The late, cantankerous Frank Zappa once wrote that "Politics is the entertainment division of the military-industrial complex." Zappa was no modern Liberal, and his politics to me always seemed to pre-date the Boomer era. He was more of a creature of the WW2 generation, but I think he was way ahead of what happened in our country, as I t…
The late, cantankerous Frank Zappa once wrote that "Politics is the entertainment division of the military-industrial complex." Zappa was no modern Liberal, and his politics to me always seemed to pre-date the Boomer era. He was more of a creature of the WW2 generation, but I think he was way ahead of what happened in our country, as I think he wrote what I just paraphrased some time in the late '80s.
We've always been a nation of "temporarily embarrassed millionaires" (a saying I think often attributed to Mark Twain... but it's too early in the day to Google for a comments section). So there has always been a false belief held by Everyday Joe American that THEY are Members of the Club, that THEY are part of the Smart, Advantaged class... if it only weren't for THOSE PEOPLE.
Wingnut Media and Fox News turned professional political grifting into a competitive team sport, where You Too can compete, can sweat, bleed, cheer and root for Your Team. Just like you cheer on the New England Patriots, or the Broncos, or the Red Sox.
And much more importantly ROOT AGAINST the Other Team. Those Lousy, Dirty Losers!
By "glamming" up politics into a pro-sport game, they turned two generations into rabid fans, super-fans. And because there's really only one side who pushes these events as purposely, forcefully and dramatically as Entertainment, they turned it into an Us vs. Them thing the way Pro Wrestling did. There's only 2 teams in pro wrestling. It's not split into different regions, where fans support their hometown. There's literally "good guy" wrestlers and "bad guy" wrestlers, and every event is on the same network, the same channel, covered by the same commentators.
Dirty tricks, low hits, no holds barred... it's all part of the game—on both sides. All those things are an intrinsic, essential part of the game. But the OTHER SIDE is much worse with all that stuff, the Bad Stuff! So it's ESSENTIAL for Our Side to mercilessly overpower The Other Side.
I still haven't had enough coffee. But basically, wingnut media made politics popular and turned it into a one-sided version of accessible, digestible Drama. The true Entertainment Division of the Military-Industrial Complex.
I think there's always gonna be complete mobsters who use crises to grab all they can get no matter when/where. But now they have a Cheering Section, and die-hard Superfans.
Your point about wrestling is very good. I've heard Trump's involvement with the WWE linked to his behaviors as a candidate and as president, but good guy-heel thing really is at the root of it.
Miles away from the simple joys of the Gorgeous Ladies of Wrestling!
In wingnut media, there really is no Other Side besides the caricature villains they present. They portray Both Sides at the same time, they write, direct and act out the Good Guys and well as the Bad Guys in a simplistic, ongoing soap-opera drama 24 hours a day, seven days a week.
The other thing about pro wrestling is that it's fake. Absolutely 100% fake. WWE actually says it's fake.
Yet, the fans root for the good guys and jeer the heels as though it's real--and for most of those fans, it IS real. They can't tell it's fakes, or they delude themselves into believing it's real.
Any wonder why we look at Trump and see incompetent criminal asshole, and they look at Trump and see Jesus' handpicked president?
I have a hard time squaring that with the reactions of the fans. If they KNOW it's fake, then there's some other tragic mental illness that makes them cheer for their favorites as though the competition is real. To my mind, it's like going to the symphony and cheering loudly for the bassoons because you love woodwinds but find the strings suspect.
Oh, come on. You watch a TV drama, that's "fake" too in some sense, but you don't accuse viewers who root for their favorite characters of being mentally ill.
Sure. I like, say, Bob Odenkirk in Better Call Saul. But I'm not actively cheering for him from the stands, nor am I paying for premium tickets to go watch him on tour, nor am I filling my home with merch and trinkets from the series. Children might do such things, but adults generally confine such fandom activities to actual competitive sports such as football, baseball, soccer, etc.
I think you'd be extremely hard pressed to find anyone buying Downton Abbey trinkets because they're rooting for Mrs. Crawley.
