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Dana Milbank of the “Washington Post” didn’t do us a favor when he placed a self-imposed blackout on Sarah Palin in his column a month ago. We wondered what life would be like without her quotes all over the media. We found out. Charlie Sheen has filled the void.
It is not as if Palin is no longer doing what she always did. She still bravely defies authority by bringing chocolate chip cookies to school kids. She still pursues the extinction of Alaskan wildlife with a weapon in hand and still does a helluva impression of Tina Fey. But no one is paying any attention, thanks to Charlie Sheen.
Lindsay Lohan sends gift bouquets to Charlie on a daily basis for taking her out of the news. Our infatuation with Lohan’s flirtation with lesbianism abated when he hired a porn star or two to provide day care for his kids. We do have our priorities.
Charlie is everywhere. He even went on with CNN’s Piers Morgan, a gig Michael Vick turned down. Piers (Larry King without suspenders, but with a British accent), is turning out to be a master of understatement. “You are a bit quirky,” he told Charlie. Yes, and so was Mike Tyson. At least Charlie didn’t respond by biting off Piers’ ear.
You can’t get away from Sheen. It is one thing for “TODAY” to feature a multiple-part interview, it is quite another for the network to shamelessly insert it into MSNBC’s “The Last Word” with Lawrence O’Donnell, the replacement for the departed Keith Olbermann. How would the volatile Olbermann have reacted if NBC bosses had him insert the Sheen interview in the middle of his show? Maybe Keith would have made Sheen one of his “Worst Persons in the World.” It is almost as fascinating to see the serious O’Donnell intoning about the “unraveling” of Sheen right after his story about union busting in Wisconsin and the uprising in Libya.
Sheen’s interviews have the same fascination of a train wreck. He rambles on like Fidel Castro in a three-hour speech on Cuban television. Charlie doesn’t have the weird facial tattoo (at least not yet) of Mike Tyson, but he sprinkles his conversation with violent images like “Iron Mike.” Who knew Sheen had tiger blood coursing through his veins? I seriously doubt we can blame Charlie’s bad boy behavior on the noble tiger, who take better care of its cubs, and I have never heard of a tiger involved with drugs and porn stars (except for a golfer named “Tiger”).
Sheen is so ubiquitous even the sports pages of the “Daily News” provide no respite. One expects to find Sheen on its front page when there is no ghastly photo of an accident available or a Hooters’ girl in the news (yes, there are days when even the “Daily News” cannot figure out how to insert cleavage on the front page).
My concern is when Sam Donnellon, one of my favorite sportswriters, devotes his entire column to Sheen instead of Charlie Manuel. What does it say about the state of our civilization when Bill Conlin as “King of the World” wonders what it would have been like to have been a fly on the wall when Lenny Dykstra was a guest at Sheen’s place before it became the “Sober Valley Lodge?” Hint: It would not have reminded anyone of the Lincoln-Douglas Debates. Dykstra has the ego of Sheen, but without his financial smarts. Both are unemployed, but Sheen is better prepared for his unemployment.
Sheen fancies himself a Gen. George Patton. He is in a war where defeat is not an option. Patton battled the Nazi forces. Charlie is battling the clueless forces of network bosses. Patton won the Battle of the Bulge. Charlie also claims he is “winning,” if you define victory as achieving the shutdown of a popular TV show at a personal loss of $2.5 million per episode. Charlie responded to the shutdown the only way a respectable warrior could: He demanded a raise in pay.
Despite Sheen’s grandiose vision of himself, he has better insight than the media types who relay his every word. During his interview with Morgan a singular moment of clarity occurred when Morgan had to interrupt Sheen for breaking news. The scene abruptly shifted from the disheveled Sheen to a Libyan city in flames. As a CNN correspondent ran down the list of that day’s casualties, people scurried in the streets behind him and sirens wailed. And then in a surreal moment, the scene shifted back to the studio.
Sheen blinked at the camera in bewilderment. He muttered something about the world falling apart while the media’s lead story was Sheen. As ego maniacal as the actor may be, even he understood something is quite amiss in America’s media coverage. It is not the feigned concern over what is going to happen to Sheen’s children. There was no such concern when Sheen was multi-tasking at carousing and parenting when he was reporting to the “Two and a Half Men” set. This is all about ratings and our insatiable appetite for tabloid sleaze.
Charlie Sheen, as flawed as he is, he is not a hypocrite. You cannot say the same thing about the rest of us. SPR
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