It is common knowledge that the Obama administration cut a deal last summer with Big Pharma, before Congressional hearings on health care reform began.  In exchange for keeping drug prices and Medicare kickbacks high–in other words, unreformed–while taking on new customers via extended coverage, Big Pharma agreed to pay an additional $80 billion in taxes and fees.

That this agreement contradicted Candidate Obama’s promise to negotiate openly and to use the government’s stake in the drug market to drive down prices, was considered small change in exchange for what was considered the big gain: Big Pharma agreed to not lobby, publicly and privately, against the Democratic reform bill.

Like Obama and Big Pharma, the WWE is paying a king’s ransom to win its Monday night showdowns with Total Nonstop Action Wrestling (TNA), which has gone all-in on selling Hulk Hogan as the TNA franchise savior.

The biggest name in the game likes us instead of WWE, TNA says, so shouldn’t you?

Except that Hogan isn’t the biggest name in professional wrestling.  That distinction belongs to “Stone Cold” Steve Austin, arguably still the best mic worker in the game, and in his prime, a fast, charismatic, unpredictable game-changer who consistently got as big a pop, and sometimes bigger, than Hogan:

To get a sense of how much sway Austin still holds over the wrestling world, Hulk Hogan had only to drop Austin’s name into a radio interview to set wrestling blogs on fire with speculation on the WWE’s demise–despite the fact that severe knee and neck injuries have, for three years now, relegated Austin to a premature retirement of B-movie hero roles.

So, the WWE released notice that Austin remains under contract–rumored in the mid seven-figures–to sit at home, not wrestle, and collect merchandise royalties.

Like Big Pharma, the Stone Cold persona has grown big enough to topple the very system in which it prospers.

Big Pharma develops the drugs you need, and then often want, and even a perceived disruption in its ambitious work and processes portends serious, life-threatening demise, while its continuation could very well put all of us into outer space:

Austin not only created but now drives what is still the biggest storyline in wrestling, the Attitude Era:

If Big Pharma remains on the sidelines for the duration of the debate, then the White House and the Democratic Party will have fried some of the bigger fish clogging up the national health care pond.  In particular, insurance companies will take hit after hit, while eventually adding some 30-odd million subscribers (subsidized by the government) to its rolls.

Similarly, this Monday night, TNA’s Hulk Hogan will stand toe to toe with his oldest and most accomplished rival, Ric Flair, who will step into the ring one last time (until the next time) to holler and hustle with whatever moves he’s got left:

While, next Monday night, Stone Cold will guest host but not wrestle for the WWE.

For both events, expect much pop and sizzle, and good memories of great wrestling moments past.

But, as with whatever bill President Obama eventually comes out of Congress, however it happens, the one thing you won’t see is wholesale reform or change.

Austin replaced, then improved upon, Hogan.  Many young wrestlers have since come and gone, all promising some new twist or turn to revitalize the industry, only to fall off the map, while Austin sits at home, cashing the biggest check in the game.

For a while, it seemed, President Obama was one such fresh face in the political fray, a game-changer and, more importantly, a reformer, who would take on, then take down, the biggest names in the game.

Instead, it seems that Democratic politics, like wrestling, gets older, strikes some stop-gap deals, and continues to strain under the stress of what has ailed it since the mid-90s.

Evan Bayh: the Doink The Clown of Republican Politics

You remember Doink the Clown, right?

Doink The Clown is the quintessential placeholder in professional wrestling of the last fifteen years.  He wrestles competently but does his major character work as a shill for bigger stars.  He doesn’t win titles and he doesn’t lose significant matches.  His career continues to this day, making no waves, the funny-looking guy with the clever gimmick and silly music.

Like Doink The Clown, Evan Bayh has a reliable base of fans who like his name a lot.

The two-term junior senator from Indiana, former Secretary of State, and Governor, Evan Bayh inherited the state political machine, if not the progressive legacy, of his father, Senator Birch Bayh, who navigated Title IX legislation, the Equal Rights Amendment, and the 25th and 26th Amendments to the U.S. Constitution through Congress during his three terms in office.

Unlike his father, Evan Bayh has played second banana to major Republicans throughout his career, standing with George Bush to announce the 2002 joint resolution authorizing the Iraq War, co-sponsoring the Patriot Act and its 2006 renewal, and introducing Bush’s Medicare tax-cut/deficit-accelerator in 2004, while opposing partial-birth abortions, sponsoring small farm bills, and currying extensive favor with the Clintons, who tapped him to be Senator Clinton’s 2008 VP before her losing the nomination to Obama.

Like Bayh, Doink The Clown capitalizes on a popular name, as do World Wrestling Federation/Entertainment bigwigs, to sustain a mediocre career.  Bayh climbed the state political ladder, famously never losing an election battle, but also rarely facing serious opposition.  Doink  has previously presented a kind of inoffensive universality, wrestling here for Jerry Lawler against Bret Hart (before stepping aside for the main action), there against Chris Benoit (again stepping aside quickly and without incident).

His character is so inhabitable that it has been played, without notice, by numerous wrestlers willing to don the clown paint and unitard.

As Bayh steps aside during this tough election season, he will be replaced by one of two famous sons of Indiana, either Republican Dan Coats, who has made a career of filling in Dan Quayle’s seats as Quayle ascended the GOP ladder, or hoops legend Democrat Baron Hill.

Senator Bayh says that he’s not running for re-election in 2010 but if he did, he would definitely win.  Every media outlet, from The New York Times to The Economist to The National Review to News Max, has either paraphrased or directly quoted this inane declaration.

It’s the equivalent of listening to Bill Walton explaining how he’d handle Shaq in the post, or Jim Palmer ending his comeback to allow the kids more time to develop.

