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:

www.youtube.com/watch?v=P67IHE0MMKo

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:

www.youtube.com/watch?v=mjMRgT5o-Ig

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:

www.youtube.com/watch?v=PsuKfI8wq-U

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:

www.youtube.com/watch?v=c8HMvjQIz5w

Charlie Crist is a politico who can’t get over with Florida voters.

Not as a tough-talking right-wing McCain anointer.  Not as a straight-shooting, friend-of-the-everyman Independent.  Not as a tax-cutting, health-care providing, sugar-loving big-state governor.

And yet, there Charlie Crist is, leading every latest Florida Senate poll in a three-way race with Republican Marco Rubio and that other guy, the Democrat.

Never mind that, in a primary season proving toxic for old, white, male incumbents, both Representative Kendrick Meek and Tea Party firebrand Marco Rubio are young, vibrant candidates who bring the prospect of diverse backgrounds and experiences to the office, with the full backing and deep coffers of their respective political parties.

There Charlie Crist preens in the shadows, with his own deep (and deeply personal) coffers, a variety of recently-altered and Dem-friendly positions, waiting for Rahm Emanuel’s call to narrow the race and face down Rubio head-on in exactly the sort of classic youth-versus-experience, insider-outsider showdown that looks to favor the quietly predictable over the under-conceptualized and patently unqualified:

www.youtube.com/watch?v=VqAAfSfap5w

Wrestling fans of a certain age will recall the quiet tenure of Adam Bomb, professional wrestling’s only radioactive superstar (due to his having allegedly survived the Three Mile Island incident).  Bomb wrestled for a decade, making last-minute entrances at the Royal Rumble, briefly winning a tag-team title by default, co-opting Mortal Kombat characters into his act, then finally peetering out in independent circuits.

Despite his various incarnations, and some wrestling skill, Bomb became most famous for getting appendicitis during the WCW-WWE merger in 2001.  Looking at their inherited roster, the WWE decided to make a change, and let Bomb go, rather than investing heavily in yet again reinventing his unsuccessful brand.

The Democratic Party would do wise to follow suit in Florida.

Crist is an energetic, charismatic, and handsome politician.  He looks the part.  He talks the part.  For Rahm Emanuel’s 2006 short-term, win-at-all-costs mid-term election strategy, Crist seems to be a natural and easy hold for a quickly eroding Democratic majority in the Senate.

Except this isn’t 2006.  In 2010, the Democrats face multiple challenges, but foremost is their lack of ideological cohesion, which gives the voters nothing against which to measure the policy choices of either incumbent or challenger.  It makes for great political strategy, in the sense that active misdirection gives voters headaches, but presents little in the way of substantive discussion.

Horse races abound, while majorities and minorities cohere against caricatures of each other.

It’s no wonder that every wacko with a website stands ready to enter the fray, willfully misunderstanding the Constitution, invoking British regal tyranny, ominously photographing old pistols:

www.youtube.com/watch?v=6iQ7ZDUutU4

Is our political establishment so underemployed that it has to cannibalize itself across political aisles to remain vital?

2010 may prove to be a great drubbing for the Dems, a righting of wrongs for Republicans.  However it works out, both sides will claim victory and soldier on to the Presidential Election of 2012, the 2014 Mid-Terms, and the Great Obama-Less Winner-Take-All of 2016.

By then, any number of jobbers will have risen through the ranks by sheer not-disappearing, to remain something resembling viable candidates.

Woo hoo!  Somebody won.  In the meantime, the current slate of elected officials will do everything except govern responsibly in the face of threats often generated by their own neglect.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=68bKMtncSuw

In politics, as in gardening, you have to turn over a lot of shit to push the daisies up.  Charlie Crist will make a fantastic lobbyist, somewhere.  Florida Democrats should stop trying to put over the guy who can’t get over himself.

In the short-term it may mean a drubbing.  But, there are worse things than losing.  The kind of longview planning--make that “change”--and intellectual foresight that Democrats have clamored for, regardless of the winner, and failed to heed to in the past, remains prescient, 4 or 33 years onward:

www.youtube.com/watch?v=-tPePpMxJaA

In 1996, Jake “The Snake” Roberts made a comeback in the WWE as a born-again Christian preacher seeking to wrestle in the name of his religion.  A longtime fan favorite for his “outsider” angles and signature sidekick snakes, Roberts worked his way to a King Of The Ring showdown with then-upstart “Stone Cold” Steve Austin, who humiliated the legend in his post-match remarks:

“The first thing I want to be done is to get that piece of crap out of my ring.  Don’t just get him out of the ring, get him out of the WWF, because I proved, son, without a shadow of a doubt, you ain’t got what it takes anymore.  You sit there and you thump your Bible and you say your prayers and it didn’t get you anywhere…Austin 3:16 says I just whipped your ass.”

www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q_atmzsOrK0

What’s amazing about the recent Democratic health care reform victory--the biggest domestic policy legislative victory for either party since Medicare passed in 1965--is that the post-victory trash-talking has come entirely from the losing side.  Promises to repeal-and-repass spew forth alongside Sarah Palin’s infamous gun-target-map of Democratic incumbents, calls by Michelle Bachmann (R, MN) for armed insurrection, and John Boehner (R, OH)’s promises of Armageddon.

