The Observer tries hard to lionize Sean Penn, and in doing so acknowledges how farcical of a figure he has become in the public mind. Nevertheless, the article does provide some insight into why Sean Penn does what he does.

His father was blacklisted during the fifties (isn't it awful when communists can't find work?), so he's resentful of perceived infractions of civil rights (which of course communists and socialists would dispense with as soon as they attained power...).

In his interview with Larry King, Penn pulled his punches about President Bush and his late response to Katrina. Nonetheless, over the years he has consistently sought to get right up under Bush's chin. For the Chronicle, Penn tried, and failed, to interview the president; in the run-up to the invasion of Iraq, he famously paid $56,000 to publish an open letter to Bush on a nearly full page of in the Washington Post: 'Many of your actions to date and those proposed seem to violate every defining principle of this country over which you preside: intolerance of debate... marginalisation of your critics, the promoting of fear through unsubstantiated rhetoric, manipulation of a quick comfort media, and the position of your administration's deconstruction of civil liberties all contradict the very core of the patriotism you claim,' he wrote.

This from a man who has a Ann Coulter doll who suffers various indignities at his hands "just for kicks". From a guy who regularly invites the media on his road trips through dictatorships to see how wonderful everything is. The delusions don't stop there.

In the same letter, Penn invoked his father: 'He raised me with a deep belief in the Constitution and the Bill of Rights.' 'My dad was a hero to all of us,' Chris Penn told me. 'I think it's easy to say that Sean wants to be a hero. I see what he does around the world and, you know, I think that his heart's always in the right place. And is some of it wanting to have a little credit as a hero? Maybe. I think there's also a kind of innocence, which my father to a degree had. I think I'm a little too cynical. Most heroes get killed.' Baerwald agreed: 'I think there's a part of Sean that isn't gonna be happy until he gets murdered by the Republican noise machine. Until he finds out what it's like to feel like his dad.'

Murdered by "the Republican noise machine"? I would expect that the Republican party prays daily for him to have a long and healthy life so he can continue undermining the left's credibility with his ridiculous stunts. But wait for the piece de resistance:

'I'm under investigation by the Office of Foreign Assets Control, the Treasury Department,' he said. 'It's a fiveyear investigation. Did I violate the embargo by going to Iraq under Hussein? Did I spend money? Did I use my American passport to get there? All those things. The answer to those questions is no.' He added, 'We know it came from the White House. My lawyer in Washington knows that.' Penn has been told by friends in the LAPD that he is under surveillance.

Yeah, the Bushies are after him. No paranoid delusion is complete without the men in black.

Penn appears to be suffering from a common ailment of successful actors--they're like lottery winners, endowed with money and adulation with almost no effort on their behalf. Penn got his first job at 19. At 21 he was a star. His wealth and fame has seen him through brushes with the law that would have ruined anyone else. He never had the years of struggle everyone else have before they finally achieve success...or don't. We can hardly blame him for a critical lack of perspective.

More importantly though, Penn has become blind to the effect of his fame.

I saw my father go through something similar a number of years ago. As a successful business owner, he became accustomed to people doing what he said, even what he suggested; afterall, these people worked for him. It was only after he sold his business and confronted the rude shock of telling someone what to do and getting ignored, that he realized that he had been living in a kind of bubble. Penn lives in the fame bubble--the entire world is distorted by the "famous person observer effect".

Most ironically, Penn admits to deep friendship with David Blaine, most recently seen in a giant bubble of water which distorted his view of the outside world as well as the view of those outside of him. Coincidence? Perhaps, but so appropriate.