Charlie Sheen is God. And I'm an atheist.
He smokes seven gram rocks because "that's how he rolls." He rolls invincibly, whether god or demon, hero or villain. Sheen suggests that we need to watch him, to escape from our boring lives and the things we could never do, what being mortal and all.
We are obsessed with excess, perhaps filtering our own suppressed need for an extreme and hyperbolic lifestyle through the lens of a camera. Excess enters our home that way. It's not the media I am after, however. It is something less tangible, less easy to pin down. It is something that has infiltrated our minds and taught us that certain people dwell among the cosmos and should be revered, that extremism is the only way to live.
In the dollar we trust. In Hollywood we trust. In fanaticism we trust. In what do we trust anymore?
Maybe our movie stars, our celebrities, our "super-humans" are our gods. We certainly treat them as such. Charlie Sheen recently highlighted this god complex in his infamous interview when he barked out such hallowed assertions as, "Dying is for fools." Well said. Fools, we are. And we all just need someone to look up to, even if the looking up is provoked by a sacrilegious, incomprehensible or disgusted awe. We need it. Maybe that's what we trust: that our sanctified culture of wealth and extremism can deliver us from the commonplace.
The pedestal on which our "heroes" stand is stained by super-human perceptions of the self, by unhealthy relationships, eating disorders, drug overdoses, the color of money or the way God's face would look if He had one. Do we need it? Has life become so mundane?
It has not. It is beautiful but much too tragic. We just avert our eyes.
I said all that to say this: I wonder what unites us and if anything really holds us together.
Sometimes the craving for someone to look up to becomes looking for someone to blame. I won't say a scourge, but maybe that is just what it is.
During Spring Break, I read a letter to the editor in a local paper about the inflation of gas prices and how it indicates the deep-seated greed in Washington paired with Obama's failure to pick a flawless bracket. Apart from exposing the author's propensity for sweeping generalizations and his general ignorance of how the market works - what, you really thought we could own or independently control a global commodity? - the article did little else. I found his preoccupation with consumption and monetary Western crises most troubling, especially in light of pressing global issues.
And let's be honest, it's probably all Bush's fault anyway - living the peaceful life out in Texas and screwing up our economy simultaneously. Either that or Obama's sitting in his office eating bon-bons spinning the "Wheel o' Gas Prices" for leisure. Both explanations are reasonable.
In the wake of the earthquake and tsunami devastation across the Pacific, the chaos across Libya and so many other global issues that I have neither time nor words to address, this tunnel vision - the one that reads about tiger-blooded celebrities, that thinks money is all and doesn't know a Qaddafi from a giraffe - impairs us. It is needlessly self-based.
Are we satisfied now? Is this what connects us?
Maybe fear does. Fear that our dollar isn't holy, that our cars are just empty place-holders without cheap fuel, that Sheen isn't immortal after all, that we cannot predict nature's staggering blow, cannot control it or ourselves. We live in the ghost of Katrina, in the memory that we are human. And we revere those who can look death in the face and say: "Eat it." But often not the right ones, not the heroes.
Or perhaps it is that awe that unites us. We gawk at excess the way we would gawk at an interstate pile-up. We want to look away but can't - and then we ourselves crash.
True, in our society, participation in consumption does connect us. But are we consuming the right things or are we just consuming waste? And what about those who consume in the extreme, the Sheens of the world? That's just, well, extreme. So we live in excess, whether we participate in it or live it vicariously through others - through the media, the tabloids, the fantasies that keep life awful and going.
We turn our eyes to the screen, to the wallet, to a culture of excess and, too often, trash.
The world is a circuit. We are in it. We are one. Our vision should not be this tunnel vision, but the blinders too frequently appear. Do we all just want to be Charlie Sheen? I don't know if we want to be him. But we sure as hell want to watch him.
Kathleen's column runs biweekly Mondays. She can be reached at k.baines@cavalierdaily.com.
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