It’s no wonder President Obama casually noted, the morning after he signed health care reform into law, that birds were chirping and no asteroids arrived to destroy our nation.  Instead, it seems, a substantial number of Americans will receive better, more affordable health care coverage in the short and long term, while decreasing overall health care costs.

One wonders if Obama hasn’t arrived at his own kind of understated mantra, an Obama 3:16 for 2010.

The quality of Republican fear-mongering has grown so intense in the last nine years, that it almost seems as if any act of leadership not initiated by the right would or will ultimately result in, well, Armageddon.  Having bankrupted or exhausted their policy initiatives, Republicans have devolved into a party with nothing to say, that wants to say things very loudly and forcefully.

It’s never a good thing for an entire political party to lose the battle of ideas to will.i.am:

www.youtube.com/watch?v=T0oWzRnnLTg

What President Obama and the Democratic leadership understand, and are now making clear to the voting public, is the vast chasm between the appearance of leadership and actual governing.

Despite a lack of “wanted: dead or alive” signs, and “Mission Accomplished” banners, financial institutions are being regulated, auto industries are being reinvigorated, job growth is being stimulated, and, yes, health care is being extended to all citizens.

Frank Rich is a master at putting over Democratic victories.  His observation today that the ethics of recent Tea Bagger protests correspond more closely with past objections to broad social change, civil rights in particular, rather than substantive disagreements over policy, nicely draws out both the complete lack of substance and the incoherent, desperate fear-mongering made manifest in the rhetoric of protests against health care reform in the days before its passage.

President Obama even wins points for taking the high road, as he so often has during the first year of his presidency, and the contrast is reassuring to those of us who are not threatened by a black American President who is probably smarter than we are.

Isn’t that what we want in our chief executive?

Obama 3:16 says that when smart change happens, good things follow, and everybody wins.

Obama 3:16 reassures Joe Biden that his victory is a “big fucking deal,” with none of his predecessor’s desperate need for everyone to see him winning.

Obama 3:16 marvels at Representative Randy Neuberger (R, TX)’s shouting “Baby Killer!” at fellow Representative Bart Stupak (D, MI), Republican’s standing vigil outside of Congress egging on Tea Baggers, and Joe Wilson’s “You lie!”, because they all indicate that, indeed, crazy has crept in from the lawn and is making itself at home on the other side of the aisle.

In politics, as in wrestling, the value of a victory usually corresponds to the quality of the won match.  For every tomato can who gets in a couple of good shots, then quickly succumbs to the face’s finishing move, there’s an epic match for the ages that involves being thrown over the turnbuckle, across the announcer’s table, under the canvass, back and forth through the belts a few time, a few cuts on the forehead and folding chairs across the back before, voila, the competitors exchange finishing moves and the winner takes the day.

Obama 3:16 says this match is over and it’s time to move on to the next one.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=EZed5B5cWm4

To paraphrase Frank Rich in today’s New York Times, what do you get when you cross a black President, a female Speaker of the House, a powerful gay Congressional committee chair, and a wise Latina Supreme Court Justice?

A bunch of angry white folks.  On the wrong side of history.

It is common knowledge that the Obama administration cut a deal last summer with Big Pharma, before Congressional hearings on health care reform began.  In exchange for keeping drug prices and Medicare kickbacks high--in other words, unreformed--while taking on new customers via extended coverage, Big Pharma agreed to pay an additional $80 billion in taxes and fees.

That this agreement contradicted Candidate Obama’s promise to negotiate openly and to use the government’s stake in the drug market to drive down prices, was considered small change in exchange for what was considered the big gain: Big Pharma agreed to not lobby, publicly and privately, against the Democratic reform bill.

Like Obama and Big Pharma, the WWE is paying a king’s ransom to win its Monday night showdowns with Total Nonstop Action Wrestling (TNA), which has gone all-in on selling Hulk Hogan as the TNA franchise savior.

The biggest name in the game likes us instead of WWE, TNA says, so shouldn’t you?

Except that Hogan isn’t the biggest name in professional wrestling.  That distinction belongs to “Stone Cold” Steve Austin, arguably still the best mic worker in the game, and in his prime, a fast, charismatic, unpredictable game-changer who consistently got as big a pop, and sometimes bigger, than Hogan:

www.youtube.com/watch?v=NQguP1vpfSo

To get a sense of how much sway Austin still holds over the wrestling world, Hulk Hogan had only to drop Austin’s name into a radio interview to set wrestling blogs on fire with speculation on the WWE’s demise--despite the fact that severe knee and neck injuries have, for three years now, relegated Austin to a premature retirement of B-movie hero roles.

