The twin tragic figures of the week: Charlie Sheen and Qaddafi. Both would be laughable except that both are doing damage, although Charlie's is not nearly as widespread or serious. Sheen is not only self-destructing, but other-destructing. The folks on his TV show (each TV show employs hundreds of people), his kids, they are all paying a price for Sheen's rants this week. But his rants are fairly amusing--fools and trolls, indeed. Qaddafi's speeches have been jokes. As one tweet noted, Qaddafi blamed drugs, teenagers but not rock and roll. He even blamed Al Qaeda--is he so deluded as to think that we might fall for that an side with him as an ally against terrorism? Oh, we had. Oops. Not any more.
Is it too soon to laugh at these guys? I remember a key South Park where they announced that enough time had passed that they could make AIDS jokes. Is it too soon? No, of course not. A morbid sense of humor can get us through dark times, as M*A*S*H illustrated so nicely. But we can keep in mind that both of these addled celebrities are doing heaps of damage. We can multi-task, can't we?
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