Nothing to See Here

This morning, I was perusing news on the Internet over breakfast (the 21st century version of the newspaper, right?) when I came across a report that Charlie Sheen has purportedly reached the end of his (very long) rope.

In an interview published in this week’s issue of Life & Style magazine (and on the mag’s website), the actor whose antics have fueled perhaps the most spectacular celebrity meltdown ever, admitted, “I’m really starting to lose my mind. I’m ready to call anyone to help.” Elsewhere in the interview, Sheen added ominously, “My lawyer wants to come over to my house and take the bullets out of my gun.”

Such humble admissions of brokenness and desperation stand in stark contrast to his recent stream-of-consciousness ramblings about tiger blood, being a warlock and winning, ramblings that have dominated the news cycle for a couple weeks now.

And that brings me to a confession of my own.

My first thought upon reading this article was not, “Good for Charlie. He’s finally beginning to reckon with reality.” No, my first thought, in all honesty, went more like this: “That’s too bad.” As in, too bad we won’t have any more stories about the crazy things crazy Charlie said today. Too bad we won’t see any more pictures of him brandishing a machete like some kind of third-world dictator. No more winning. No more tiger blood. No more gibberish about warlocks.

To borrow a phrase from Leslie Nielsen, “Move along. Nothing to see here.”

Almost as soon as that thought traipsed through my mind, a combination of guilt and shame washed over me. I realized anew just how much our celebrity- and entertainment-oriented culture has infiltrated my perspective on the world. Instead of responding in a compassionate and Christian way to the real—albeit bizarre—struggles of a fellow human being, I had a moment of something akin to disappointment that Sheen’s “entertaining” meltdown would no longer be headline material to amuse me.

Edgar Allen Poe had a name for this tendency to rubberneck at accidents—whether they be the kind we pass on the freeway on the way to work or the kind that’s played out in front of us in slow motion, as has been the case with Sheen. Poe called it the “spirit of perverseness,” that dark impulse within our hearts to gaze on someone else’s misfortune.

Even if such an impulse does lurk in the shadowy corners of our hearts—and the fact that 2 million people signed up for Charlie’s Twitter feed in just a few days proves I’m not the only one paying attention to his very public disintegration—it’s not something to be proud of.

I don’t want to be the kind of person who takes pleasure in others’ troubles. But this morning reminded me that that’s the kind of person I can all too easily become when I indulge the temptation to gawk too much at celebrity train wrecks like Charlie’s.