Can You Dig It?

Politics is eating my soul, so I'm done talking about it here.  I'm not going to mention the twisted apricot of prevarication that is about to be inaugurated next week unless he happens to tangentially relate to something I find interesting or important beyond the sphere of the latest bureaucratic kerfuffle.  But there is something that has been dragged into the political discussion recently that actually has broader ramifications for our culture, and that is the concept of "fake news."
This phenomenon exists on both sides of the aisle, and thus is a non-partisan burr in the saddle of our public discourse.  I would be okay if we let Breitbart and Mother Jones battle it out in the Thunderdome and then executed the survivor, because their stank is becoming toxic and it's polluting the honest commentary and news that we actually need to make sense of the chaos that is our body politic at the moment.
Fake news may seem like a new thing, but actually it's not really.  We've all seen the tabloids at the supermarket check-out right?  Well the reason those things are there is because someone, actually probably a lot of someones, maybe someones who won't admit to being someones, actually buy them.  They want to read about Kim Kardashian's cellulite and the fact that Elvis works in a 7-11 in Mississippi, oh and let's not forget Bat-boy. There are enough people out there who buy those things to keep the tabloids in business while actual newspapers have to scramble to figure out how to compete in the age of the interweb. There is a distinctively American phenomenon that I think reflects the reality that we are confronting at the moment, and it is actually fun to talk about, I will leave filling in the somewhat disturbing implications of this to you the reader.
That phenomenon is the world of professional wrestling.  I'm not talking about this:

Because unless one of those guys is your son, that stuff is boring

I'm talking about this:

Yeeeah, Brother.

Aka, Wrasslin'. 

Now, when I was a kid, I watched these dudes do their thing on Saturday morning, after cartoons, it just seemed like a logical extension for a 10 year old boy, ridiculous men doing ridiculous and seemingly violent things, but no one ever seemed to get really hurt.  It was easy to tell the good guys from the bad guys.  The good guys were honorable and never cheated (unless they had been cheated against many times and the deck was really stacked against them).  Authority was either A.) clueless (the darn ref never saw anything) or B.) nefarious and corrupt (for some reason Vince McMahon would let Bobby Heenan or Fred Blassy actually run the shows, what was he thinking).  It was all about working class hero type fantasies being played out by mesomorphs in spandex. The "prizes" were gaudy gold belts and the companionship of beautiful women, what else is there right?

When you're a little kid, you love to root for the good guys, called "babyfaces" or just "faces," even though you are years away from actually knowing that sort of industry insider language.  And you root against the Heels, who are often the epitome of the things you hate: bullies, snobs, cheaters. As you grow up you learn that the most interesting characters are not necessarily either the Faces or the Heels, but the guys who tiptoe the line a little, like Rowdy Roddy Piper and Ric Flair, they could sort of go either way depending on what the script called for.

The critical inflection points in the world of wrasslin' were those moments when a Face went Heel, or vice versa.  The guys who were tweeners like Piper and Flair could really pull this off almost any time, and so they tended to be critical to plots, even if they weren't actually doing much wrasslin'. If you watched it back in those days, you will remember that Piper's Pit, Rowdy Roddy's "talk show," segment was the absolute highlight of many an hour of wrasslin'. It was where good guys got ambushed by bad guys and often where the bad guys got their evil outed to the world.

As you grow up, you start to get a sense for how these things go and you start to develop an interest in a lot of the behind the scenes stuff that goes on.  You take a bit of pride in knowing how scripts are going to unfold, and there is nothing more exciting than a "shoot," a match or an encounter that goes off script, because that happens, or it used to.  When I was in college, my roommates and I watched wrasslin with that sort of eye, looking for the clues about what was going on.  This was during a pretty exciting era for the wrasslin world, there was a major competition in the real world between WCW and the WWE  for the TV ratings and market share.  There was a little indy operation called ECW that operated in a bingo hall in South Philly who basically made a living by giving the more grown up (but not necessarily more mature) wrasslin fan what they wanted: more sex, blood and chaos.  It was in this era that Vince McMahon, almost by accident stumbled upon an important reality: rule breaking was becoming popular.  The way I remember it, Stone Cold Steve Austin was the first one to really snap the chain.  He was bad, but he was not bad in a conniving, cowardly way, like most of the really good Heels, think Bobby Heenan, who is sort of what you would get if Draco Malfoy developed a serious IHOP addiction.  He was a "manager" and not at all capable of physically intimidating anyone, he relied on his thugs and he ran away and sniveled whenever things got rough.  Steve Austin started out as a flunky for Ted Debiase who was a well devised Heel whose gimmick was being rich (perfect bad guy for the wrasslin audience, most of whom were decidedly working class), but Austin flipped on that whole scene and started to make himself what seemed like an actual menace to society, drinking beer in the ring, pushing the boundaries of what language you were allowed to use on TV.

He went "over" like you wouldn't believe.  "Over," is what they call it when the fans start rooting for a wrassler.  Stone Cold was popular with the naive Face crowd, with the more cynical Heel crowd, and with the fans like us who liked to be in the know about stuff.  Pretty soon, others started to follow the pattern Hunter Hearst Helmsley (Triple-H) followed a similar pattern, moving from a snooty, rich Heel, to a cerebral puppet master (The Game).  Dwayne Johnson went from being the worst Face ever Rocky Maivea, to perhaps one of the best characters of all time: The Rock.  To college age fans, this seemed like a great thing, until you went to a couple of live shows and sat in the midst of an audience who clearly wasn't appreciating the nuance and the story-telling art of what was going on.

It might seem funny to pick up a National Enquirer and read the ridiculous stuff in those pages as a sort of laugh at the absurdity of it all, but it gets less funny when you realize that there are people out there, grown up people, who work at jobs, and drive cars and vote in elections, who actually believe that stuff.

It got a little less funny the first time I saw an 8 year old kid with a Stone Cold Steve Austin T-shirt that read "I Just Whooped Your ASS." If I had said that when I was 8, my mom would have whooped my ass.  This kid's parents actually bought him that shirt.  I don't think I appreciated at the time that this C-change that was happening in the wrasslin' world was actually a ruination.  When I was a kid, Hulk Hogan told us to say our prayers and eat our vitamins before he went out and ripped his T-shirt off and proceeded to do justice to the evildoer.  Sure, that wore a little thin by the time I was 18 or so, but I had grown into an understanding of the underlying truth of the business, it was all just storytelling and melodrama.

These days I can't really watch wrasslin' none of the characters really make much sense, anyone that matters has taken up residence in that gray area.  They're all trying to be Roddy Piper and Stone Cold Steve Austin and that's not a good thing, because it muddies the plots, and let's face it, the story has always been the thing.

Fake news has muddied the plot to the point where he-who-must-not-be-named can accuse a reporter from a fairly well established network or newspaper of being the very same thing as Buzzfeed.  If I can bring myself to look at this with the level of detachment that I used to have while watching Monday Night Raw, this might be entertaining, but this is happening in a world where healthcare and fighting in wars are at stake.  This is not about whether the Macho Man can win the Intercontinental Title and get back Miss Elizabeth.

I just can't detach from it enough, so I'm done.  I'm raising the people's eyebrow at everything I read, and everything I hear, and I'm watching out for someone about smack us with a steel chair.

If you smell what the Rock is cooking.