Bayh also explains that he’s done with the partisan environment of Washington, D.C. and can better serve the nation in other ways.

Legislative service is, by definition, contingent on the approval of an electorate, who audit their decisions in the voting booth.  It’s the practical difference between the Greenpeace guy with the clipboard sidling up to you on the street and the 60 recorded votes needed to pass environmental reform legislation.

If Bayh did not oppose the insular political world that allowed his ascendancy in the first place, he’s done with it now.  After years of taking bribes from Rick, he’s shocked–shocked!–to find that gambling is going on here:

That legacy of political inheritance will serve him well on the dinner/lecture/memoir circuit.  But you’ll forgive attendees if they have to pause every now and again to wonder if they haven’t seen this guy before.

Martha Coakley is what’s wrong with the Democratic Party?  Try Tony Garea.

In the early 1980’s, Tony Garea wrestled like a champion.  His mic work was solid, he had a couple of signature moves, he gave as good as he got.  Night after night, he wrestled the big names of the day: Hulk Hogan, Junkyard Dog, Randy Savage, Ted DiBiase, et al.

And Tony Garea always lost.  No matter the advantage, or how certain the victory, Tony Garea excelled at blowing the sure thing.

How could it happen, wrestling fans used to wonder, that a guy so certain of victory could always come up short?

Not that it wasn’t easy to root against him.  He was blah, earnest, sporting a modest haircut.  If he didn’t rile up the crowd as easily as his opponent did, he also didn’t self-destruct or breakdown like the prima donnas of his day.  Garea oozed respectability but also managed to look strangely out of place.  He was like that guy at the bar who’s really good at darts but can never seem to get a game going with other people.

Here’s a signature performance from January 1984, against a spry Jesse Ventura:

If you start at 8:23, you’ll see Garea systematically break down Ventura, and execute a series of near three-counts.  Ventura kicks out, and the masterful Garea comes back again, completely in control, until the very last moment when Garea fails to execute a simple turnaround, knocks himself out cold, and lays down for an easy pin.

Ventura hardly breaks a sweat securing the win.

Of course, Tony Garea was one of the great jobbers of the WWF.  He wrestled solely for the purpose of losing.  His job was to make the other guy look good when he won.

Jobbers serve an important function in professional wrestling.  They test the water for bigger talents, giving the fans an anonymous opponent against which to judge whether the new guy has the right stuff.  They are immediately recognizable because they get regular work, and they look the part, so their losses are credible.  They fill valuable air-time and ring space while the more important workers are resting, healing, traveling, or negotiating their next contract.

The only thing jobbers don’t do is win.

Martha Coakley is your classic jobber, in a party that is getting regular work these days as the Party of Jobbers.  She put in her time as a local, reliable Democratic state insider.  Among a slate of highly-qualified liberal candidates, all capable of filling the enormous shoes of the Liberal Lion of the Senate himself, Ted Kennedy, she worked a smart and efficient campaign to get the Democratic nomination to finish out his term.  With  a filibuster-proof 60 Democratic Senate seats on the line, she exuded calm, poise, strength, and accountability.

And then, a mere 20 days before the election, she went on vacation to the Bahamas over the Christmas Break.

And snarked that she wouldn’t deign to stand outside of Fenway Park shaking the hands of voters.

Before deciding to challenge the baseball credentials–the only unbloodied-socked leg he has left to stand on–of red-staterRed Sox hero, Curt Shilling.

Until she got her hat handed to her on election day.  By a former Cosmo pinup.  Whose signature move was to have someone drive his truck next to the campaign bus.

Of course, Democrats will tell you, it should have never come to this.  Coakley was the wrong candidate, the special election comes at an especially bad time for Democrats nationwide, any incumbent would lose an election in this environment, and the political establishment failed to do its due diligence in polling accurately.

Now, despite their insistence that it was an anomaly, Democrats nationwide have either shut down their semi-progressive agenda of ambitious health care reform, or initiated systemic reforms of a legislative process that worked just fine with the other guys were in power.

George W. Bush pushed through tax cuts, Medicare benefits, and No Child Left Behind with much slimmer majorities.

As the viral “Balls Beer” ad campaign suggests, Democrats seem to get so caught up in the manners of politics that they seem to lack, er, spine:

I’m not buying it.  One year in, President Obama is operating without a steady base of core constituents.  That may be a good thing, in the sense that a potential cult of personality is kept at bay.  But it’s a bad thing for a political party’s base to refuse to act like a base.

Republicans spin Coakley’s loss as an indication that voters are sick and tired of one-party bullies unwilling to play nice.  Never mind that it’s the Republicans who have collectively refused to vote individually to support any aspect of any legislation or nominee set forth by the Democrats, who wait, eager and smiling, for the other guys to like them enough to play fair.

But that’s the point, isn’t it?  How does a vegan make sausage?

]]> http://thefastertimes.com/prowrestling/2010/01/26/democrats-package-jobbers-not-jobs/feed/ http://thefastertimes.com/prowrestling/2009/12/31/the-avatar-affect-wrestling-culture-and-politics-in-the-decade-that-refuses-to-end/ http://thefastertimes.com/prowrestling/2009/12/31/the-avatar-affect-wrestling-culture-and-politics-in-the-decade-that-refuses-to-end/#comments Thu, 31 Dec 2009 20:13:49 +0000 John Evans http://thefastertimes.com/prowrestling/?p=432 Call it “The Avatar Affect,” for how James Cameron’s awful monstrosity of a movie embodies the cultural and political trends of the previous decade borrowing extensively from  professional wrestling (rather than all the ballyhoo about how James Cameron’s new movie heralds a new kind of movie-making).  Reality is merely a “vehicle” for presentation. Dress up reality, lipstick-on-a-pig style, through a toxic mix of narrative, self-importance, deception and denial, until what’s happening becomes incidental to how it happens.  Booms, loud noise, and high-definition help, too:

Let there be no doubt about this now-thankfully ending decade: in wrestling, as in much of American culture, the 2000s were the Decade of Anti-Heroic Corporate Swagger.

