I have watched the whole Charlie Sheen debacle with great sadness over the last several months, which seems to contrast sharply with how the whole pathetic charade is being treated in the broader culture. And it makes absolutely no difference to me that Sheen himself is orchestrating all this, an observation that would seem to suggest that it’s perfectly acceptable that whatever happens happens, because Charlie Sheen is an adult and so much of this (all of it?) seems self-inflicted.
We shouldn’t be giggling about what’s going on because a human being is self-destructing right in front of our eyes, or up on the stage on Broadway or on the Internet and beyond. I would feel like such a schmoe if I so much as bought a T-shirt, coffee cup or whatever else his website is peddling, to say nothing of how I’d feel if I paid $100 for a ticket to watch it all in-person.
The fact that he’s a millionaire doesn’t make a whit of difference to me: this is a guy unraveling right in front of us and there ought to be an obligation not to just wink or snicker at what we are seeing. For those people who are part of his posse or whatever clever expression they are using, I am just amazed that they would play the part of enabler simply to remain part of an inner circle that is three parts mayhem and one part madness. I’ll bet that his true friends and family members are insisting that they tell him the truth at every opportunity, even if by doing so they find themselves excluded from that demented inner circle.
I’m not so smart that I know with certainty what the truth is, but I am smart enough to know that what we’ve seen thus far isn’t anywhere in the same zip code as the truth. The fact that he has so much money has allowed him to conduct this grotesque theatre, but that doesn’t make it real. I’m not even smart enough to know for sure how this is going to end, but I’d be amazed if it didn’t end badly. Which is why I wouldn’t want to have been part of the nuttiness along the way.
I know I come off sounding like a wuss about all this, but this is one of those things that hits close to home, and by that I am not referring to an interview that I did with Sheen over the telephone more than 10 years ago. That was a lot of fun and he couldn’t have been nicer or more accommodating, but seeing what I believe is a confused young man slipping so far from acceptable conventional norms of behavior is not something I want to be part of … again.
More than 40 years ago, I was in the Navy and stationed in the Philippines and despite being all of 18 years old, I watched helplessly from the sidelines as one of my buddies apparently had a nervous breakdown and was promptly discharged and sent back to the states. And we had known for many months that this individual needed assistance, but efforts – probably tentative and circuitous – to notify superiors up the line about his erratic behavior had gone nowhere. We had tried to get him some help, but it had been done within the framework of a culture that wasn’t nearly as sensitive to such matters as it hopefully would be today.
In 1968 in the military or even in society at large, mental health issues were burdened with a terrible stigma, and possibly even had we been more strident in informing officers about the man’s difficulties, the outcome might have been the same. But watching him implode that day in the barracks was about as horrible a sight as I ever wanted to see.
Watching Charlie Sheen do the same thing on television or the Internet is almost as bad.
- T.S. O’Connell
