As a kid I loved professional wrestling.
I was first exposed to the artform because my friend Denzel who lived down the block from my dad had a Wrestlemania party every year. Wrestlemania is the biggest spectacle in the world of pro wrestling and it also is a great show if you only watch one show a year because it tends to summarize the year’s most important storylines in the lead up for the matches. It is effectively the Super Bowl and the season finale of a show that never goes off the air. The pageantry and performance was massively engaging to me. I don’t remember if I ever thought it was legitimate competition but I probably did because I was a child.
After a few years watching the annual show at Denzel’s house two things happened that allowed me to become a deeper fan of the form. The first thing was the Christmas when our family got a Playstation. Among the games we got was a pro wrestling game called WWF War Zone that I played for hours on end. The second thing that happened was in 1999 the show WWF SmackDown premiered on the UPN Network. Because the show was earlier than the usual flagship show Raw and because it was on network TV that meant for the first time ever I was able to become a weekly viewer of pro wrestling.
I remember negotiating my usual bedtime back a half hour so that I could watch the entirety of SmackDown. I remember conspiring and collecting money from my friends so that we could buy a multiplayer adapter to play battle royal matches on my PlayStation. I remember at one point before I became a poet or thought of myself as a writer working on a comic book project that we never completed called Iron Man Wrestling. I was primarily concerned with the storylines and my homie Shaun was mostly concerned with the meticulous drawing. I remember reading wrestler biographies and show recaps on our dial up internet in the morning before going to school. In short, there was a good few years stretch where I was really into this form.
I don’t remember exactly when or why I lost interest in wrestling but I suspect it had something to do with school. Once I went to high school I mostly stopped watching tv shows during the week. I went from a regular watcher of several cartoons and sitcoms to only watching things on the weekend, if at all. A lot of this was practical. I’m from the far South Side of Chicago. My high school was on the Near West Side. That meant that my public transportation commute was about 90 minutes one way every day. Because I often had poetry slam practice in the morning and basketball practice in the evening that meant often I’d be at school from about 7 AM-5 PM many days. Even days when I didn’t have either commitment I’d still get home between 4 and 5 PM. I just didn’t have a lot of time or energy for watching with that schedule. Also by then I’d become so engrossed in music that I was much more likely to be in my headphones than watching the TV, especially since I had to share our living room TV with 2 of my sisters but my headphones were a private world I could retreat to easily.
My high school commute was a half mile walk from my house to Halsted Street to catch the bus. That bus would carry me from 115th Street to the end of the Red Line train at 95th and the Dan Ryan Expressway. I’d take that train downtown to the Jackson stop and then walk the underground tunnel to the Blue Line train and then I’d take that train to the Racine stop and exit on the west exit a half block from Whitney Young Magnet High School.
Why am I talking about my high school commute in an essay about pro wrestling? Why am I writing an essay about pro wrestling? This is a false finish. Keep reading. A false finish in wrestling is when a match appears to be reaching its conclusion only for the apparent loser to recover and the match story to continue. Keep reading.
About a year ago I started watching pro wrestling again for the first time in a few decades. I started watching because one of my favorite childhood wrestlers, The Rock, returned to the ring and I was fascinated about what stories he still had to tell with his body after all these years. I also became a parent a year ago. The thing about having a small child, particularly when your family has an intense postpartum experience, is that you stay in the damn house. the regular wrestling shows started at the perfect time my viewership. Wrestling shows happened right after bedtime and in the few hours when I’d clean the house and decompress from the long days of doctor visits and diaper changes. It became a great companion in those solitary hours in the house.
Wrestling also became a source of connection with an important group of homies. My boys José, Lamar, and Cortney all followed the shows to some degree and so we started to talk more regularly about the weekly storylines. This was an important lifeline for me. Because we were living in a temporary place where we didn’t have a ton of community and we weren’t really able to be out and about generally our group texts about suplexes and powerbombs was often the most socializing I got to experience most weeks.
This was a thrilling time to rejoin the wrestling fandom. The main storyline was Cody Rhodes, the son and younger brother of two legendary wrestlers fighting a villainous stable called the Bloodline, comprised of the sons and nephews of several legendary wrestlers. The Rock joined the Bloodline and also the Board of Directors of the WWE’s parent company. The Rock became a great villain, a living embodiment of corporate entitlement and unchecked power. The champion that Cody Rhodes was pursuing, the Bloodline’s leader, Roman Reigns, was one of the biggest stars in the company since the era when his play cousin Rock was at the top of the company in my childhood.
I think the fact that so many characters in wrestling were related to the stars of my childhood offered me an entry point. One thing about me is that I love a history. One of the ways that I enact interest in the world is to pursue history. So a major storyline that was so rooted in the history of pro wrestling tickled the specific part of my brain that does fandom.
