File this one in the “losing” category. From James Hibberd at Entertainment Weekly:
Charlie Sheen unleashed his Violent Torpedo of Truth Tour on the Motor City on Saturday night before a crowd that greeted the actor with an adoring standing ovation and concluded with booing and walk-outs.
[…]
9:18 – “Nothing terrifies a troll more than its own reflection,” Sheen continues, before shifting gears into politics. “In a recent poll, they told me I’d bring down that whore [Sarah] Palin. I don’t have time for that nonsense.” [Read about the poll he’s referring to here.]
9:20 — People start booing Sheen. Not playing around, but actually booing him. Sheen yells, “I already got your money, dude!”
Until this point, the libertarian in me was truly pulling for Sheen to continue sticking it to the Hollywood Man and fulfilling his own personal definition of #WINNING. Sheen has probably been “banging” cocaine and porn stars for a couple of decades now, and the fact that it became an international crisis all of a sudden still strikes me as a bit unfair. We all can imagine that he must have been extremely difficult to work with, but despite all the drugs and all the women, he managed to show up to work and do his job for seven seasons. That’s actually pretty impressive, in a filthy, depraved sort of way.
I’ve heard reports that “Two and a Half Men,” through international syndication and DVD sales, is worth over $50M per episode to CBS, and maybe even twice that. Sheen, the big-name star of the program, was making about $2M per episode when this saga began and wanted a bump to around $3M per. Sure, no one really needs all of that money, but fair is fair, and if he’s the biggest piece of a puzzle worth at least tens of millions of dollars, wasn’t it on CBS to make it work out so that the show could go on? Forget about the raw values and think about the principle: in all likelihood, Sheen is mathematically worth the extra million per episode for the network and the dozens (hundreds?) of people whose bills are paid by “Men.”
And besides, Money Talks alone should earn the man the benefit of the doubt.
It isn’t black and white, of course, and I don’t mean to defend him–I would love to say that Sheen is only hurting himself, but he has a family, including children, and you can’t just go around trapping porn stars in hotel bathrooms. Still, the man struck me as a genuine free spirit–a contrarian with a skepticism about the natural order of every-things that made him seem downright insane yet charismatic at the same time. This even applies to his 9/11 trutherism. I’m usually quick to dismiss 9/11 truthers as America haters, but my read on Sheen was that he just doesn’t believe what anyone tells him and would rather stir the pot than heed deference to facts. That would be consistent with everything else in his life. He lives like a rock star and relishes it–a breath of free-based air, if you will. So why not just pay the man the money and let this go away?
Anyway, it’s painful to feel forced to respond to a remark delivered to get attention by a person who is utterly desperate for it, so I’m not going to overly indulge Sheen or anyone of the other anti-Palin bed-wetters who would enjoy it; after all, the ad hominem attack is provably false and meant to offend people like the ones who frequent this blog, so why bother? Also, Charlie is Martin Sheen’s son, so we can’t realistically expect him to have reasonable political views.
But what I will say is that I’m disappointed that Sheen, a star who I thought did everything in his power to buck the establishment, has embraced the single most pathetic cliché in Hollywood today: bagging on the mother of five with some of the most caustic words imaginable.
And even in deep-blue Detroit, he was booed for it. Now that’s what I call Tiger Blood.
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