Linda McMahon, The Heartbreak Kid, and the 2010 Mid-Term Elections

The recent retirement of The Heartbreak Kid, Shawn Michaels, from pro wrestling, illustrates a major flaw in the Republican electoral strategy for the upcoming mid-term elections.

Michaels, aka Michael Shawn Hickenbottom, wrestled a long and admirable career of 22 years that featured four heavyweight championships, universal acclaim for his technical accomplishment, ingenious repeated angles that put him over with new and old fans alike, and his earning the moniker “Mr. Wrestlemania” for his  spectacular performances at the WWE’s signature annual event.

It also featured two near-career-ending injuries, five other major injuries, one extended retirement, a divorce, periods of drug addiction, thoughts of suicide, and a final turn to evangelical Christianity that saw Michaels rightly earn peace of mind outside of the ring.

Michaels cites his struggles with painkiller abuse as chiefly a battle of the spirit, to ease disappointment and dull anger.

However, it is worth considering that Michaels’s drug abuse follows a much broader and better-established trend among pro wrestlers: self-medicating the extreme physical punishment that day-in/day-out wrestling takes upon the human body.

The medical situation of pro wrestlers is further complicated, to their detriment, by two factors (as reported recently, and well, by Raymond Hernandez in the New York Times).

First, pro wrestlers are designated “independent contractors” by the WWE, thus limiting both its financial obligation and liability.

Second, the WWE is treated as scripted entertainment, rather than athletic performance, and as such is exempt from the kind of medical oversight required of boxers and mixed martial artists.

As it grew into a $1.2 billion empire broadcasting in nearly 150 countries, the WWE was thus exempt from paying health insurance, Social Security, Medicare contributions, and unemployment expenses, as well as from providing ringside medical assistance mandated for athletes enduring similar abuse.

In a nutshell, pro wrestlers bleed, break, bust, pound, plummet, strip, and limp into, inside of, and out of the ring, without regulation, compensation, or insurance commensurate with the risks they undertake:

Who went from city to city, county to country, state to state, meeting with regulators and athletic commissions, to ensure that wherever new wrestling markets opened up for the WWE, its liability would be severely limited by these designations?

Former WWE executive and the 2010 Republican Senate nominee from Connecticut, Linda McMahon.

McMahon is a competent, savvy professional whose years of experience, during boom and bust, reflect considerable ability and accomplishment.  In this respect, she resembles other Republican nominees with business-first attitudes who see the free-market, unencumbered by the intrusion of government, as the rising tide that lifts all ships.

If such an attitude seems both out-of-touch and strangely anachronistic in a time of overextended investment risks and unsound banking which, gone unregulated, nearly sank the U.S. economy, it is strangely well-tuned with the preferences of Republican primary voters, who long for Reaganomics (if not Reagan deficits).

This scale-back-at-all-costs approach has led, during this session of Congress, to calls from establishment Republican elders to repeal the 14th Amendment, the 17th Amendment, and the Civil Rights Act, to block two center-left Supreme Court nominees, and to underfund Social Security and filibuster unemployment benefits.

It’s no wonder that survivalist elements of the Tea Party movement are now training rank-and-file voters to shoot man-shaped targets at 500m out with automatic rifles and semi-automatic handguns: if their goals will not be realized through the democratic process, they’re willing and able to pursue them through force and thuggery.

Simply put, aspiring Republican lawmakers struggle to play chicken with a radical base disinterested in their existence, alternately currying favor to earn its 30-odd % of party votes needed to get the nomination, then keeping a respectable distance to attract the moderate voters necessary to win state-wide.

It calls to mind the continuing Christian Zionist hope that a war between Jews and Arabs in the Middle East will accelerate the Rapture:

There’s another name for this kind of politicking, a rhetorical fallacy whose fundamental error is understood by most second-graders: The ends do not justify the means.

For Shawn Michaels, it means early retirement (if, hopefully, some ringside mic work) and a fused back at 45.

For wrestling fans, it means a cavalcade of top-shelf talent gone too early either into retirement or to the grave:

For elected officials, it means the obstruction of that fundamental right of elected government, the term of office and the opportunity to propose, debate, and pass laws.

For voters, it means sorting through a whole lot of noise and distraction to understand, in simple and clear terms, how certain fortunes are made, on whose terms, to whose injury, and at what cost: