Vanity Fair, October 2010; Rolling Stone, June 21 2012

Oh god, not this joker again. These are the first words that enter my head when I see the new issue of Rolling Stone on the newsstand. The cover features a haggard Charlie Sheen. He looks like a cross between a chain-smoking bobble head and a contestant vying for first place in a Keith Richards look-alike contest. It’s certainly not pretty.

The story promises me “a week on the edge with Hollywood’s last wild man.” Haven’t we already been on the edge with this guy? For what felt like way, way longer than a week? Who can forget the wild man and all his tiger blood and torpedos of truth and goddesses and winning. Was he back? Please, no.

The story starts out with a lovely anecdote about Sheen drinking and hitting on a girl who previously auditioned for the role of his 15-year-old daughter on his new show. The classy train continues on to the station from there. The story updates us on what Sheen’s been doing since his much publicized warlock-themed meltdown in 2011, which started with Sheen taking on CBS and ended with him setting a Guinness world record for Twitter followers, and negotiating merchandising and licensing deals before embarking on a concert tour.

The Rolling Stone article doesn’t do Sheen an injustice, in fact quite the opposite. It mentions his failure to get a “conventional grip on his personal life” and downplays his many violent attacks on women. He’s referred to as a “ruthless negotiator” whose actions could be considered “heroic.” Someone who has never made excuses for what he’s doing. Seriously, Rolling Stone? The magazine even goes so far as to credit his crazy catch phrases like “tiger blood” and “warlock” to his love of films like Apocalypse Now and Jaws. Wait, he’s not crazy! He’s just a lover of film.

But it seems Rolling Stone couldn’t build their summer douche bag special issue around Sheen alone so they also included an interview where we get to go deep with John Mayer and his regrets. Referring to ex Jessica Simpson as “sexual napalm,” making really racist comments, breaking Taylor Swift’s heart, unleashing “Your Body is a Wonderland” on an unsuspecting world; it seems there’s a lot for Mayer to apologize for. Not to worry, Rolling Stone gives him ample column inches to apologize and talk about what a changed man he is.

The interview left me with the sense that I should feel sorry for Mayer and his shutdown Twitter account. So misunderstood. So remorseful. So changed. I half expected to turn the page and find a piece celebrating the wonder that is Chris Brown. Oh wait, that’s what the Grammys are for.

It’s certainly not news that there’s a double standard, especially in Hollywood, when it comes to men and women behaving badly. The same week the Rolling Stone issue hit newsstands Lindsay Lohan was all over the media again for crashing her car, allegedly attempting to cover up crashing her car, and for paramedics being called to her hotel room when it was feared she was unconscious. She was really just asleep and didn’t hear people knocking on her hotel room door. Thank god that in real life paramedics don’t show up every time someone hits the snooze button a few too many times. If that were the case, paramedics would be at my house every morning.

Was she unconscious from drugs? How long until she drops dead? Will she ever get her career back? Surely she can’t think a Lifetime movie about Elizabeth Taylor is going to resurrect her career? What happened to the cute girl from Mean Girls? What a mess Lohan is! How many different ways can we find to talk about what a mess Lohan is? It was the usual TMZ-style reporting which might as well have been sponsored by the Lindsay Lohan Celebrity Death Watch Commemorative Calendar.

When Sheen goes off the rails (cocaine or otherwise) he’s a rock star who is speaking the truth and sticking it to that evil Hollywood machine—the same machine that made him the highest paid sitcom actor for wearing ugly bowling shirts and playing a really, really, really thinly veiled version of himself.

When Lohan goes off the rails (cocaine or otherwise) she’s the little girl lost, the, pardon my French, fuck up, with no hope of ever getting her life or her career back on track.

The media delights in watching Lohan fall further and further—and helping her to do so—without ever giving her the same shot at redemption that a Sheen or a Mayer get. In October 2010 Vanity Fair ran a cover story on Lindsay Lohan—entitled “Adrift.” Nine months later they ran a profile on Charlie Sheen—entitled “Charlie Sheen’s War.” The Sheen story was newsworthy for several reasons, one of which being that Sheen wanted to be paid a million dollars and have final story approval. He didn’t get either, but he really didn’t need approval because he doesn’t come across all that bad in the piece. Sure it talks about his love of porn stars, his 1998 cocaine overdose and his role in the Heidi Fleiss trial, but it also talks about how he “redefined the internet,” how he helped actor Tom Sizemore with his addiction and manages to never delve too deep into Sheen’s history of misogyny and violence against women. Let’s not forget this is the man who once threatened to put his wife’s head in a box and send it to her mother. Oh, that zany Charlie! What antics!

