(Don't) Watch What Happens

During the early days of Charlie Sheen's monstrous, fast-talking public wild-out, I will admit to being pretty blown away by it, and I guess by him. What at first seemed like The Highest Shit Ever -- complete with the amazing coke-decision to start his image-rehabilitation tour on the radio program of 9/11 Truth godfather and overall crazy person Alex Jones -- became... well, it stayed really high-seeming. The over-the-top verbosity and epically poor rhetorical decisions and general thermonuclear grandiosity, after all, being what an already jerky/cocky guy -- who has gotten away with decades of conspicuous substance-consumption, property destruction and woman-hitting -- would sound like were that guy coked to the fucking gills. In a "Christ What An Asshole" sense, it was kind of gripping and mostly amusing.

And it still is, when you read the stuff Sheen has said on the page/screen. But listening to his sad sped-up crackpipe voice going on about himself -- always about himself, always going on -- or watching his prematurely wizened and withered visage, little pet's eyes flashing around restlessly, while he's spouting all that bullshit is not really funny to me. It's hugely discomfiting and increasingly depressing, and this is true even if the bullshit itself, the "I'm an F18 with tiger blood and poetry-spouting fingertips" stuff is actually amusing on its own. (It's doubly amusing when, thanks to Buzzfeed, it is attributed to other organisms)

Again, too, because it's the internet, my revulsion is enhanced by being able to watch other people watching this. For me, the hundreds of thousands of rubberneckers who opted to Join The Revolution and follow him on Twitter -- Sheen got 810,000 followers in a little over a day -- were basically people fighting for front row seats at a bumfight, but that's the internet, and that's what you get on the internet. But as Sheen continues (improbably, I know) to pass drug tests, it's getting tougher for me to laugh at any of this. He is indeed "high on a drug called Charlie Sheen," which is why he is continuing to talk about Charlie Sheen all the time, in these amazingly grandiose and insight-free ways. Dude is having a very public manic episode, and whether it's drug-fueled or not doesn't make it any more or less amusing to me. The "bi-winning" thing is funny, on its own. When it's said by a textbook dual-diagnosis bi-polar dude acting like a textbook dual-diagnosis bi-polar dude, you wince. Or I do.

Sheen is better-spoken, better-looking and marginally better-dressed -- I'm not really feeling his bowling shirt couture, personally -- than the crazy person in sweatpants screaming shit about how the CIA can just COME FUCKING GET HIM outside my office yesterday. He is rich enough that he could never find the mountain of blow he couldn't afford. And I don't really like being on the side of those clucking news program types who are like "don't you feel bad about choosing to ingest all these substances?" because fuck that noise, he's a grown-up and can do what he wants to his body. That includes being a total epic dickhole and starring on Two and a Half Men, both of which he has successfully managed to do for years without me really noticing. Or I'd be inclined to say that, I guess, if he wasn't also socking women in the face and keeping his crack rocks so near his young kids.

But I'm going to unplug from his I Need My Meds Tour for awhile, and be glad to do it, because I don't want to watch a crazy person be crazy in this way. I have no doubt that Charlie Sheen is not a very good guy -- hitting a woman once is proof enough of that, and the fact that his kids got removed from his sprawling and no doubt very hygienic home at Eight Balls And Shaved Pudenda Estates yesterday is abhorrent. More to the point, though, I am increasingly unable to laugh at this guy as he hurtles vainly, ragingly, biliously over the edge, blathering anti-semitisms and noxious self-praise as he makes his way down to the bottom. I'm not going to sit here and Dr. Drew you about how I want him to get help -- I'd think that's probably a good idea, but I do not now and never have given a shit about Charlie Sheen. Mostly I just think that pointing at laughing at this mentally ill narcissist in mid-breakdown is maybe not the best use of a week's free time.

Is It Getting Heavy?