For crying out loud. Type "do pro-wrestling fans know it's scripted?" into google and see what you get. Or, if your vested interest in thinking wrestling fans are all mentally defective won't brook any challenges, don't, I suppose.
I watched WWE a little when my young nephews were into it and I thought at the time, this is not only bad, this is bad in a not good way, like not a "I don't understand young people" way but a "I don't need to understand young people to realize this is not just inane, which is fine, but also valorizes meaningless violence and self-aggrandizement in a way that might have damaging long-term effects." And, as Hamlet said, the time gives it proof.
I personally have zero interest in pro wrestling, and I'm sort of annoyed that I'm finding myself in the position of sort-of defending it. However, I know people who are into it who are neither malevolent nor dumb nor right-wing (but I repeat myself). The idea that these are people (other than some small children) who delusionally believe it's real and cheer it on in a totally unironic way is just flatly false. I know there are all kinds of problematic aspects to the sport (or whatever you call it), in the same way that there are with football, but I don't think liking either football or wrestling makes you a bad person.
A long time ago I read Baa Baa, Black Sheep, the memoirs of marine fighter pilot and professional drunk Gregory Boyington. After the war when he was really down and out he was a professional wrestling referee. This would have been in the late 1940s early 1950s.
Last week I went back to the book and reread the chapter about his refereeing and his thoughts about the crowds of that period. It was both nasty and funny, and if I may say so: plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose, without as much money or power of course.
He thought they believed and he was attacked by members of the crowd at at least one point who disagreed with this calls, even though it was made clear to them again and again that it wasn't a sporting event but rather an "exhibition".
One other thing: he says at one point a wrestler told him the thing that worried the wrestler the most was that "Each one of those people has one vote just like you and me."
Just a tangent: I was a teenager when the "Baa, Baa Black Sheep" TV series was on, which I started watching because I'd enjoyed lead Robert Conrad in "The Wild Wild West" (in endless afternoon TV reruns). I enjoyed the show - about a bunch of roguish hard-drinking hellions who had a good time while fighting the good fight - and that led me to read Boyington's autobiography. It was fascinating to me that the whole basically feel-good TV series was not only a small part of the book, but it was clear that it was a part that as arecovering alcholic Boyington looked back on with shame and regret.
The late, cantankerous Frank Zappa once wrote that "Politics is the entertainment division of the military-industrial complex." Zappa was no modern Liberal, and his politics to me always seemed to pre-date the Boomer era. He was more of a creature of the WW2 generation, but I think he was way ahead of what happened in our country, as I think he wrote what I just paraphrased some time in the late '80s.
We've always been a nation of "temporarily embarrassed millionaires" (a saying I think often attributed to Mark Twain... but it's too early in the day to Google for a comments section). So there has always been a false belief held by Everyday Joe American that THEY are Members of the Club, that THEY are part of the Smart, Advantaged class... if it only weren't for THOSE PEOPLE.
Wingnut Media and Fox News turned professional political grifting into a competitive team sport, where You Too can compete, can sweat, bleed, cheer and root for Your Team. Just like you cheer on the New England Patriots, or the Broncos, or the Red Sox.
And much more importantly ROOT AGAINST the Other Team. Those Lousy, Dirty Losers!
By "glamming" up politics into a pro-sport game, they turned two generations into rabid fans, super-fans. And because there's really only one side who pushes these events as purposely, forcefully and dramatically as Entertainment, they turned it into an Us vs. Them thing the way Pro Wrestling did. There's only 2 teams in pro wrestling. It's not split into different regions, where fans support their hometown. There's literally "good guy" wrestlers and "bad guy" wrestlers, and every event is on the same network, the same channel, covered by the same commentators.
Dirty tricks, low hits, no holds barred... it's all part of the game—on both sides. All those things are an intrinsic, essential part of the game. But the OTHER SIDE is much worse with all that stuff, the Bad Stuff! So it's ESSENTIAL for Our Side to mercilessly overpower The Other Side.
I still haven't had enough coffee. But basically, wingnut media made politics popular and turned it into a one-sided version of accessible, digestible Drama. The true Entertainment Division of the Military-Industrial Complex.