Roided-out (like much of the rest of sport) in its pursuit of maximized ratings, spectacle and brand growth, the WWE defined its self-advertised “edge” well within the limits of traditional media-driven mores.  Sexism, homophobia, and racism pushed the familiar buttons of outrage, wrapped in flags and blood, pulsing to loud music, with prime-time ready PG ratings.

That dropped and dropped.

If, as Chuck Klosterman brilliantly argues in his essay, Football (excerpted here), American football feels conservative but acts liberal, professional wrestling in the 2000s was its bizarro-universe doppelganger: looks liberal, acts conservative.

Having vanquished rival wrestling associations, the WWE lost much of the imagination that defined its heyday run from the mid-80s through the 1990s.  As Mankind focused on his writing career, the WWE tried and failed to introduce one clean-cut, marble-mouthed hulkazoid after another, to little effect.

The biggest superstars of professional wrestling in the 2000s were mostly late-career wrestlers defined by t-shirt ready gimmicks/slogans: Steve Austin (middle finger in air, chugging beer, Austin 3:16), The Rock (Just Bring It, eyebrow), The Undertaker (The Last Ride, tall), Ric Flair (whooooo!), and, of course, Hulk Hogan (Real American, bandanna, mustache).

The era of Hawk and Animal in black-and-red face paint, free associating cheap heat about weasels and weasel-slappers on public-access television, night after night, this was not:

Not surprisingly, an upstart rival organization, Total Nonstop Action Wrestling (TNA), partly led by the slasher-flick I-just-won’t-die Eric Bischoff, poached one discarded brand after another from the WWE, until low and behold, Hulk Hogan himself signed with TNA for a January 2010 first match.

As with the end of the 90s, the prospect of new Monday Night Wars offers a new period of prospectively better entertainment, though the WWE remains the behemoth.

Still, the WWE’s biggest personality, “Stone Cold” Steve Austin, whose wrestling is severely limited by various spinal and leg injuries, and age, is paid a “high-money” contract by the WWE to essentially sit at home and do nothing.

From a business standpoint, this makes a lot of sense.  Even the suggestion that Austin might follow Hulk Hogan to sign with TNA would set the WWE into an even faster tailspin.

Wrestling-wise, however, it makes little sense.  Austin can’t really wrestle anymore. Because of age, few popular headlines really can.  And yet, even when he doesn’t speak, when he just stands there being Stone Cold, he’s got more personality, wit, and vigor than the rest of the WWE put together:

In other words, the biggest name in wrestling gets the biggest pop because he doesn‘t wrestle anymore.

Call it the apotheosis of brand development: content is irrelevant–once the machine is running, stand back and watch it do its thing.

Of course, this preference for the appearance of the thing over the thing itself was hardly centered in the ring.

Like the WWE, much of the mainstream cultural output of the 2000s seemed obsessed with retreading trends from the 1990s, with an eye toward market expansion.  Instead of producing albums and developing a fashion line (P. Diddy), rap’s great mainstage act of the 00’s, Jay Z,  is going to move the Nets to Brooklyn.  Instead of Britney’s situating Lolita in the bump-and-grind, Lady Gaga deconstructs the aesthetic of popular music videos, which, sigh, requires some background music. I guess  Perhaps the greatest rock band of the last fifteen years, Wilco left one big record label for a subsidiary of the same, gained creative control, and made three kick-ass albums before ending the 00’s with the kind of bland major-label 90s-era big record it eschewed when finalizing Yankee Hotel Foxtrot.

In politics, Bobby Jindall turned a promising neo-Clinton into Kenneth The Page from 30 Rock.  Hammertime took on a retro-80s touch when Tom DeLay danced with the stars.  George W. Bush was perhaps the most heartfelt Texan, Christian, folksy, plain-speaking United States President to graduate from a long line of Yale patriarchs who grew up in tony suburban Connecticut and inherited their fortunes from commodities profiteering.

He looked like a total dude when he cleared brush on the ranch in Texas that he bought months before the 2000 election.

He leveled some major league threats against the terrorists and promised to revitalize our schools.

He played the part of president really, really well–all, of course, except for the actual governing.

In 2008, voters took note, only to find many supporters wondering whether this first year reflects a Democratic mastery of political aesthetics–brilliant, well-educated, multicultural, handsome Chicago liberal–or whether President Obama will do more than look the part.

More than any decade in recent memory, the 00’s were defined by a wary understanding that what we were watching happening was entirely disconnected from reality, and yet also, as close to reality as we were going to get.  In politics, especially, it seemed that old, white men behind curtains moved the levers of power and made lots of scary noise, stayed one step ahead of the muckrakers–usually with the complicity of those politicians in other branches of government we expected to keep them honest (Nancy Pelosi, we are looking in your general direction).

When outright opposition was slippery at best, we became obsessed with antiheroes who, like us, were complicit in the system, but secretly imagined themselves working to initiate some better form of revolution.  This phenomenon was best encapsulated in the story arc of The Matrix, which begins with the seeming liberation of human beings from machines, only to witness the hero himself willingly sacrificing his life to reboot the machine and, hopefully, make it run better:

Rarely has such self-realization so cleanly dovetailed with not-rocking-the-boat.

