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Around the Town #4: Offending Offenders and the Offenders..... |
» Reported by Hunter Golden of WrestleView.com
» On Wednesday, June 20, 2007 at 11:47 PM EST
Around the Town #4
June 20, 2007
Reported By: Hunter Golden of WrestleView.com
Offending Offenders and the Offenders that Offend Them
It seems that the internet wrestling community has really lost it’s head now.
For as sociopathic as the whole “Death of Vince McMahon” thing may be, I don’t know what’s more creepy, Vince killing himself or the ’offended’ fans who are somehow deeply affected by a fake character being killed off on television to the point that they flood sites like the observer and the torch with letters about how deeply this effects the moral fiber of the human species.
Why is it that wrestling fans feel the need to be offended and angered by just about everything wrestling, more specifically, anything the WWE seems to do? The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again while expecting the result to somehow be different. Why don’t wrestling fans who are offended just shut up and go away instead of wasting years of their lives telling us they’re going to shut up and go away? No matter how offended the modern day pro wrestling fan is today, they still keep coming back for more. No matter what.
Especially ‘smart’ marks.
Here’s a friendly word of advise from a long, long, long time wrestling fan: Stop trying to put pro wrestling on a pedestal to the degree that you feel that it somehow is supposed to represent something resembling reality of any kind. Wrestling is fake. Over the course of the last 10-15 years it’s been trying really hard to make sure the world understands that. It’s a television show. Most importantly; stop looking to pro wrestling as a form of moral guidance. Do this and you will enjoy long, fruitful lives of which at some point, you may even *gasp* enjoy wrestling again. Vince pretending to blow up his pretend character on a pretend show that not too many people watch these days is going to have minimal impact socially.
Just like JBL’s Nazi salute didn’t.
Just like Triple H humping a dead corpse didn’t.
Just like Lita’s pregnancy/miscarriage angle didn’t
Just like the infamous ‘who’s your papi’? angle didn’t
Just like a million and one other angles didn’t. Need proof of how collectively short wrestling fans’ (and the human species in general) memory is? Pop quiz: Who remembers Kanyon running around the back of Kemper arena on WCW TV at some point in 2000 and then going splat almost exactly a year after Owen Hart died on television? Remember the outrage? No, I’m being honest, did ANYONE remember that until I jogged your memory?
Somewhere along the line Dave Meltzer mentioned something silly about ‘pure sports builds’ and fans gobbled it up because it legitimized their creepy infatuation with men pretending to beat each other up in their underwear. That was all she wrote for the sanity of wrestling fans (if we ever really had much to begin with) as the downward spiral to the bowels of perceived but never genuine intelligence began. Fans began reviewing matches but somewhere we went a little too far. We started putting wrestling on a bit of a pedestal, as if somehow the events taking place on WWE television somehow had a direct effect on ’stupid’ (the irony) people and was important enough in people’s lives to the degree that when something occurred contrary to their moral beliefs, they could be ’offended’ by it. Being offended by something means it’s something legitimate not only in your world, but the physical world you live in. Wade Keller and the torch made wrestling out to be some sort of representation of the real world and, well, here we are now.
Fans that are deeply offended by the Vince Death angle either haven’t been fans very long, or frankly, just aren’t very emotionally intelligent people (cue hate mail in my inbox now). They weren’t around for tasteless angle after tasteless angle in the Von Erich dominated World Class territory. Fritz Von Erich was a way bigger sleaze bag than Vince could ever hope to be. They’ve apparently forgotten about Tony Atlas playing a spear chucker (literally) and the Freebirds mocking Eddie Grahm’s suicide in Florida. I could go on for hours. Wrestling ain’t about being classy and yes, there’s really nothing wrong with that.
Pro Wrestling is at best, a colorful form of performance-based narrative storytelling. At worst, it’s a low brow form of seedy carnie fun, with seedy carnie people playing even more seedy carnie-like characters. It doesn’t speak to nations nor is it a reflection of society as a whole. For some it’s an escape, but for those of us who have marriages and live otherwise normal lives, it’s just a TV show we like for some unexplainable reason.
Besides, don’t people think that the very roots of wrestling are six hundred times more offensive than any of this stuff? Wrestlers started working in the 19th century to fleece gamblers out money. Not one person worth their salt, or in possession of half a brain in the 19th century ever thought that wrestling was real. Read some newspaper stories on it sometimes to enjoy the general mockery.
It wasn’t the wealthy, educated and intelligent debutants of the day who were betting on these obviously fixed and fake fights, it was the less educated, poor idiots who were making the bets and losing money that they simply couldn’t afford to lose. In 2007 dollars, the average middle class American family was making and living off of less than $5k a year. The origins of the sport were based on swindling money out of people who were supporting entire families on what is today considered below the poverty line for a four person family.
Vince McMahon, the WWE and wrestling as a whole, has always been outrageous. The expectations and reactions of fans, especially the ones who supposedly know what they’re talking about are equally outrageous. Those who are consistently offended by pro wrestling are ironically outrageous.
Back To WrestleView.com
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