The hardworking gargoyle at left is helping to hold up Wat Arun, in Bangkok. Not in the photo, but surrounding the 250-year-old Buddhist temple, are dozens of identical figures, each with the same burden and the same carved expression -- a cross, viewed straight on, between a grimace and a grin. Climb a dozen steep steps, and there are more of him, and then again, and onward and upward for 262 feet and change, although at the upper reaches the temple tapers towards an unborne spire. Most of the height is there. The views get more and more dizzying, the steps less and less appealing in their steep suddenness, and the pathways wrapping the temple are anxiously narrow. The effect, as always for me at places this old and sacred, is a reminder both of how important it is to get nearer to God, and at how small people once were. Or at least how little extra room they used to cut for themselves in their structures.

Thailand is beautiful and difficult and welcoming and very far away. We did finally make it there, after this year's Storm of the Century -- bigger, admittedly, than last year's -- wiped out the day in which we were supposed to travel, and after a happy fluke put us on a flight on December 28. If we'd been unlucky, or if I'd not doofishly hung around the Cathay Pacific ticket counter for an hour and a half on the early afternoon of the 28th waiting patiently for the frazzled ground crew to load a flight with people who were supposed to have left on the early morning of the 27th, we might not have left until the 29th. As it worked out, we were in Thailand for not all that long a period of time, and certainly barely long enough to get our bearings. (How long it might have actually taken to get our bearings in a place so profoundly foreign is a different question altogether) At any rate, while our bodies never quite figured out what time it was -- and still haven't, although my body clock was pretty insanely in-the-red before we left anyway -- we enjoyed ourselves immensely. We ate well and drank well and slept as well as we could when we could, and generally enjoyed the comforts (in Bangkok) of a comfortable and exciting city that seems to work quite well, as well as the company of a great amount of beauty, and my very wonderful sister and brother-in-law and a few million other generally friendly people, none of whom felt quite as desperately close as did the residents of India, in the last big non-honeymoon international trip I took with my wife. It felt like a vacation, overall. And then we came home, the way you do when your vacation is over.

That is, we came home to the United States, which is where I grew up and live, and also a place where, on the morning of my return, a rageful loner and apparently untreated paranoid schizophrenic who bought an automatic handgun with an extended, assault-style clip at a Tucson-area sporting goods store, fired those very same bullets into the head of a third-term congresswoman and the bodies of 18 other people. At which point the aforementioned loner was wrestled to the ground -- the gun jammed, or he was trying to reload, or something; reports are unclear, but there's no answer that isn't horrific or trivial -- and finally arrested. Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords is still in a medically induced coma, but appears, somehow, likely to pull through. She's the first congressperson to be shot in what I guess one would have to call the line of duty since Rep. Leo Ryan was killed at Jonestown back in the 1970s.

And it's horrible, of course. It's a horrible thing in any and every way, and harrowing in its impenetrable and essential meaninglessness -- the shooter, Jared Loughner, appears to have been an adherent of a paranoiac theorist who goes by the unconventionally and VERY intentionally punctuated name :David-Wynn: Miller (more on him here), and was obsessed with issues of grammar and ontology so nuttily far-out as to be effectively non-partisan. As James Fallows points out at The Atlantic, that's ordinarily the way it goes with assassinations and assassination attempts -- any asshole can rock a shoulder holster and a tricorn hat, but history shows that it takes a crazy person to draw down on a public figure. The buttheads protesting imaginary tax increases from behind the guy with the fife and drum might roll out the revolutionary rhetoric, but they're too privileged -- and too sane -- to actually try to deliver on their own self-flattering revolutionary rhetoric. The words, the whole Water The Tree Of Liberty pomp, is there to make them feel more important. Which I guess is fine, as that's a common-enough use for words, but which is also not without consequence, because words mean things.