Maybe the best movie of the 2000’s, Waking The Dead, contains this exchange that sums up nicely the limitations of such reform-from-the-inside ambitions:

Sarah Williams: I don’t want to watch you turn into a cog in their machine.
Fielding Pierce: That’s so fucking condescending. Sometimes cogs can make machines run a little but better.
Sarah Williams: Sometimes yes. Mostly they turn in circles and wear out. Then they get replaced.

For most of America, the major wrestling stories of the decade happened outside of the ring.  Wrestlers’ Deaths, The Hogan Family Drama, XFL, and Linda McMahon’s Senate bid garnered far more attention than Johnny Damon’s cringe-worthy saved-by-a-stuffed-tiger-then-Sgt. Slaughter-dressed-as-a-homophobic-Santa hosting gig on Monday Night Raw.

If wrestling will engage in some sort of return-to-the-sport cross-league rivalry of yore, it will do so to ape the reliable American appetite for “good, clean fun” in an entertainment form defined by its eagerness to break rules and stretch credulity.

Yet, the cynicism and blatant misrepresentation inherent in the war rationales, Clean Skies initiatives, heck-of-a-job-Brownie Katrina responses, etc. of the 2000’s, reflects how American cultural and political life now apes wrestling’s easy blurring of reality and performance, to obscure inconvenient, well, truths.

Inside the ring.  Outside the ring.  In wrestling, as in America anymore, what’s the difference?

Think you hate health care reform now, fellow Democrats?

Just wait until you drive it.

So, you’re a Democrat.  And you thrilled at the 2006 and 2008 elections, when all of America seemed to wake up and smell the Bushes, discover their ineptitude, and vote the Republicans out of office.

In ushered an era of new accountability and transparency.   Of curbed executive privilege and bipartisan reform.  The first female Speaker of the House, and the soft-spoken veteran insider-cum-Majority Leader, alongside the Great(er) Communicator, seemed to promise that happy days, oh happy days, were here again.

Ten months later, the Democratic Party is about as popular as Ken Jeong popping out from under the ring to co-guest host  WWE’s Monday Night Raw with Jeremy Piven (making a fine recovery from his near-death, off-Broadway, sushi poisoning)

The shelf-life of Ken Jeong’s appeal may mirror that of the Democratic Party, but really, disheartened Democrats should take a page from Jeong’s co-star, Chevy Chase, the seemingly left-for-dead funnyman who has turned a stint last spring on Chuck into a career resurgence in the masterful Community.

Not the contemporary, shadow-of-his-former-self-with-still-impeccable-comedic-timing Chevy Chase. Instead, the spry, young, self-effacing Chevy Chase of yore.  (Hopefully, we can cut out the intervening, excruciating 26 years: Cops and Robbersons, Memoirs of an Invisible Man, The Chevy Chase Show, etc.).

In National Lampoon’s Family Vacation, Chase plays the earnest, hard-working, well-intentioned Clark Griswold, whose plan to take his family on an all-American road trip goes horribly wrong.

It begins inauspiciously with Griswold and his son arriving to the car dealership to pick up their Antartic blue super sports wagon with the CB and the optional rally fun pack, only to get stuck with a total lemon:

Democrats should find this scenario eerily familiar.  We sat down at the dealership (polling booth), talked it over with the dealer (Obama) and ordered the shiny (single-payer), powerful (universal coverage), tricked-out (extended Medicare coverage) health care that would lower our deficits, eliminate the bloodsucking middlemen, and make all of us healthier.

Ed went to headquarters (Congress) and called us with the good news: we’d have a car by Labor Day!

Of course, Salesman Ed was shocked–shocked!–that headquarters couldn’t deliver by the deadline.  He’d get us the car, all right, but the deadline is going to be tricky.  Six weeks at least, but then you’ve got to consider that, really, the better car is the truckster (elections are coming up, there are other issues on the table), it’s going to be hard to swing the wagon this time of year.

Now, of course, the deadline is Christmas–oh wait, that won’t work either.  The deadline is the State of the Union address.  And the truckster is a souped-up jalopi that, if you balance everyone just right, will haul lots of people across the country just fine:

After all, what you really wanted were wheels, right?  And, really, wasn’t your goal was to cross the country?

Howard Dean is right to say that what is before Congress right now isn’t the ideal of substantial health care reform:

“This is essentially the collapse of health care reform in the United States Senate. And, honestly, the best thing to do right now is kill the Senate bill and go back to the House … You have the vast majority of Americans want the choices, they want real choices. They don’t have them in this bill. This is not health care reform and it’s not close to health care reform.”

But that’s the issue, isn’t it?  If we want anything–literally, anything–that even resembles health care reform, then we have to go with the party that’s sort of a little bit maybe interested in health care reform.  And that’s the Democrats.

And if we want to kill health care reform, or plan to make a ton of money such that we won’t need to worry about the cost of health care reform, then we get behind the Republicans.

And in the middle, of course, is the electorate, terrified out of its mind at the prospect of living without insurance, reasonably encouraged by the good stuff in the current legislation (props to Ezra Klein at the Washington Post, who outlines the how and why of these in much better detail):

–Extended coverage to 97% of Americans
–Mandatory private national nonprofit health care coverage made cost-effective for the poorest Americans
–No denial of coverage based on nefarious pre-existing conditions
–No arbitrary monetary caps on annual and lifetime coverage
–No sudden dropped or watered-down coverage
–Caps on out-of-pocket expenses
–Required coverage for preventive care
–Short and long term deficit reductions
–Mandatory tax credits for small businesses providing group coverage to employees

Americans have every right to believe that the Democrats screwed the pooch on this one, missing out on much more substantial reform that would significantly improve the situation of health care and health care coverage in the United States.

And that may come–as President Clinton argues, Democrats are toast if they don’t pass something before next year’s mid-term elections.