So, the WWE released notice that Austin remains under contract--rumored in the mid seven-figures--to sit at home, not wrestle, and collect merchandise royalties.

Like Big Pharma, the Stone Cold persona has grown big enough to topple the very system in which it prospers.

Big Pharma develops the drugs you need, and then often want, and even a perceived disruption in its ambitious work and processes portends serious, life-threatening demise, while its continuation could very well put all of us into outer space:

www.youtube.com/watch?v=je1LsY0OZJs

Austin not only created but now drives what is still the biggest storyline in wrestling, the Attitude Era:

www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q_atmzsOrK0

If Big Pharma remains on the sidelines for the duration of the debate, then the White House and the Democratic Party will have fried some of the bigger fish clogging up the national health care pond.  In particular, insurance companies will take hit after hit, while eventually adding some 30-odd million subscribers (subsidized by the government) to its rolls.

Similarly, this Monday night, TNA’s Hulk Hogan will stand toe to toe with his oldest and most accomplished rival, Ric Flair, who will step into the ring one last time (until the next time) to holler and hustle with whatever moves he’s got left:

www.youtube.com/watch?v=v6E_jfAzRew

While, next Monday night, Stone Cold will guest host but not wrestle for the WWE.

For both events, expect much pop and sizzle, and good memories of great wrestling moments past.

But, as with whatever bill President Obama eventually comes out of Congress, however it happens, the one thing you won’t see is wholesale reform or change.

Austin replaced, then improved upon, Hogan.  Many young wrestlers have since come and gone, all promising some new twist or turn to revitalize the industry, only to fall off the map, while Austin sits at home, cashing the biggest check in the game.

For a while, it seemed, President Obama was one such fresh face in the political fray, a game-changer and, more importantly, a reformer, who would take on, then take down, the biggest names in the game.

Instead, it seems that Democratic politics, like wrestling, gets older, strikes some stop-gap deals, and continues to strain under the stress of what has ailed it since the mid-90s.

Evan Bayh: the Doink The Clown of Republican Politics

You remember Doink the Clown, right?

Doink The Clown is the quintessential placeholder in professional wrestling of the last fifteen years.  He wrestles competently but does his major character work as a shill for bigger stars.  He doesn’t win titles and he doesn’t lose significant matches.  His career continues to this day, making no waves, the funny-looking guy with the clever gimmick and silly music.

Like Doink The Clown, Evan Bayh has a reliable base of fans who like his name a lot.

The two-term junior senator from Indiana, former Secretary of State, and Governor, Evan Bayh inherited the state political machine, if not the progressive legacy, of his father, Senator Birch Bayh, who navigated Title IX legislation, the Equal Rights Amendment, and the 25th and 26th Amendments to the U.S. Constitution through Congress during his three terms in office.

Unlike his father, Evan Bayh has played second banana to major Republicans throughout his career, standing with George Bush to announce the 2002 joint resolution authorizing the Iraq War, co-sponsoring the Patriot Act and its 2006 renewal, and introducing Bush’s Medicare tax-cut/deficit-accelerator in 2004, while opposing partial-birth abortions, sponsoring small farm bills, and currying extensive favor with the Clintons, who tapped him to be Senator Clinton’s 2008 VP before her losing the nomination to Obama.

Like Bayh, Doink The Clown capitalizes on a popular name, as do World Wrestling Federation/Entertainment bigwigs, to sustain a mediocre career.  Bayh climbed the state political ladder, famously never losing an election battle, but also rarely facing serious opposition.  Doink  has previously presented a kind of inoffensive universality, wrestling here for Jerry Lawler against Bret Hart (before stepping aside for the main action), there against Chris Benoit (again stepping aside quickly and without incident).

His character is so inhabitable that it has been played, without notice, by numerous wrestlers willing to don the clown paint and unitard.

As Bayh steps aside during this tough election season, he will be replaced by one of two famous sons of Indiana, either Republican Dan Coats, who has made a career of filling in Dan Quayle’s seats as Quayle ascended the GOP ladder, or hoops legend Democrat Baron Hill.

Senator Bayh says that he’s not running for re-election in 2010 but if he did, he would definitely win.  Every media outlet, from The New York Times to The Economist to The National Review to News Max, has either paraphrased or directly quoted this inane declaration.

It’s the equivalent of listening to Bill Walton explaining how he’d handle Shaq in the post, or Jim Palmer ending his comeback to allow the kids more time to develop.

Bayh also explains that he’s done with the partisan environment of Washington, D.C. and can better serve the nation in other ways.

