In Defense of Poppery, XV: Why Charlie Sheen's crazy ranting matters to us.

Pop example: Charlie Sheen's crazy ranting, and subsequent media coverage of said ranting

What redeems it: Well, nothing. It's crazy ranting.

Okay, then what makes it important, or why do we want to watch it?:
I've seen two kinds of media coverage of Charlie Sheen's recent claims to being from Mars (a claim John Gray would probably back him up on, though I haven't seen that angle covered), having tiger blood, and doing more cocaine than the human body can handle.

I've seen the actual Charlie-Sheen ranting in highlight reel forms (such as with bunnies or on autotune), and I've seen the semi-ranting meta-coverage of the media and commenters asking us all why we're so interested in the crazy ranting of Charlie Sheen.

It's the second kind of coverage I want to discuss first, and then I'll justify our possible collective interest in the first kind of coverage.

Most people who are upset with Charlie Sheen coverage (we'll call it CSc) claim to have one of two reasons (or both) for annoyance:

1. Charlie Sheen is clearly mentally deranged or ill (either from drugs or a pre-existing condition, such as bipolar disorder), and we need to pity him -- or ignore him. (Odd combination of prescribed responses, but there it is.)

2. Charlie Sheen's crazy ranting is not "real news" because "real news" is hearing about unemployment, the unrest in Libya, etc. Under this umbrella falls also laments that CSc is taking up time that should go to those topics, as well as protests that "it's just TV" and so we shouldn't care.

To the first objection, that Charlie Sheen is mentally deranged/ill, I honestly see no way in which either pitying or ignoring him would actually help Charlie Sheen. Perhaps it's schadenfreude for us to be so fascinated by his rants (though I'll discuss later why I don't believe it is), and perhaps we should "be better than that," but neither pity nor ignoring actually make us "better than that." The fact is that no collective attitude we take toward CS or CSc will improve Charlie's chances of rehabilitating himself or finding an appropriate cocktail of prescribed medications to deal with whatever disorder we've decided he has.

Pity and ignorance don't help people, and pretending that our pity or ignorance is morally better than our fascination is kind of silly.

To the second objection, that CSc is preempting more important coverage of more important events, I would say that the news people wish we would be hearing more about is either boring, difficult to watch, or both. This is the trap that environmental groups and human rights organizations and Tea-partiers all fall into: no sense of humor, and an urgency that implies no time to develop one.

People can't be constantly being reminded that polar bears are about to become extinct without either becoming apathetic or blowing their brains out. You need to give people some down time.

[Tangent 1: The Middle East has not been giving us very much down time in this 24-hour news cycle. We're obviously not living it (making the caring actually a lot more difficult to sustain), but we've been through a change of regime in Egypt, political unrest in several other countries, and (still) the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.

In other words, if you want us to care about Libya and unemployment and the crushing federal deficit, you need to let us watch Charlie Sheen for awhile to clear our brains.]

To the related objection that "it's only TV," and so we shouldn't care, I say that I agree that Two and a Half Men, as far as I can tell from the few five-second blurbs I've seen while changing channels, is a crappy show. But TV is the touchstone for all generations born since 1950. Saying that it's "only" a TV show is like saying "what's the big deal? He's just a famous person everyone in the realm recognizes and normally pays homage to, the modern equivalent of the king!" or perhaps more pointedly, "what's the big deal? It's just the English language, the mother-tongue through which we understand the world!"

We all speak TV. That's how you know that you wish evening news shows would show what you think of as serious evening news instead of Charlie Sheen rants. You weren't born thinking "the evening news should be about crime, the economy, politics, and other boring serious things, only." You know that because TV taught it to you. Your elitist expectations actually came from TV.

Which brings me, I think, to my observations on the bifurcation of the American mind when it comes to television. We all think it's important, and we all also know that we "shouldn't" think so because other things are "more important." (I mean, when people actually like a TV show, they describe themselves as helpless in relation to it; "I'm addiction to X show" they say. As though TV is a drug that we'd quit if only we had the moral fortitude.)

We watch CSc, and we simultaneously gripe about the fact that we're watching it.

I believe this relates directly to capitalism, since television is one of capitalism's greatest inventions -- a tool of the economic system from the start -- and the way capitalism needs us to be simultaneously consuming a massive amount of product, and also dissatisfied with the products we consume so that as soon as we're "finished" with the first thing, we move on to consume the next one.