Democrats are probably toast either way.  Republican opposition has been lockstep perfect in its total refusal to participate in any reform effort, and as a result, they seem principled and stubborn, while the Democrats seem over-reaching and flailing.

Unfortunately for Obama, his best argument is that what America might have become without his economic and health care stewardship would have been far, far worse than what it’s getting now.

Fellow Democrats, this is health care reform in 2009 in the United States.  It’s ugly, cheap, miserable, and nothing like what we thought we would get.  And it just barely beats our current system.

In other words, its a political achievement.

Like Santa Claus, The Easter Bunny, and Franklin Delano Roosevelt, the legend often turns out to be much sexier than the real thing.

Democrats, it’s time to drive the family truckster off the lot.

]]> http://thefastertimes.com/prowrestling/2009/12/17/democrats-its-time-to-drive-the-family-truckster-off-the-lot/feed/ http://thefastertimes.com/prowrestling/2009/12/08/a-target-demographic-wrestlers-and-health-care-reform/ http://thefastertimes.com/prowrestling/2009/12/08/a-target-demographic-wrestlers-and-health-care-reform/#comments Tue, 08 Dec 2009 19:08:15 +0000 John Evans http://thefastertimes.com/prowrestling/?p=391 Watching superstars of a bygone era come out of the woodwork to take pot shots at former WWE CEO Linda McMahon’s 2010 Senate ambitions, one thing is clear: few demographics better represent what Americans can gain from a national health care program than that of professional wrestlers.

In today’s Politico, Erika Lovley writes an amazing beyond-the-mat perspective on Linda McMahon’s ambition to become the Republican challenger to Chris Dodd’s embattled Senate seat in Connecticut.

Lovley talks with a slew of top-bill retired wrestlers like “Superstar” Billy Graham, who take issue with the WWE’s refusal to offer health care coverage to its featured performers (note: the WWE generally provides full coverage for medical services provided to wrestlers who are injured in the ring).

At issue is the WWE’s designation of the people it employs to wrestle.  Essentially, the WWE considers its wrestlers contractors, and pays them a straight-up salary without benefits.  Legally, the WWE is entirely within its right to do so–a legal reality made clear last spring, when a federal district court threw out a class-action lawsuit brought by former wrestlers, who claimed, via a tax dispute, that their service entitles them a designation as employees, who are entitled to group coverage.

Like many Americans stuck between jobs in the current recession, wrestlers working on independent contracts receive much-needed cash, while undertaking a long-term gamble with their health that may one-day bankrupt them.  Unlike many Americans, professional wrestlers take dramatic risk to life and limb, as neatly embodied in Mickey Rourke’s match with Necro Butcher in last year’s movie, “The Wrestler.”  The punches may be fake, but all too often, the ladder-drops, staple guns, sand, and blood are real.

Former Minnesota Governor Jesse “The Body” Ventura points out several problems with the WWE, in general, and with its labor and health care policies in particular, in a recent interview with ESPN.Com Radio.  How have professional wrestlers come so far in a skilled labor practice, decade after decade, and yet still have no union?  What kind of independent contractor is not allowed to contract his services to other employers?  Why do so few independent contracts own the licensing rights to the characters they perform during their contacted service?

Most importantly, Ventura argues, how could the McMahons earn hundreds of millions of dollars while witnessing the seeming roll call of early-age disability and sudden death of their former contractors, and not offer them full health care?

In the last year, the WWE has taken great strides to make its programming more family-friendly.  Gone are the late, great days of Attitude-era beer-swilling, lingerie-wrestling, finger-tossing, crotch-pointing, 30-foot-steel-cage-dropping matches among wrestlers clad in black, covered in blood.  Here, again, are the square-jawed heroes insisting, “You can do it!” in bright blues, yellows, and oranges.

Probably, this comes down to market trends and personal preference.  If you were an Ultimate Warrior fan, heady days are here again.

Fortunately, Linda McMahon’s Senate run has drawn attention to the fact that times were not always so peachy-keen, and that, more often than not, fans leave the arena a little miffed if their beloved heroes haven’t been bruised and bloodied–you know, taken down a notch or two.

Whatever the rationale, it’s good to see former wrestlers like Graham stepping up and insisting, “The fact that we were out there experiencing trauma and drawing in untold millions for the company [means] we should have at least had some sort of health insurance.”

Sadly, such testaments are more universal to the situation of American business in the late 20th and early 21st century.  Someone’s earning the money, but someone else entirely is making it.

Constituents of Chris Dodd won’t be surprised to witness hypocrisy, bald-faced lies, gross profit-stealing, and a squeaky-clean sheen on an otherwise rancid candidacy:

It seems par for the course in Connecticut where, whoever wins the public contract in 2010, the benefits seem destined to land in a few deep pockets.

Watching AARP wrestling superstars Hulk Hogan and Ric Flair trade barbs, then come to blows, at the outset of the Hulkamania: Let The Battle Begin tour of Australia, one can’t help thinking of that other battle of the geezers, Senator Joe “Spoiler” Lieberman and Harry “Really, I’m In Charge” Reid – two old pros locking horns, going for broke, and remaining relevant to the game, regardless of the outcome.

For non-fans, one of the great head-scratchers of professional wrestling is how so much attention can be paid to staging elaborate, fake fights that inflict real, crippling damage on the wrestlers’ bodies. Bodies bruise, bones break, blood flows. Why devote so much attention to careful planning, if everyone still gets hurt in the end?

In the October 19^th issue of The New Yorker, Malcolm Gladwell draws disturbing parallels between the practice of dog fighting and playing football. He notes how sports like NASCAR, following significant in-action damage, responded quickly with wholesale changes that diminished the prospect of future catastrophe: improved technology, better on-site reaction time, changes to rules that de-incentivize brutal behavior.