Legislative service is, by definition, contingent on the approval of an electorate, who audit their decisions in the voting booth.  It’s the practical difference between the Greenpeace guy with the clipboard sidling up to you on the street and the 60 recorded votes needed to pass environmental reform legislation.

If Bayh did not oppose the insular political world that allowed his ascendancy in the first place, he’s done with it now.  After years of taking bribes from Rick, he’s shocked--shocked!--to find that gambling is going on here:

www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Gf8NK1WAOc

That legacy of political inheritance will serve him well on the dinner/lecture/memoir circuit.  But you’ll forgive attendees if they have to pause every now and again to wonder if they haven’t seen this guy before.

Martha Coakley is what’s wrong with the Democratic Party?  Try Tony Garea.

In the early 1980′s, Tony Garea wrestled like a champion.  His mic work was solid, he had a couple of signature moves, he gave as good as he got.  Night after night, he wrestled the big names of the day: Hulk Hogan, Junkyard Dog, Randy Savage, Ted DiBiase, et al.

And Tony Garea always lost.  No matter the advantage, or how certain the victory, Tony Garea excelled at blowing the sure thing.

How could it happen, wrestling fans used to wonder, that a guy so certain of victory could always come up short?

Not that it wasn’t easy to root against him.  He was blah, earnest, sporting a modest haircut.  If he didn’t rile up the crowd as easily as his opponent did, he also didn’t self-destruct or breakdown like the prima donnas of his day.  Garea oozed respectability but also managed to look strangely out of place.  He was like that guy at the bar who’s really good at darts but can never seem to get a game going with other people.

Here’s a signature performance from January 1984, against a spry Jesse Ventura:

www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nzqauz2arss

If you start at 8:23, you’ll see Garea systematically break down Ventura, and execute a series of near three-counts.  Ventura kicks out, and the masterful Garea comes back again, completely in control, until the very last moment when Garea fails to execute a simple turnaround, knocks himself out cold, and lays down for an easy pin.

Ventura hardly breaks a sweat securing the win.

Of course, Tony Garea was one of the great jobbers of the WWF.  He wrestled solely for the purpose of losing.  His job was to make the other guy look good when he won.

Jobbers serve an important function in professional wrestling.  They test the water for bigger talents, giving the fans an anonymous opponent against which to judge whether the new guy has the right stuff.  They are immediately recognizable because they get regular work, and they look the part, so their losses are credible.  They fill valuable air-time and ring space while the more important workers are resting, healing, traveling, or negotiating their next contract.

The only thing jobbers don’t do is win.

Martha Coakley is your classic jobber, in a party that is getting regular work these days as the Party of Jobbers.  She put in her time as a local, reliable Democratic state insider.  Among a slate of highly-qualified liberal candidates, all capable of filling the enormous shoes of the Liberal Lion of the Senate himself, Ted Kennedy, she worked a smart and efficient campaign to get the Democratic nomination to finish out his term.  With  a filibuster-proof 60 Democratic Senate seats on the line, she exuded calm, poise, strength, and accountability.

And then, a mere 20 days before the election, she went on vacation to the Bahamas over the Christmas Break.

And snarked that she wouldn’t deign to stand outside of Fenway Park shaking the hands of voters.

Before deciding to challenge the baseball credentials--the only unbloodied-socked leg he has left to stand on--of red-staterRed Sox hero, Curt Shilling.

Until she got her hat handed to her on election day.  By a former Cosmo pinup.  Whose signature move was to have someone drive his truck next to the campaign bus.

Of course, Democrats will tell you, it should have never come to this.  Coakley was the wrong candidate, the special election comes at an especially bad time for Democrats nationwide, any incumbent would lose an election in this environment, and the political establishment failed to do its due diligence in polling accurately.

Now, despite their insistence that it was an anomaly, Democrats nationwide have either shut down their semi-progressive agenda of ambitious health care reform, or initiated systemic reforms of a legislative process that worked just fine with the other guys were in power.

George W. Bush pushed through tax cuts, Medicare benefits, and No Child Left Behind with much slimmer majorities.

As the viral “Balls Beer” ad campaign suggests, Democrats seem to get so caught up in the manners of politics that they seem to lack, er, spine:

www.youtube.com/watch?v=IMlPE1lV_5Y

I’m not buying it.  One year in, President Obama is operating without a steady base of core constituents.  That may be a good thing, in the sense that a potential cult of personality is kept at bay.  But it’s a bad thing for a political party’s base to refuse to act like a base.

Republicans spin Coakley’s loss as an indication that voters are sick and tired of one-party bullies unwilling to play nice.  Never mind that it’s the Republicans who have collectively refused to vote individually to support any aspect of any legislation or nominee set forth by the Democrats, who wait, eager and smiling, for the other guys to like them enough to play fair.

But that’s the point, isn’t it?  How does a vegan make sausage?

www.youtube.com/watch?v=cRdxXPV9GNQ

Let there be no doubt about this now-thankfully ending decade: in wrestling, as in much of American culture, the 2000s were the Decade of Anti-Heroic Corporate Swagger.

