We are too much with ourselves. We’re fraying at the seams; the world is fraying at the seams. Yet it seems Charlie Sheen is the news of the day. This tells me the American penchant for humor persists, during war and even during bad—really bad—economic times.

So, as in Obama, there is in Charlie, much humor to be mined, the Dark kind, but humor nevertheless, of the political kind. Which is why I’m suggesting to the vast array of liberals and leftists out there who chance to read this, that you can get some political mileage out of Sheen’s most apolitical plight, despite its unfortunate, tragic aspect. In light of the red-hot battle between rank-and-file union workers and Capitalist America (and, by extension, Republicans and Conservatives, your whirling political spins just might take serious flight among receptive Americans of similar political bent.

So listen up: You folks are creative at this (“Sarah Palin was responsible for the massacre in Arizona . . .”). Charlie, you can claim in usual, playbook hyperbole and other over-the-top language, has every right to file for Workman’s Compensation. That’s right, Workman’s Comp. In one sentence captured, he rasped, “I was fired.”(by inference, Charlie was fired “for cause,” as they say in the Firing business, which term, of course, American business never mentions, since it’s bad for business, if you will).

Anyway, stay with me. Charlie, you can scream, announce, and demonstrate through your usual outlets, is the victim of an . . . “unjust cause,”—yes, our Star is yet another union worker-victim, discriminated against by the greed of Big Business, of Capitalist-greed, of avarice among “the Rich” and Right Wing. yada, yada; . . . who are directly and indirectly guilty of working him (despite union contract and, he told the world, “a family to support and love”), under overly harsh, demanding studio heads, in an emotionally unsafe work environment that triggered his current behavioral disease (that’s right, “disease”), which, in turn, caused Charlie to publicly stress, which, in further turn, led to his further decline, which, in still-further turn, caused his Warner Brothers employer to (a) hook him off stage and unceremoniously toss him out Stage-Right—him! Charlie Sheen!—for behavior that was unintentional and tacit (b) to stem the outflow of lost millions in revenue from deserting Private-Sector-Rich-Guy sponsors, whose phones were probably ringing off the hook with, “I’m-not-buying-your-product” calls from the morally offended “Religious Right” and virtually every of other Christian group. Don’t mention that, of course.

But do emote on the evening news with the requisite liberal’s “sadness” (like Senator Chuck Schumer’s) that Charlie is another tragic example of the assault on worker “rights,” etc. Get a little poetic: Say, “It’s American Big-Business-1920’s-style all over again in 2011—exploitation that will impact the jobs and virtually destroy the lives of millions of other such struggling union workers and (get this in) their families and children—just like what’s happening to the Brothers and Sisters in Wisconsin’s beleaguered public-sector and teacher unions, who are about to be axed by their (Republican) employers.

So, remember, emphasize words along the lines of, “Worker Exploitation,” and in your friendly media “interviews,” the business about business’s failure to provide adequate “social safeguards” for keeping a worker’s mental and physical health on an even keel. For added punch, perhaps work in a metaphoric allusion to Charlie as a “victim of the Triangle Waist Shirt Company fire,” but survived his firing only to be forced into “Rehab for Actors with Afflictions”—an insufferable gig (outside of Hollywood), that will only increase his pain and suffering . . . and impact job prospects, to boot.

You get the picture. Something like that.