But, Gladwell notes, in football the opposite seems to be happening. The athletes grow bigger and stronger, the pads get light and thinner, the hits become dirtier and more crippling. As a result, incidences of brain trauma increase, and onset earlier, resulting in a near 17-times increase in the likelihood that a retired football player in his 40s suffers from early-onset dementia and Alzheimer’s.

Like dogs, Gladwell concludes, football players become so archetypal in their embodiment of virtues like courage, sacrifice, and determination that fans lose sight of the humans under the helmet, and the terrible abuse they endure in the ritualistic and cathartic violence.

One would like to imagine that American politicians readily fall on their swords, but even the most casual observer quickly understands otherwise. In politics, as in professional wrestling, a pantomime of risk-taking—and the “selling” required to make that pantomime convincing to the viewing audience—typically suffices for the actual thing.

Americans like to believe that their elected representatives are virtuous, noble, selfless (mostly white) men of the people, tirelessly advocating for the well-being of all humanity, or, barring that, all humanity within the most recent incarnations of their gerrymandered districts. In reality, we know that nearly all politicians are not-so-bright egomaniacal manipulators, who secretly know that they are one election cycle away from blowing this two-bit whatever and really hitting the bit time.

And yet, those very qualities that make for an effective political candidate—handsome fake smiles, fingertip-ready generalities, a firm handshake, a capacity for seeming bold while never offending anyone—embody the very slipperiness that political observers so readily decry.

“What to make of our thwarted expectations?” the thinking seems to go. “Why isn’t my hero heroic?”

So it is that we find Harry Reid initiating, this Saturday, the first procedural vote for what will undoubtedly be a tedious legislative process that, in the end, will commence a watered-down version of health care reform that may or may not reduce your co-pays come 2035.

That some version of the legislation will come to a vote, and pass, is in little doubt to anyone paying attention.

And yet, in this corner stands Smoking Joey L, screaming to anyone who will listen that he will personally filibuster any bill that even smells like a public option.

Of course, the public option that the Senate is considering is a watered-down compromise of the watered-down compromise that the House kind-of-not-really passed into committee two weeks ago.

Think ordering Samuel Smith’s Taddy Porter and getting half a cupful of Natty Light from a keg, and you’ve about got it right.

And, in that corner stands Huckleberry Harry, pouring shots of bar whiskey from of a bottle of Johnny Walker Blue, promising health care for all if this bill just passes!

And over in Australia a paunchy Nature Boy slaps a foggy Hulkster, who quickly blades his forehead, then stumbles through a bloody hazy. Hogan and Flair walk through the motions and rile up the crowd like they always do. And they get paid well to do it.

When you’re tired of doing real work, you can at least bloody your own face and hands. No one’s going to know the difference and it doesn’t really matter.

Right?

A neurologist, to be precise.

As Captain Lou Albano and Cyndi Lauper once attested, that pesky medulla oblongata can do heinous things to the brain’s moral center, when left unchecked.

In 1983, Albano and Lauper met by chance on a flight and became fast friends.  At the time, Albano was at the tail-end of a heel run as a manager who, basically, would bring up a new wrestler, then turn on that wrestler and so viciously beat him that the wrestler would recover, declare a feud, and turn face.  During this run, Albano managed 15 title winners, but slowly lost airtime in the early heyday of independent-minded superheroes and supervillians like Hulk Hogan, Roddy Piper, and Andre The Giant.

That year, Albano appeared as Lauper’s father in “Girls Just Wanna Have Fun.” A huge MTV hit that instantly established a crossover storyline, Albano began trashing Lauper for not giving him his proper due as the true star of the video.  On MTV, Albano appeared in more Lauper videos–“She Bop,” “Time After Time,” “The Goonies R’ Good Enough”–while at WWF events, Albano’s public ire at his lack of recognition grew.  A staple of the WWF’s shows at Madison Square Garden at that time, Albano incensed fans in 1984 when he made sexist remarks about Lauper, declaring also that he had also written her songs.

On July 23, 1984, The Brawl To End It All marked the WWF’s first appearance on MTV–an hour-long feature match that was MTV’s highest-rated show to date.  Lauper and Albano “managed” surrogates who wrestled in the main event.  When Albano lost, he graciously apologized to Lauper at Madison Square Garden.

Lauper accepted his apology, then announced that, actually, Albano had been suffering all these years from calcium deposits on his medulla oblongata, and that their removal had also removed his “evil tendencies.”  When Roddy Piper interrupted the reconciliation to smash a gold record over Albano’s head, a bona fide face was born:

Hogan intervened to save Lauper and Albano.  Piper picked up Albano’s gripe about feeling overshadowed by Lauper, and challenged Hogan to a title shot.  Again, on MTV, with Lauper and Albano in his corner, Hogan defeated Piper by disqualification, when Paul Orndorff, Jr., jumped into the ring to help Piper, followed by Mr. T, who jumped up from ringside to help his friend, thus setting the stage for a winner-take-all tag-team match of Hogan-T versus Piper-Orndorff, the first Wrestlemania.

That spring, Albano began a solid B-celebrity run, guesting as an ambling, shuffling, friendly extra on 227, a henchman on Miami Vice, movies with Brian DePalma, Joe Piscopo and Roddy Piper, and eventually, as the voice of Mario on The Super Mario Brothers TV Show:

If Albano and Lauper never quite reached the same stratospheres of fame separate of each other, they expanded the brand image and reach of MTV and the WWF while doing some of the best work of their careers.  Albano’s appeal on MTV opened the door to millions of eventual Hulkamaniacs, just as Lauper made female-driven rock tough and cool in wrestling arenas more accustomed to The Scorpions and KISS.