[Tangent 2: The fact that TV is so obviously a capitalist tool is what makes it seem "low class." Low class things are characterized by their exposure of/to the mechanics of capitalism: the prototypical lower class people are factory workers, even though farmers may make about the same amount of money (or less). Farmers are portrayed as having "other benefits," ones indigenous to the countryside that disintegrate (literally) the closer they get to the city -- pastoral scenery, simplicity, nutrition, "down home" wisdom, etc. -- and that are viewed as "outside" the capitalist structure and the hurly burly world of money.

"They're poor in money but rich in spirit," we say about farmers. Those who leave the land for mechanized labor are "selling out"; those who stay on the land but begin to use factory-like mechanized labor devices are also "selling out."

How would a factory worker "sell out"? Would it even be possible?

Think about it for a minute. I'll wait.

If you thought of a way a factory worker could sell out, it probably involved some vestige of human bonds, like betraying a union or coworker. But the point is that machines and mechanical labor cannot be "sold out" -- they are the sellout. And so it is with TV.]

The complex structure of our society relies on urban spaces, factories, and television, and it so obviously relies on those things that they become the "low" -- while objects, people, artists and media that appear not to rely on those "low" things give the illusion of "rising above" and managing to be "high class." (In modernism, at least...where cities necessarily also produce the "high class," which is partly defined by its association with human production, standards, and "cultured-ness." If capitalism defines the lower class, so does it define the higher within its own workings, leaving farmers out of the spectrum despite/because of their supposed spiritual riches.)

So here's my long-awaited point: Charlie Sheen is a lunatic. And I think part of the fascination with his particular lunacies is that he has been completely unpredictable in a high/low kind of way.

He is a "low" kind of guy, in that his fame comes mainly from TV and some Oscar-unworthy movies. And he's acting "low," in that he claims to have done a ton and a half of drugs, and in that he is clearly bragging about himself, and in that he may be mentally ill.

But he's refusing to apologize for all those things in the way that "low" things should -- Charlie Sheen doesn't have a bifurcated mind about CSc, loving it and hating it at the same time. He just freaking loves it, as he tells us again and again. And instead of the usual apology, he's saying things that are actually out-of-control, insanely creative. They're far more like poetry than any script of Two and a Half Men.

Tiger blood? Adonis? One-armed children?? Where is he getting this stuff?

That's what everyone wants to know. That's why we keep listening. That's why it seems like such a killjoy when others attempt to diagnose him (again making him "low," controlled, in need of our help), because it seems to explain what's going on when he opens his mouth.

And maybe it does.

But maybe we also see our own possibilities and servitudes exposed in some of the craziness Charlie has been exhibiting. We are, after all, a nation that both polices the world and polices our policing of the world (that watches TV and says "we wish we didn't"). In Charlie Sheen, we see the specter of that hubris if it were unleashed, if we stopped policing ourselves. We see the destruction and creativity unleashed by that kind of arrogance.

I think we see both what we have created as the (semi)omnipotent audience and what we fear we could become as Americans. We are the crazy ranters who never thought we could be taken down, that we were "too big to fail" -- and here we are in a recession. Charlie Sheen stinks of impending disaster because we can smell it on ourselves, not because he's actually faced any disaster...because he's very specifically not facing disaster and is blissful in what we feel must be his ignorance. He's a metaphor for us that we created by our attentions. In a way, the narrative of his "breakdown" proves our power; in a more literal way, our attention to his recent crazy ramblings allowed more crazy ramblings.

And I think we can't look away because both halves of our capitalist minds are attracted to these rantings: reveling in the low, low class obsession with and proximity to bald power, and also the implied freedom in the creative claiming of that power -- without apology, as if Manifest Destiny had come back into vogue. Charlie Sheen seems to be rising above us as he speaks, not in the ways he describes (he's not actually from Mars, he doesn't have only one speed [Go], and he probably doesn't really have any tiger blood), but in his descriptions themselves. He is free from our capitalist anxiety and obsessive self-consciousness (though not our self-obsession).

He makes us wonder what "winning" means. Could he be winning? Could it be that this nut-casery is what we are exhibiting when we say we're winning? In the split seconds between watching a video of CSc and making an amateur diagnosis and dismissal of him as "crazy," Charlie makes us think about what winning is.

And therein lies the value of CSc, I believe.