Compare this to the Lohan cover story which spends the opening paragraphs describing how crappy Lohan looks before descending into questions of “what went wrong?” and “is it too late?” Again and again in the piece Lohan has to defend herself with the writer never seeming to believe her or offer a shot at redemption. It repeatedly mentions how her reputation is in tatters and tries to find answers to why Lohan is so, well, adrift. In Sheen’s war there’s still the prospect he could win. Lohan, well, she doesn’t stand a chance.

Illustration by Matt Daley.

When Google, citing concerns over security and censorship, pulled their operations out of China in March this year, they were widely praised for taking a stand for democracy. But Google’s move wasn’t the first time a Western entity had taken the moral high road in regard to China.

In fact, almost 200 years ago, the British government also stood up for its beliefs. After they had expended countless resources developing an opium industry, China shut down its borders to the drug, claiming that addiction was taking its toll on Chinese society. The Raj, seeing not only its business threatened, but also its ideals of free trade and capitalism, twice sent its navy to war to force China to open its borders. Britain won, and China had to relent.

Of course, comparing an enforced opium trade with online free speech may slip into exaggeration. But when Google indignantly left China, an important point was lost in the sanctimonious chatter: to many in China, the difference between the Google of today and the Empire of yesterday isn’t as clear as we might like to think. And as the web increasingly becomes a battleground for cultural and political exchange, it’s worth remembering that history is never as far in the past as we might hope.

In the aftermath of Google’s departure, the chorus of satisfied approval was overwhelming. Though Google itself treaded with the kind of care any profit-minded company might, the press was less tactful. When Google launched a chart that tracked which services China had blocked, prominent tech journalist Steven Levy called it an “Evil Meter.” Vanity Fair’s Michael Wolff suggested that China was simply a bully, and that Google had “beat an honourable retreat.” Meanwhile, the National Post and the Globe and Mail did their best to cast the decision in moral rather than economic terms. The complexities of geopolitics and culture were reduced to a tired old approach: “Western values good; China bad.”

One might say “fair enough”: we are talking about a totalitarian regime here. But a few hundred years of Western global domination means there’s just no way to get around the optics of a massive American multinational saying its moral views are the right ones. In light of history, that kind of ideological dogmatism comes off as more than a little paternalistic.

But Google is not a parent and places like China, with their own histories, cultures and practices, are not children. To make matters worse, Google’s business model is essentially a paragon of Western democratic capitalism: disseminate information without restriction and then find a way to make money off the ways people access it. This may seem neutral, but it isn’t. It relies on the idea that spreading knowledge and information is an inherent good because an effective social system empowers individuals to find out things for themselves, and change their lives accordingly. For us, the sovereign individual is everything.

By contrast, even in contemporary Chinese thought, what still reigns is the idea that the community gives people their place in life, and the structures of ritual and authority give life order. The individualism that underpins Google’s business model is frequently seen as both arrogance and selfishness because it seems to prioritize the individual over the knowledge of the state and its rulers. The questions Google raised in China weren’t simply a matter of “repression,” but of how people locate themselves in reality. This fact seemed to be lost on most Western journalists. (About the only dissent in the technology press came from Gizmodo’s Brian Lam, himself the son of immigrants from Hong Kong, who wrote a piece titled “Google Would Remind My Grandpa of the Arrogant White Invaders.”)

Is it a noble goal to try to spread values and ideals that seem to have benefited the societies that have adopted them? Sure. But principles like democracy and freedom of speech don’t simply float down from the sky into open arms below. They are borne out of centuries-long processes rooted in social, material, and intellectual change. To assume their universal good—as Google and the Western press seemed to—is to deny their historical and cultural specificity. And at a certain point, it ceases to matter what is “objectively” right when such presumptuousness and arrogance only serve to galvanize people against you.

For all that, it’s worth noting that when Google did leave China, many there weren’t too affected. They had Baidu—a Chinese search engine, albeit heavily censored, that is the sixth most-visited website in the world and is still growing. And this is the thing, really: a Western navy can no longer force “our” way of thinking on the world, because power is no longer centralized in the West.

But history rattles noisily still, and the values of an open, democratic web aren’t universal or even necessarily right. And some, presented with the image of Google getting up on its moral high horse, find it hard to forget an armada of ships, their holds stocked with opium, barging their way into the Canton harbour.