The Boy Who Cried Wolf

I love Charlie Harper. He is so badass. He is that uncle, with a beach-front Malibu house, I wish I had. That is probably why I have imagined Charlie Sheen to be a total badass too. It is highly likely that my judgment of him is a little hazy because of the character he portrays on a sitcom - it is actually Charlie Harper that I adore - but who cares? Sheen doesn't look like he gives two shits about anything. And that's what's awesome about him. 

The past week was a monumentally crazy week for Sheen. His long-running television program, Two and a Half Men, was canceled for the rest of the season because the things the eternally high or drunk actor said on a radio show. He was accused of including anti-Semitic slurs in his insane radio rant. He had referred to the show's creator, Chuck Lorre, by the Hebrew name, Chaim Levine. Sheen felt that he was personally attacked - that his integrity was called into question, so he called out the integrity of his so-called attacker by attacking Lorre's decision to change his name. It was a stupid move on Sheen's part because a change of name doesn't necessarily mean a lack of integrity. But his rant was hardly evidence for Jew-hatred.

For starters, Lorre's name at birth was in fact, Levine! And while I do not know his Hebrew name, or even if he has one, Chaim could well be the chosen Hebrew parallel for Charles or Chuck. So my suspicion is that the executives at CBS and Warner Brothers who labeled Sheen's remarks as anti-Semitic, just needed an excuse to finally pull the plug on the show. They were done with Sheen's antics and had to come up with an explanation for why Sheen's drunkenness or domestic violence wasn't enough to cancel the show before. It gave them a sense of being on moral high ground.

In other news, John Galliano was fired from Christian Dior on similar grounds. It's great that the world we live in takes charges like "anti-Semitic" and "racist" so seriously. But I'm afraid they can now be used too loosely. I'm afraid this seriousness will create a counter-trend where these charges will have very little value.

We all remember the Boy Who Cried Wolf from Aesop's Fables: when the sheep were actually confronted by a wolf, the villagers did not believe the shepherd boy and the flock was destroyed.