Wrestling fans know that nothing heals old wounds like an unexpected face turn, especially one with a great backstory.  If a questionable medical diagnosis ultimately enabled the tastemakers to endorse each other’s greatness, the fans sure didn’t seem to care. Part of what makes professional wrestling so engaging is that bygones become bygones whenever the plot requires it.

The Obama administration and Fox News have turned recently to tenuous bases.  If traditional Republicanism seems in serious decline, so too does the political capital of a new president seeking to enact major reforms, much less one who is regularly decried by liberals as having sold-out their ideology.

Wrestling fans know that nothing heals old wounds like an unexpected face turn, especially one with a great backstory.  Even if their feud is too satisfying to neglect come the next election cycle, President Obama might extend the olive branch and sit down for a few exclusives, in exchange for the kind of support that, only a few years ago, Rupert Murdoch seemed ready to extend to Candidate Clinton.

What’s needed, though, are seasoned professionals who, like Piper and Hogan, can step in and do some of the heavy lifting to really get things moving: divisive, mic-happy, safely-skewed and over-the-top talking heads whose sheer bombast polarizes red and blue state Americans alike, giving cover for substantive exchanges about the issues of the day.

Someone we all wouldn’t mind seeing cross-checked a couple of times with steel chairs.

Has anyone checked to see if Madison Square Garden is free?

Admit it.  When you watched Tom Delay’s most recent appearance on the ABC hit series, you thought, Now here’s a good guy!  So game!  Is that an ELEPHANT on his back?  What a card! Clad in what can most charitably be described as barbershop-chic, DeLay’s near-Samba to War’s 1975 paean to bipartisanship exuded a kind of vulnerable humanity absent from his corrupt, power-mad political days:

Mumbling the step-count under his breath, DeLay seems years removed from the Cuban-cigar-chomping, Chocktaw-shakedown-ing, under-the-table-wife-paying, Abramoff-teaming opportunist who undercut the entire moderate wing of the Republican party, then famously questioned at a national press conference the grieving Michael Shiavo’s manhood and devotion as a husband (despite Delay’s own having, in the absence of a living will or trust or medical directive, denied dialysis to his coma-ridden father sixteen years prior).

Transformation is, of course, a strategy that politicians and wrestlers have employed for years.  Losing ground with your fan base?  Change your appearance.  If that overs, change your name, then your entrance, and finally, add a gimmick.

Voila!  Tom “The Hammer” Delay is now “Hammer Time” Tom Delay.

Or was.  Almost.  DeLay’s recent announcement that he will leave the show, due to multiple stress fractures in both feet, invites further sympathy and reconsideration.  This is a wild guess, but I’m thinking we’ll shortly see a thoughtful memoir from DeLay, followed by the chairmanship of a new national nonprofit charity, then finally, a modified second-life as party elder.

Call it “The Newt Effect.”

Pro Wrestling has witnessed similar improbable transformations turning mid-level wrestlers into bona fide superstars.

Randall Poffo toiled in the mid-majors until he donned over-sized sunglasses, hired Elizabeth Hulette as his kayfabe manager, changed out Donna Summer’s “Hot Stuff” for “Pomp and Circumstances,” and entered the ring as Randy “Macho Man” Savage.

“The Ringmaster” had a hard time getting over with fans until he shaved his bleach-blond tresses, lost the Million Dollar Belt, and re-emerged as the bald-pated, profanity-spewing, beer-chugging Stone Cold Steve Austin.

Hossein Vaziri carried a green Hulk Hogan’s water until Hogan nailed down his all-American-hero persona by defeating Vaziri’s Iron Sheik at Wrestlemania I.

Perhaps the most infamous, controversial, and accomplished transformation came in 1996, when Hulk Hogan turned heel in the WWE-rival World Championship Wrestling, and extended his career a full decade by becoming “Hollywood” Hulk Hogan–the former hero with a huge chip on his shoulder who never got what he deserved and now would make everyone pay:

(Note: especially impressive to note here, and only partly seen in this video, is the observation later made by co-conspirator “Big Sexy” Kevin Nash, that, despite fans littering the ring with trash and one fan desperately jumping into the ring running full-throttle at Hogan, Hogan never missed a beat–for 17 minutes, on and off camera, Hogan kept giving perhaps the best cheap heat ever to the audience.  No one leaves!  All of the wrestlers are eventually escorted out of the ring and arena under armed guard.)

If Tom DeLay has set his career on strange footing, he’s also at least, to some extent, re-branded himself to his base.

Not so much, it seems, for those long-serving pols with 2010 races who see their numbers dropping quick: Chris Dodd’s attempt to redefine himself as anti-health-care-industry, pro-working man reformer of the corporations and industries who’ve lined his campaign coffers with millions of dollars, or Harry Reid’s insistence that he can in fact lead his party, or even John Ensign’s quiet insistence that, sure, he may have paid-off his mistress’s husband but, hey, he didn’t break any laws.

Some late-career reformations have been positively disastrous.  Adrian Adonis’s homophobic, lisping, perfume-spouting, permed-hair turn as “Adorable” Adrian Adonis, led to his eventual breakdown and drop-out from major-event wrestling.  Ivan Koloff’s Soviet heel-turn ended abruptly with the fall of the Berlin Wall.

Richard Nixon’s 1968 quiet-talking, super-hugging, up-with-people turn as a “Nixon Now” Everyman concealed, for a good five years, the epic corruption that defined his presidency:

Hybriding Adonis’s and Nixon’s playbooks, the anti-gay-marriage Christian right has adopted a whole slew of surfer-friendly, hipster-happy, fun-loving, homophobically-embattled advertisements meant to soft-peddle otherwise unpalatable vitriol.  Especially obnoxious is a recent ad featuring small children flummoxed at the story of “Anne and Eve”:

As has been noted throughout 20th (and now 21st) century politics, you can put all the lipstick you want on a pig, but at the end of the day it’s still a pig.

