Because You Never Asked

(4/98)

     I could not comfortably leave this subject without taking a swipe at the institution alluded to in the title of this essay. To call Pro Wrestling an "institution" might seem somewhat grandiose, but when one ponders the fact that this vaudevillian massacre can be seen on TV every night of the week for substantial swabs of time, it must be considered as much woven into the fabric of our culture as shopping malls, baseball or pop music. Once again, in choosing to speak about this daily, gruesome spectacle, we are really talking about media induced violence. If not for TV, none of this could have the psychic effects it possibly has. (Causal connection, admittedly, is still just a matter of "faith" here.)

     It could easily be said that the writer has gotten a bit carried away, that the theater of Pro Wrestling is a trivial thing that nobody in their right mind could take seriously. We all know this is just an exhibition, that none of this is real, that no true athletic competition is taking place . c'mon . lighten up.

     Why is it that the "moral majority" feels the sight of a female breast will send us into an uncontrollable, delirious, simmering sexual rut, while the hours and hours of Hulk Hogan mayhem made so accessible to all ages every night of the week, is a harmless exercise in manly posturing?

     Certainly, the elimination of Pro Wrestling from the human experience is no vaccine for violent behavior. Notwithstanding such admission, I challenge anyone with the civility and maturity to not be interested in this steroidal dementia to tune it in for just 20 minutes . ok, for just 10 minutes. Go ahead; check it out, for the sake of broadening your worldview.

     Perhaps the first thing you should notice is that a substantial part of the throbbing mob in attendance is made up of adolescent and pre-adolescent males. (I can't "prove it", but I'd be willing to bet that many of these kids are already --- or about to be --- smokers. Cigarettes and violence have always shared much of the same turf.) What is the message?

     It would be difficult to find any positive aspect of human behavior in evidence. There are extreme doses of unfettered vanity, generally portrayed by men whose masculine beauty has been recklessly manufactured in an unhealthy, chemical way. There are, like lava flowing uncontrollably from a volcanic eruption, oozing gobs of conceit and braggadocio. There is not the barest hint of humility, modesty, remorse, compassion, tenderness, sportsmanship or respect for your fellow man. An absence of fair play is considered not just legitimate, but necessary. There is an overwhelming tone of anarchy pervading the ambiance that runs contrary to any concept of civilized behavior. Pro Wrestling is a festival of everything obnoxious in the human character.

     Once again, and notwithstanding the wrath of the Redundancy Gods, it must be said that the violence so leadenly displayed at "Wrestle Mania" or at the movies is easily mitigated by saying that none of this is real and everyone knows it.     

But it is just this unreal quality that might lead to the propagation of physically aggressive behavior.

     One watching a boxing match can empathize with the loser's pain. We see his eye go shut, his nose bleeding, his face swelling; we feel his fatigue and desperation. We know we wouldn't want to be him. But when Clint Eastwood punches someone in the face during some adolescent barroom brawl, there is a tendency not to connect this with pain and suffering. It might even seem comical, sexy, romantic or "cool"; just fade out and fade in and our star's wounds are miraculously healed and his macho aggression has landed him in bed with the girl we all want. The wholesale quality of the mega-violence put forth during a Pro Wrestling show has much the same quality; everyone is getting beat up but nobody is getting hurt. There are no consequences to be paid.

     Fighting is fun.

     When I first started writing these essays, quite logically, I felt as if I were in control of their content and my thoughts and feelings were the impulse behind their progression. As the years have gone by and the intellectual content has begun to take root, branch out, thicken and double back on itself in a complicated entwinement of ideas, feelings, instincts and beliefs, a peculiar thing has begun to happen: the work itself is beginning to force the action and dictate the content. The book is now beginning to teach the writer. It is helping him to more fully understand his own feelings.

     If everything that has been said previously in all the essays leading up to this moment could be mushed together and put through some kind of intellectual refining process that gave forth with the most purified, distilled essence of the complete work, it could be summed up in the following way:

     For the last few million years or so, there has been an animal running around on this planet at least somewhat reminiscent of the person you see in the mirror each morning. (Some mornings more than others.) For almost all that time, millions of years, the pure act of survival --- finding food, providing shelter, procreating the species, etc. --- has been the almost exclusive concern of this creature's conscious existence. It is only in the most recent times --- just a blink in evolutionary terms --- that we have tamed our environment sufficiently enough to make our physical well being a rather mundane task. The paranoid insecurity of a purely survival mode way of life, along with the violence associated in protecting such hard earned survival, should not be a serious factor for the contemporary human being. We now live in a world of abundance but we still haven't kicked the millions of years of habits developed in an environment of scarcity. We are still protecting our own little traditionally perceived pieces of turf as if it were a matter of life and death.

     Our current economic system, which is just another way to say the way in which we distribute the resources of the planet, is a perfect example of this. It is unnecessarily predatory in its outlook. It is still living the Neanderthal reality of hardship survival in a time of cornucopian abundance. Like Hulk Hogan and his ilk, it is merciless, self-centered and unscrupulous in its competitive ferocity. It has yet to make the emotional jump necessary for the harmonious bliss that should be the reward for our technological ingenuity. That romantic "Woodstockian" concept we used to refer to as the "Aquarian Age", could be waiting, in some approximate form, on the other side of that emotional leap. Until this happens, our wonderful technology will remain a hollow accomplishment that could cause more harm than good.

     Relevant Material: "I don't believe wars come only because of greed or business, but because men get bored with their well being and look to get into it simply to do something different." From the novel, "El Rapto de las Sabinas" (The Kidnap of the Sabine Women), by the Spaniard, F. Garcia Pavon.