Roided-out (like much of the rest of sport) in its pursuit of maximized ratings, spectacle and brand growth, the WWE defined its self-advertised “edge” well within the limits of traditional media-driven mores.  Sexism, homophobia, and racism pushed the familiar buttons of outrage, wrapped in flags and blood, pulsing to loud music, with prime-time ready PG ratings.

That dropped and dropped.

If, as Chuck Klosterman brilliantly argues in his essay, Football (excerpted here), American football feels conservative but acts liberal, professional wrestling in the 2000s was its bizarro-universe doppelganger: looks liberal, acts conservative.

Having vanquished rival wrestling associations, the WWE lost much of the imagination that defined its heyday run from the mid-80s through the 1990s.  As Mankind focused on his writing career, the WWE tried and failed to introduce one clean-cut, marble-mouthed hulkazoid after another, to little effect.

The biggest superstars of professional wrestling in the 2000s were mostly late-career wrestlers defined by t-shirt ready gimmicks/slogans: Steve Austin (middle finger in air, chugging beer, Austin 3:16), The Rock (Just Bring It, eyebrow), The Undertaker (The Last Ride, tall), Ric Flair (whooooo!), and, of course, Hulk Hogan (Real American, bandanna, mustache).

The era of Hawk and Animal in black-and-red face paint, free associating cheap heat about weasels and weasel-slappers on public-access television, night after night, this was not:

www.youtube.com/watch?v=hipquf9u5tw

Not surprisingly, an upstart rival organization, Total Nonstop Action Wrestling (TNA), partly led by the slasher-flick I-just-won’t-die Eric Bischoff, poached one discarded brand after another from the WWE, until low and behold, Hulk Hogan himself signed with TNA for a January 2010 first match.

As with the end of the 90s, the prospect of new Monday Night Wars offers a new period of prospectively better entertainment, though the WWE remains the behemoth.

Still, the WWE’s biggest personality, “Stone Cold” Steve Austin, whose wrestling is severely limited by various spinal and leg injuries, and age, is paid a “high-money” contract by the WWE to essentially sit at home and do nothing.

From a business standpoint, this makes a lot of sense.  Even the suggestion that Austin might follow Hulk Hogan to sign with TNA would set the WWE into an even faster tailspin.

Wrestling-wise, however, it makes little sense.  Austin can’t really wrestle anymore. Because of age, few popular headlines really can.  And yet, even when he doesn’t speak, when he just stands there being Stone Cold, he’s got more personality, wit, and vigor than the rest of the WWE put together:

www.youtube.com/watch?v=NDetkXflQ8g

In other words, the biggest name in wrestling gets the biggest pop because he doesn‘t wrestle anymore.

Call it the apotheosis of brand development: content is irrelevant--once the machine is running, stand back and watch it do its thing.

Of course, this preference for the appearance of the thing over the thing itself was hardly centered in the ring.

Like the WWE, much of the mainstream cultural output of the 2000s seemed obsessed with retreading trends from the 1990s, with an eye toward market expansion.  Instead of producing albums and developing a fashion line (P. Diddy), rap’s great mainstage act of the 00′s, Jay Z,  is going to move the Nets to Brooklyn.  Instead of Britney’s situating Lolita in the bump-and-grind, Lady Gaga deconstructs the aesthetic of popular music videos, which, sigh, requires some background music. I guess  Perhaps the greatest rock band of the last fifteen years, Wilco left one big record label for a subsidiary of the same, gained creative control, and made three kick-ass albums before ending the 00′s with the kind of bland major-label 90s-era big record it eschewed when finalizing Yankee Hotel Foxtrot.

In politics, Bobby Jindall turned a promising neo-Clinton into Kenneth The Page from 30 Rock.  Hammertime took on a retro-80s touch when Tom DeLay danced with the stars.  George W. Bush was perhaps the most heartfelt Texan, Christian, folksy, plain-speaking United States President to graduate from a long line of Yale patriarchs who grew up in tony suburban Connecticut and inherited their fortunes from commodities profiteering.

He looked like a total dude when he cleared brush on the ranch in Texas that he bought months before the 2000 election.

He leveled some major league threats against the terrorists and promised to revitalize our schools.

He played the part of president really, really well--all, of course, except for the actual governing.

In 2008, voters took note, only to find many supporters wondering whether this first year reflects a Democratic mastery of political aesthetics--brilliant, well-educated, multicultural, handsome Chicago liberal--or whether President Obama will do more than look the part.

More than any decade in recent memory, the 00′s were defined by a wary understanding that what we were watching happening was entirely disconnected from reality, and yet also, as close to reality as we were going to get.  In politics, especially, it seemed that old, white men behind curtains moved the levers of power and made lots of scary noise, stayed one step ahead of the muckrakers--usually with the complicity of those politicians in other branches of government we expected to keep them honest (Nancy Pelosi, we are looking in your general direction).