And so while Loughner is pretty clearly a non-denominational crazy person, what he did is political, insofar as the victims included Giffords and federal judge John Roll (who was killed), and insofar as it highlights political issues ranging from the way we treat the mentally ill to how easy it is for those people to get incredibly deadly weapons to how dazzlingly casual has been the proliferation of the language of violence in our political culture. And the response to it has been political, too -- lesser intellectual lights on both sides trying to tie Loughner to their political opponents, and everyone generally doing what they usually do in the way in which they usually do it. Already idiots on both sides are parsing Loughner's cache'd MySpace (of course) page, weighing his avowed taste for The Communist Manifesto alongside his taste for Ayn Rand, and doing all of it with the fissured poker faces of assholes trying harder than usual not to seem like assholes. Keith Olbermann went on TV and, with his usual meaty solemnity, demanded that a grip of conservatives immediately repudiate their gunsight-adorned websites and "second amendment remedy" rhetoric and whatever else, at the risk of being no longer deemed credible by Keith Freaking Olbermann, who very probably was already at least considering unsubscribing from their email newsletters. Taken together, it's gross. It's grosser than usual, and my people that is fucking gross. But.

But yes, it's enough to make me want to head back overseas, to go someplace else. And you can see the pictures throughout this post -- once you see Wat Arun, you want to see it again, you want be there in it and breathe the cleaner air higher up and look out over that sprawling city and feel that strange and unearned and very human feeling of pride that comes with surveying humanity's accumulated work. But even in Thailand, spending time in a place like Wat Arun is functionally hiding -- the Thais are nice people, it seemed to me, but their country is not always a nice place, and it is governed cruelly and poorly by a not very good prime minister and a military shadow government and a revered and vain and embalmed-looking king, who would be kind of ridiculous anyway because he's a freaking king, and it's 2011. Thailand is subject to censorship of things big and small -- people still go to jail for things like lese majeste (which you can occasionally but not always read about on Wikipedia and can almost never post about on blogging platforms like this), and it has not been long since there was violence in those streets, and it may not be long until it happens again. There are real reasons for unrest and actual problems there, just as there are everywhere.

And so I guess coming back to all this, and touching down in a nation that's not appreciably less thwarted and ulcerous and terrified and indignant and lost than the one I left just a few days ago, is just a reminder of both why vacations are necessary and why they must end. There's a detail in the Wall Street Journal story on Loughner I link to above that comes to mind, here. While in the thrall of his Wynn:Miller-inspired linguistic solipsism, which sounds like a rejected footnote from Infinite Jest and revolves around "the government controlling our punctuation," Loughner called out a question to Giffords at a public event much like the one at which he later shot her. "How do you know words mean anything?," he reportedly asked. Giffords paused, and (strangely) gave him an answer in Spanish. The piece doesn't translate it, and Loughner apparently perseverated on it with all the fever in his ruined mind, right up until the moment he shot her -- and a judge, and a nine-year-old kid, and 17 others.

And it's tempting to say something like "This is how we know," but I think that's not it at all. While there's clearly a sense that the brutal ambient fervor of the political discourse set the stage for Loughner's savagery -- and while certain political undeniabilities did create the circumstances for it -- it seems increasingly clear that Loughner was coming from a place beyond reason and (ironically) language; the bitter irony of his fixation on seeming reasonable (he posted a serious of incoherent YouTube videos filled with Escher-ian syllogism and batshit logic games) and using language precisely isn't lost, but it also isn't worth much. Words are worth something only insofar as we can and do use them.

Thailand is all sound, but to a tourist without the language, it's finally so much polite noise. Here, at home, I speak the language, and am back in my element. What greeted me here at home, and the world into which I'll soon make a grudging return, is not easy to love, but words matter here, and you and I have that much, at least -- for all of Palin's glib and infantile apocalypticism and the gallons of Glenn Beck's porky millionaire stage tears, we can at least talk freely. Can and must and, I hope, will -- talk about this as people who hate that it happened when we can, and talk about those who can't or won't see it that way when necessary. I'm not expecting any of what surrounded and anticipated and half-occasioned this awfulness to sort itself out, and I'm certainly not expecting to sort any of it out myself. But as nice as the holy silence up Wat Arun was, I knew that sooner or later it would be time to come down, and to come back, and to maybe get to work. I'm not looking forward to getting back to my actual work -- although I am kind of eager to get back to cracking jokes about football coaches -- but I am, perversely but honestly, somewhat glad to be home, and certainly eager to get started on whatever is next, and to get on to doing whatever I can do to be a part of whatever will come after this.