The Oily Sheen of Power Basting

March 04, 2011
15th-floor office, late morning
"Winners"

cjh
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It's no fast and easy coincidence that everyone's hollerin' at their powers these days. It's part of the thirty-year cycle I'm always raggin' on about. Obama kicked it off a few years ago let's say. Really it was Bush, and Iraq, and Katrina, and the Ice Caps, and the Bubble, but let's keep this easy for the sake of digestion; I don't want to spend too much time writing this. Point is, once it's in the air, in the ether, it's up for grabs. Anyone can take a whiff and get high on their own righteous plight. Collectively unconscious.

So we're part of it. We elected a President on it. The Tea Party drinks it like moonshine. Tucson will never forget it. Folks in North Africa and the Middle East certainly have a taste for it. Even ask Wisconsin about it. Better yet, ask the half of their government that's taking political refuge in Illinois. While you're there, ask Rahm Emanuel to comment. He's probably just had a conversation with Charlie Sheen about it.

So there's an oily sheen of power hollerin' on everything these days. People wanted to know what all this Internet and Facebooking was gonna do: you're looking at it. Don't gotta have a good idea to be heard these days, or a good cause, just a good loud voice for hollerin'. Not to say there aren't good causes. There's both good and bad in this, like everything, always. It just takes different forms.

Toward the tail end of the previous thirty-some-year cycle, Paddy Chayefsky wrapped it all up in a beautiful film called Network. Thirty-five years later, we're wrapping it up in Charlie Sheen.

So...Sheen's gone full gonzo and it's really frickin' incredible to watch. To put it in somewhat obscure and sheenish terms, he has identified that the media has gone full Sheen, the self-reflexive feedback loop that is the Internet has swallowed itself, and he is more than happy to be the Sheen that shines a mirror in the face of TV.

There is real virtue in some of what he is doing. The other stuff, of course, will kill him. And it's not until then that we'll know exactly how to polish this story for posterity. So for now, I withhold judgment and opinion, and I continue to ride my own soaring comet toward the land of the warlocks, if only to have it fizzle out in a few years with a collective forgetting and beginning of the next thirty-year cycle.