby, Baldwin, the five-o'clock-shadowed burly meat-eater, even looks like an angry white male.

This would take a whole lot of explaining, so he hopped aboard the Apology Century Unlimited and jawed at every stop about the importance of "parenting skills" and his need for "parenting counseling." He went on The View and explained parental displacement, i.e., how you can be cussing out your daughter when suddenly you realize that you're actually cussing out her mother.

He seemed to be on every show, even if it was just his voiceover and film clips, listening to everybody else's fatherhood stories. The talk-show crowd discussed whether his career was "over," and what he would "do" now, as if we would momentarily see him stumbling out of town with all his worldly goods in a bandana on a stick.

That's when he inspired himself. "I have a dream," he announced, tremulously if unoriginally. Yes? "To go out this door today and do something else with my life." What? Give up acting, he told Dr. Phil, and devote himself to helping alienated divorcing parents who hate each other. He wants to be a parenting counselor!

Somewhere around the 857th repetition of the word parent I heard a familiar voice in my head yelling, "I'm your father!" That's how the good talking-to of old usually started, before it unraveled in all directions for want of parenting skills. To girls of my vintage and our mothers it was called "getting worked up," which was something only fathers did; they owned the idiom. Mothers got "upset," but only a father could get worked up. In the pre-parenting era, it was how somebody in fine fettle talked to somebody in dire straits.

If certain overly melodramatic words, antiquated phrases, and arcane conclusions and configurations invariably found their way into the mix it is because fathers of daughters simply can't not use them.

Orgy: any party

Good-for-nothing: any date

Snake in the Grass: any boy you've dated more than once

Dissipated Lecher: the 20-year-old steady boyfriend who was as unthreatening as Jimmy Lydon in the Henry Aldrich movies

The Middle of the Night: between midnight and 1 A.M.

The Crack of Dawn: between 2 and 3 A.M.

Stark Naked: a one-piece bathing suit, with an extra fold of material across the front, like a little curtain, that you pulled down to cover the crotch area

"Tell me the truth!"

"Nothing happened!"

"I'll kill him."

It ended the only way monologues can. He finally wound down, but not before he delivered his standard exit line: "I'm going to straighten you out!" Alec Baldwin said "I am going to straighten your a** out," which he should not have done, but otherwise it was close enough to make me smile and to make him sound like an honest-to-God father, and so I say two cheers for Alec Baldwin.

I also side with his brother, who made the crisp observation that the anagrammatic possibilities between "parent" and "paternity" are now held in contempt, and reminded the audience what had made Alec mad to begin with: The daughter was playing telephone tag, arranging to take calls and then wandering off when they were scheduled. "She has to learn to be punctual and to keep her word," he said.

Three cheers for the unequivocal Baldwin brother!

Florence King can be reached at P.O. Box 7113, Fredericksburg, VA 22404.