When outright opposition was slippery at best, we became obsessed with antiheroes who, like us, were complicit in the system, but secretly imagined themselves working to initiate some better form of revolution.  This phenomenon was best encapsulated in the story arc of The Matrix, which begins with the seeming liberation of human beings from machines, only to witness the hero himself willingly sacrificing his life to reboot the machine and, hopefully, make it run better:

www.youtube.com/watch?v=CBMuZ3OMDLA

Rarely has such self-realization so cleanly dovetailed with not-rocking-the-boat.

Maybe the best movie of the 2000′s, Waking The Dead, contains this exchange that sums up nicely the limitations of such reform-from-the-inside ambitions:

Sarah Williams: I don’t want to watch you turn into a cog in their machine.
Fielding Pierce: That’s so fucking condescending. Sometimes cogs can make machines run a little but better.
Sarah Williams: Sometimes yes. Mostly they turn in circles and wear out. Then they get replaced.

For most of America, the major wrestling stories of the decade happened outside of the ring.  Wrestlers’ Deaths, The Hogan Family Drama, XFL, and Linda McMahon’s Senate bid garnered far more attention than Johnny Damon’s cringe-worthy saved-by-a-stuffed-tiger-then-Sgt. Slaughter-dressed-as-a-homophobic-Santa hosting gig on Monday Night Raw.

If wrestling will engage in some sort of return-to-the-sport cross-league rivalry of yore, it will do so to ape the reliable American appetite for “good, clean fun” in an entertainment form defined by its eagerness to break rules and stretch credulity.

Yet, the cynicism and blatant misrepresentation inherent in the war rationales, Clean Skies initiatives, heck-of-a-job-Brownie Katrina responses, etc. of the 2000′s, reflects how American cultural and political life now apes wrestling’s easy blurring of reality and performance, to obscure inconvenient, well, truths.

Inside the ring.  Outside the ring.  In wrestling, as in America anymore, what’s the difference?

Think you hate health care reform now, fellow Democrats?

Just wait until you drive it.

So, you’re a Democrat.  And you thrilled at the 2006 and 2008 elections, when all of America seemed to wake up and smell the Bushes, discover their ineptitude, and vote the Republicans out of office.

In ushered an era of new accountability and transparency.   Of curbed executive privilege and bipartisan reform.  The first female Speaker of the House, and the soft-spoken veteran insider-cum-Majority Leader, alongside the Great(er) Communicator, seemed to promise that happy days, oh happy days, were here again.

Ten months later, the Democratic Party is about as popular as Ken Jeong popping out from under the ring to co-guest host  WWE’s Monday Night Raw with Jeremy Piven (making a fine recovery from his near-death, off-Broadway, sushi poisoning)

www.youtube.com/watch?v=r3Zfg_sZICU

The shelf-life of Ken Jeong’s appeal may mirror that of the Democratic Party, but really, disheartened Democrats should take a page from Jeong’s co-star, Chevy Chase, the seemingly left-for-dead funnyman who has turned a stint last spring on Chuck into a career resurgence in the masterful Community.

Not the contemporary, shadow-of-his-former-self-with-still-impeccable-comedic-timing Chevy Chase. Instead, the spry, young, self-effacing Chevy Chase of yore.  (Hopefully, we can cut out the intervening, excruciating 26 years: Cops and Robbersons, Memoirs of an Invisible Man, The Chevy Chase Show, etc.).

In National Lampoon’s Family Vacation, Chase plays the earnest, hard-working, well-intentioned Clark Griswold, whose plan to take his family on an all-American road trip goes horribly wrong.

It begins inauspiciously with Griswold and his son arriving to the car dealership to pick up their Antartic blue super sports wagon with the CB and the optional rally fun pack, only to get stuck with a total lemon:

www.youtube.com/watch?v=pTaTitRENDM

Democrats should find this scenario eerily familiar.  We sat down at the dealership (polling booth), talked it over with the dealer (Obama) and ordered the shiny (single-payer), powerful (universal coverage), tricked-out (extended Medicare coverage) health care that would lower our deficits, eliminate the bloodsucking middlemen, and make all of us healthier.

Ed went to headquarters (Congress) and called us with the good news: we’d have a car by Labor Day!

Of course, Salesman Ed was shocked--shocked!--that headquarters couldn’t deliver by the deadline.  He’d get us the car, all right, but the deadline is going to be tricky.  Six weeks at least, but then you’ve got to consider that, really, the better car is the truckster (elections are coming up, there are other issues on the table), it’s going to be hard to swing the wagon this time of year.