Is this the conclusion of my point? No. This is a false finish.
The overwhelming majority of people in the US attend public schools throughout their entire education. I did until I went to university. This week it was announced that Linda McMahon would be nominated to be the Secretary of Education. Linda and her husband Vince founded and ran the WWE for decades after acquiring its predecessor business from Vince’s father. They grew what was effectively a successful regional business into a billion dollar publicly-traded global media company. Vince was by all accounts most interested in the creative side of the business and the in-ring stories while Linda tended to focus on the business operations side.
Linda previously served in the first Trump White House as the Small Business Administrator, a cabinet level position, albeit one that is much less high profile than a Department Secretary. She resigned to head up a Trump-aligned PAC. Prior to her previous White House stint she had become a major GOP donor after two failed campaigns for office as a Republican.
In the world of wrestling most characters can be categorized as a face or a heel. Faces are good guys and heels are villains. Sometimes, especially if a wrestler is around long enough then they will play both roles for a time. The process by which a character transitions is called a turn. The last 15 years have represented a heel turn of sorts for Donald Trump, from a tacky but delightful celebrity businessman and TV star to right wing conspiracy peddler and nationalist politician. Of course if you know the whole story then you know Trump has always had heel tendencies. His racism and chauvinism have been consistent over the years. But the most successful turns always work this way. You don’t necessarily change your character’s energy, just its direction. The most important thing for any wrestling character isn’t whether the crowd cheers or boos but only that the crowd reacts. A wrestler who is compelling to the crowd and can draw reactions is considered ‘over.’ Trump is probably the most 'over’ figure in the last half century. He gets a reaction. He generates heat.
In wrestling a work is the plan that governs the unreal reality of scripted sport. A shoot is when something real happens, something unplanned and legitimate, whether accidental or intentional in the moment. Sometimes a wrestler has a work injury so they can have time off the road to be with family. Sometimes wrestlers have real conflicts and a moment of shoot fighting or talking is the result.
In wrestling a promo is the moments when wrestlers talk outside of a fight or match, usually to build anticipation for a rivalry or match. You might think about every Trump speech or media appearance as a promo. It is built to keep you watching, to bring you out to the next show, even if you’re booing, especially if you’re booing.
Donald Trump is a WWE Hall of Famer alongside many of the wrestlers I loved as a kid and the wrestlers they loved in their own childhoods. It’s not uncommon for non-wrestler celebrities to be in the Hall of Fame, the spectacle of wrestling is often assisted by seemingly unrelated figures taking momentary part in the story. This is maybe a good logic with which to approach the appointment of Linda McMahon. She seems out of place and that is the point. She is meant to provide spectacle to distract you. She is a part of the work. Don’t get worked.
In wrestling the final sequence before a match concludes is the ‘go home.’ Let’s go home.
The United States does not respect education as a vocation or a discipline. The history US education particularly in the last several decades has been geared towards imposing the logic of business and capitalism onto education, particularly the education of poor and working class people. Even before this contemporary neoliberal turn schools were often designed to resemble factories and to create students who would become useful human cogs in the factory system. Trump has said he would abolish the Education Dept. Reagan also said that. It isn’t a new directive. My grandmother was an educator. I am an educator. She handed me books in the hope I’d find something like freedom in them. I hand my daughter and my students books in the same hope. It isn’t a new directive. If you are appalled by the appointment of someone who has no background as an educator running the Dept. of Education I’d implore you to apply that logic to folks like Obama’s Sec. of Ed. Arne Duncan who came into education as a CEO and largely attempted to impose the logics of business to the education of poor and working students in Chicago before he did that work on a national scale. I was a student under his administration in Chicago. I implore you to get earnestly interested and supportive of public schools, especially if you find yourself appalled and you don’t have school age children. Trump is a particularly good heel, but he is not a singular one. There have been many before him and there will likely be many to come. His imposition of the logics of spectacle and capital onto education are not new. These are longterm works. When I was a kid I was told to get an excellent education I would have to travel half a city away. Maybe that was a shoot. Maybe that was a work. I know what it did was take my time. I know your outrage will take time from you but I implore you try to understand how you are being manipulated to cheer or boo.
Peace,
Nate
PS. Thanks for indulging the silly and serious nature of this essay. One thing I will leave you with is that the jokes about Linda McMahon are pretty funny but also I’d urge you to resist the sneering posture that so often liberals exhibit when they find something absurd. Pro wrestling is easy to dismiss and make fun of. So was Trump’s political career at one point. A maxim I live by that I think would serve us well in the fights to come is this: It is useful and perhaps important to take seriously the things that other people take seriously, especially when you find them absurd.