The most effective contemporary transformation seems to be one presaged by Saturday Night Live, and embodied by that anti-pugilist chessmaster in a town full of checkers players, President Obama.   “The Rock” Obama has slowly, carefully and methodically enacted a series of reforms that, while unpopular on both sides of the aisle, have also created a fresh wave of bipartisanship among the Republican Party’s elders, culminating, this week, in Arnold Schwarzenegger, Tommy Thompson, Bill Frist, Mayor Bloomberg and now, Bob Dole’s collective endorsement of Obama’s health care reform.

Charisma aside, Obama is winning both sides of the aisle over to his reform plan, working with Congress to revise various bills, while using the bully pulpit of the presidency to canvass all media outlets.  Absent from this effort are the usual executive tricks–signing statements, executive orders, line-item vetoes–that out-flank the traditional legislative process.

Obama campaigned, and has acted during his presidency, on the principle of restoring to the presidency many (though not all) of the traditional limits flouted by previous Chief Executives.

Restitution is a careful, effective watchword in many transformations.  For every toe-tapping Congressman, there are five or six who find significant political traction among voters in calling for a “return to order.”

If Hogan’s turn as heel goes down as one of the most enjoyable and shocking events in Pro Wrestling history, Hogan’s various returns as The Real American Hero, waggling his finger and shaking off chops to set things right for the Hulkamaniacs, thrill the 13-year-old heart in all of us:

Republicans might take note.  The only thing worse than a shake-all-comers “The Rock” Obama, after so many sub-par Bushwhacker years, might be a long, healthy run, of Obamamania.

]]> http://thefastertimes.com/prowrestling/2009/10/08/the-rock-obama-its-not-as-unlikely-as-you-might-think/feed/ http://thefastertimes.com/prowrestling/2009/10/05/hey-rock-more-terminator-less-junior/ http://thefastertimes.com/prowrestling/2009/10/05/hey-rock-more-terminator-less-junior/#comments Tue, 06 Oct 2009 00:18:34 +0000 John Evans http://thefastertimes.com/prowrestling/?p=279 Pro wrestling’s greatest post-wrestling star?  By default, it’s Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson.

For a while, it seemed that The Rock would inherit Arnold Schwarzenegger’s mantle as uber-everyman action hero with a heart of gold.  Early work in “The Scorpion King,” and cameos on “That 70’s Show” and “Saturday Night Live” suggested an easy balance between swagger and charm, an ability to play to audiences across demographics, alternately winking at and embodying the persona separate of the aw-shucks man.

Best of all, it seemed, The Rock had a leg up on Schwarzenegger: he could act.

A cameo by the Governator in 2004’s Walking Tall suggested a kind of passing of the torch to many critics.  Even The New York Times profiled Johnson’s post-wrestling career as “a carefully calibrated strategy to transform Mr. Johnson…from meathead action star into family-friendly leading man and a member of Hollywood’s top tier.”

It would be easy to poke holes in the many, many unfortunate aspects of the trailer for The Rock’s latest movie, Tooth Fairy, which JoBlo.Com right describes as closely resembling “those shitty fake movies Adam Sandler spoofed in FUNNY PEOPLE”:

He’s selfish and a new rookie needs some mentoring.  He’s mean to kids but learning to love late-career Ashley Judd.  He’s vain but eventually sports pink tights and blue wings.  Billy Crystal, as Q to the fairies, schools him in the uses of invisibility spray in the hockey rink.

Surely the seen “You might just be the worst tooth fairy ever!” presages some unseen variant on “But I do!  I do!  I do want to replace the old tooth fairy!”

Arnold Schwarzenegger’s film career follows closely his post-movie politics: centrist, moderate, simultaneously excruciating to both sides.  For every Predator, there was a Kindergarten Cop; for every Twins, a quick, glib “The pavement was his enemy!” No wonder, then, that, as he leaves office, the Governator has more friends across the aisle than he does in Orange County.

Denzel Washington took one turn, and one turn only, toward the family-friendly, in The Preacher’s Wife.  His latest, The Book of Eli, suggests a kind of an alt-Cormac McCarthy take on Mad Max, full of pathos and regret:

There is great profit to be made in kid-friendly fodder.  Sequels abound.  Witness the careers of Tim Allen, Robin Williams  and Bill Cosby, for that slow, inexorable turn from unexpectedly heart-wrenching to predictably cloying (”Chickens do not have lips,’ indeed):

When I was a child, I pleaded with my dad to take me to see Hulk Hogan in No Holds Barred.  Following his celebrated turn in “Rocky III” and fresh on the heels of his Wrestlemania IV’s battle with Andre The Giant, Hogan seemed primed for what Barton Fink might have called a classic Wallace Beery good-and-evil wrestling tale.  Instead, Hogan rescues a disabled brother from an evil-minded younger Tom “Tiny” Lister, Jr., all the while wooing Joan Severance’s corporate spy with roided-out bathroom humor:

Wrestling announcing legend J.R. Jim Ross once described this film on-air as “No Holds Barred?  More like No Profits Allowed!”

Of course, The Rock is no Hulk Hogan, for better and worse.  But The Rock does give us some good insight into the phenomenon of the talented, handsome, intelligent, capable newbie crossing genres and lighting up the scene.  Whether he shades Schwarzenegger, Hogan, or other more famous wrestlers-turned-actors, remains to be seen.

The worst/best hybrid knows no greater limit than that other true original, Weird Al Yankovitch, whose 1989 “UHF” leaves much to be desired:

Here’s hoping The Rock doesn’t stretch too far for next year’s Oscar.