Now, of course, the deadline is Christmas--oh wait, that won’t work either.  The deadline is the State of the Union address.  And the truckster is a souped-up jalopi that, if you balance everyone just right, will haul lots of people across the country just fine:

After all, what you really wanted were wheels, right?  And, really, wasn’t your goal was to cross the country?

Howard Dean is right to say that what is before Congress right now isn’t the ideal of substantial health care reform:

“This is essentially the collapse of health care reform in the United States Senate. And, honestly, the best thing to do right now is kill the Senate bill and go back to the House … You have the vast majority of Americans want the choices, they want real choices. They don’t have them in this bill. This is not health care reform and it’s not close to health care reform.”

But that’s the issue, isn’t it?  If we want anything--literally, anything--that even resembles health care reform, then we have to go with the party that’s sort of a little bit maybe interested in health care reform.  And that’s the Democrats.

And if we want to kill health care reform, or plan to make a ton of money such that we won’t need to worry about the cost of health care reform, then we get behind the Republicans.

And in the middle, of course, is the electorate, terrified out of its mind at the prospect of living without insurance, reasonably encouraged by the good stuff in the current legislation (props to Ezra Klein at the Washington Post, who outlines the how and why of these in much better detail):

--Extended coverage to 97% of Americans
--Mandatory private national nonprofit health care coverage made cost-effective for the poorest Americans
--No denial of coverage based on nefarious pre-existing conditions
--No arbitrary monetary caps on annual and lifetime coverage
--No sudden dropped or watered-down coverage
--Caps on out-of-pocket expenses
--Required coverage for preventive care
--Short and long term deficit reductions
--Mandatory tax credits for small businesses providing group coverage to employees

Americans have every right to believe that the Democrats screwed the pooch on this one, missing out on much more substantial reform that would significantly improve the situation of health care and health care coverage in the United States.

And that may come--as President Clinton argues, Democrats are toast if they don’t pass something before next year’s mid-term elections.

Democrats are probably toast either way.  Republican opposition has been lockstep perfect in its total refusal to participate in any reform effort, and as a result, they seem principled and stubborn, while the Democrats seem over-reaching and flailing.

Unfortunately for Obama, his best argument is that what America might have become without his economic and health care stewardship would have been far, far worse than what it’s getting now.

Fellow Democrats, this is health care reform in 2009 in the United States.  It’s ugly, cheap, miserable, and nothing like what we thought we would get.  And it just barely beats our current system.

In other words, its a political achievement.

Like Santa Claus, The Easter Bunny, and Franklin Delano Roosevelt, the legend often turns out to be much sexier than the real thing.

Democrats, it’s time to drive the family truckster off the lot.

In today’s Politico, Erika Lovley writes an amazing beyond-the-mat perspective on Linda McMahon’s ambition to become the Republican challenger to Chris Dodd’s embattled Senate seat in Connecticut.

Lovley talks with a slew of top-bill retired wrestlers like “Superstar” Billy Graham, who take issue with the WWE’s refusal to offer health care coverage to its featured performers (note: the WWE generally provides full coverage for medical services provided to wrestlers who are injured in the ring).

At issue is the WWE’s designation of the people it employs to wrestle.  Essentially, the WWE considers its wrestlers contractors, and pays them a straight-up salary without benefits.  Legally, the WWE is entirely within its right to do so--a legal reality made clear last spring, when a federal district court threw out a class-action lawsuit brought by former wrestlers, who claimed, via a tax dispute, that their service entitles them a designation as employees, who are entitled to group coverage.

Like many Americans stuck between jobs in the current recession, wrestlers working on independent contracts receive much-needed cash, while undertaking a long-term gamble with their health that may one-day bankrupt them.  Unlike many Americans, professional wrestlers take dramatic risk to life and limb, as neatly embodied in Mickey Rourke’s match with Necro Butcher in last year’s movie, “The Wrestler.”  The punches may be fake, but all too often, the ladder-drops, staple guns, sand, and blood are real.

Former Minnesota Governor Jesse “The Body” Ventura points out several problems with the WWE, in general, and with its labor and health care policies in particular, in a recent interview with ESPN.Com Radio.  How have professional wrestlers come so far in a skilled labor practice, decade after decade, and yet still have no union?  What kind of independent contractor is not allowed to contract his services to other employers?  Why do so few independent contracts own the licensing rights to the characters they perform during their contacted service?

Most importantly, Ventura argues, how could the McMahons earn hundreds of millions of dollars while witnessing the seeming roll call of early-age disability and sudden death of their former contractors, and not offer them full health care?

In the last year, the WWE has taken great strides to make its programming more family-friendly.  Gone are the late, great days of Attitude-era beer-swilling, lingerie-wrestling, finger-tossing, crotch-pointing, 30-foot-steel-cage-dropping matches among wrestlers clad in black, covered in blood.  Here, again, are the square-jawed heroes insisting, “You can do it!” in bright blues, yellows, and oranges.

Probably, this comes down to market trends and personal preference.  If you were an Ultimate Warrior fan, heady days are here again.

Fortunately, Linda McMahon’s Senate run has drawn attention to the fact that times were not always so peachy-keen, and that, more often than not, fans leave the arena a little miffed if their beloved heroes haven’t been bruised and bloodied--you know, taken down a notch or two.

Whatever the rationale, it’s good to see former wrestlers like Graham stepping up and insisting, “The fact that we were out there experiencing trauma and drawing in untold millions for the company [means] we should have at least had some sort of health insurance.”

Sadly, such testaments are more universal to the situation of American business in the late 20th and early 21st century.  Someone’s earning the money, but someone else entirely is making it.

Constituents of Chris Dodd won’t be surprised to witness hypocrisy, bald-faced lies, gross profit-stealing, and a squeaky-clean sheen on an otherwise rancid candidacy:

www.youtube.com/watch?v=1GoK0539Gl4

It seems par for the course in Connecticut where, whoever wins the public contract in 2010, the benefits seem destined to land in a few deep pockets.

Watching AARP wrestling superstars Hulk Hogan and Ric Flair trade barbs, then come to blows, at the outset of the Hulkamania: Let The Battle Begin tour of Australia, one can’t help thinking of that other battle of the geezers, Senator Joe “Spoiler” Lieberman and Harry “Really, I’m In Charge” Reid – two old pros locking horns, going for broke, and remaining relevant to the game, regardless of the outcome.

For non-fans, one of the great head-scratchers of professional wrestling is how so much attention can be paid to staging elaborate, fake fights that inflict real, crippling damage on the wrestlers’ bodies. Bodies bruise, bones break, blood flows. Why devote so much attention to careful planning, if everyone still gets hurt in the end?

In the October 19^th issue of The New Yorker, Malcolm Gladwell draws disturbing parallels between the practice of dog fighting and playing football. He notes how sports like NASCAR, following significant in-action damage, responded quickly with wholesale changes that diminished the prospect of future catastrophe: improved technology, better on-site reaction time, changes to rules that de-incentivize brutal behavior.

But, Gladwell notes, in football the opposite seems to be happening. The athletes grow bigger and stronger, the pads get light and thinner, the hits become dirtier and more crippling. As a result, incidences of brain trauma increase, and onset earlier, resulting in a near 17-times increase in the likelihood that a retired football player in his 40s suffers from early-onset dementia and Alzheimer’s.

Like dogs, Gladwell concludes, football players become so archetypal in their embodiment of virtues like courage, sacrifice, and determination that fans lose sight of the humans under the helmet, and the terrible abuse they endure in the ritualistic and cathartic violence.

One would like to imagine that American politicians readily fall on their swords, but even the most casual observer quickly understands otherwise. In politics, as in professional wrestling, a pantomime of risk-taking—and the “selling” required to make that pantomime convincing to the viewing audience—typically suffices for the actual thing.

Americans like to believe that their elected representatives are virtuous, noble, selfless (mostly white) men of the people, tirelessly advocating for the well-being of all humanity, or, barring that, all humanity within the most recent incarnations of their gerrymandered districts. In reality, we know that nearly all politicians are not-so-bright egomaniacal manipulators, who secretly know that they are one election cycle away from blowing this two-bit whatever and really hitting the bit time.

And yet, those very qualities that make for an effective political candidate—handsome fake smiles, fingertip-ready generalities, a firm handshake, a capacity for seeming bold while never offending anyone—embody the very slipperiness that political observers so readily decry.

“What to make of our thwarted expectations?” the thinking seems to go. “Why isn’t my hero heroic?”

So it is that we find Harry Reid initiating, this Saturday, the first procedural vote for what will undoubtedly be a tedious legislative process that, in the end, will commence a watered-down version of health care reform that may or may not reduce your co-pays come 2035.

That some version of the legislation will come to a vote, and pass, is in little doubt to anyone paying attention.

And yet, in this corner stands Smoking Joey L, screaming to anyone who will listen that he will personally filibuster any bill that even smells like a public option.

Of course, the public option that the Senate is considering is a watered-down compromise of the watered-down compromise that the House kind-of-not-really passed into committee two weeks ago.

Think ordering Samuel Smith’s Taddy Porter and getting half a cupful of Natty Light from a keg, and you’ve about got it right.

And, in that corner stands Huckleberry Harry, pouring shots of bar whiskey from of a bottle of Johnny Walker Blue, promising health care for all if this bill just passes!

And over in Australia a paunchy Nature Boy slaps a foggy Hulkster, who quickly blades his forehead, then stumbles through a bloody hazy. Hogan and Flair walk through the motions and rile up the crowd like they always do. And they get paid well to do it.

When you’re tired of doing real work, you can at least bloody your own face and hands. No one’s going to know the difference and it doesn’t really matter.

Right?