I think there's always gonna be complete mobsters who use crises to grab all they can get no matter when/where. But now they have a Cheering Section, and die-hard Superfans.
Your point about wrestling is very good. I've heard Trump's involvement with the WWE linked to his behaviors as a candidate and as president, but good guy-heel thing really is at the root of it.
Miles away from the simple joys of the Gorgeous Ladies of Wrestling!
In wingnut media, there really is no Other Side besides the caricature villains they present. They portray Both Sides at the same time, they write, direct and act out the Good Guys and well as the Bad Guys in a simplistic, ongoing soap-opera drama 24 hours a day, seven days a week.
The other thing about pro wrestling is that it's fake. Absolutely 100% fake. WWE actually says it's fake.
Yet, the fans root for the good guys and jeer the heels as though it's real--and for most of those fans, it IS real. They can't tell it's fakes, or they delude themselves into believing it's real.
Any wonder why we look at Trump and see incompetent criminal asshole, and they look at Trump and see Jesus' handpicked president?
<i>They can't tell it's fakes, or they delude themselves into believing it's real.</i>
I don't think this is remotely true. The vast majority of wrestling fans are perfectly aware that it's "fake." Politics is much worse in this regard.
I have a hard time squaring that with the reactions of the fans. If they KNOW it's fake, then there's some other tragic mental illness that makes them cheer for their favorites as though the competition is real. To my mind, it's like going to the symphony and cheering loudly for the bassoons because you love woodwinds but find the strings suspect.
Oh, come on. You watch a TV drama, that's "fake" too in some sense, but you don't accuse viewers who root for their favorite characters of being mentally ill.
Sure. I like, say, Bob Odenkirk in Better Call Saul. But I'm not actively cheering for him from the stands, nor am I paying for premium tickets to go watch him on tour, nor am I filling my home with merch and trinkets from the series. Children might do such things, but adults generally confine such fandom activities to actual competitive sports such as football, baseball, soccer, etc.
I think you'd be extremely hard pressed to find anyone buying Downton Abbey trinkets because they're rooting for Mrs. Crawley.
For crying out loud. Type "do pro-wrestling fans know it's scripted?" into google and see what you get. Or, if your vested interest in thinking wrestling fans are all mentally defective won't brook any challenges, don't, I suppose.
I watched WWE a little when my young nephews were into it and I thought at the time, this is not only bad, this is bad in a not good way, like not a "I don't understand young people" way but a "I don't need to understand young people to realize this is not just inane, which is fine, but also valorizes meaningless violence and self-aggrandizement in a way that might have damaging long-term effects." And, as Hamlet said, the time gives it proof.
I personally have zero interest in pro wrestling, and I'm sort of annoyed that I'm finding myself in the position of sort-of defending it. However, I know people who are into it who are neither malevolent nor dumb nor right-wing (but I repeat myself). The idea that these are people (other than some small children) who delusionally believe it's real and cheer it on in a totally unironic way is just flatly false. I know there are all kinds of problematic aspects to the sport (or whatever you call it), in the same way that there are with football, but I don't think liking either football or wrestling makes you a bad person.
A long time ago I read Baa Baa, Black Sheep, the memoirs of marine fighter pilot and professional drunk Gregory Boyington. After the war when he was really down and out he was a professional wrestling referee. This would have been in the late 1940s early 1950s.
Last week I went back to the book and reread the chapter about his refereeing and his thoughts about the crowds of that period. It was both nasty and funny, and if I may say so: plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose, without as much money or power of course.
He thought they believed and he was attacked by members of the crowd at at least one point who disagreed with this calls, even though it was made clear to them again and again that it wasn't a sporting event but rather an "exhibition".
One other thing: he says at one point a wrestler told him the thing that worried the wrestler the most was that "Each one of those people has one vote just like you and me."
Just a tangent: I was a teenager when the "Baa, Baa Black Sheep" TV series was on, which I started watching because I'd enjoyed lead Robert Conrad in "The Wild Wild West" (in endless afternoon TV reruns). I enjoyed the show - about a bunch of roguish hard-drinking hellions who had a good time while fighting the good fight - and that led me to read Boyington's autobiography. It was fascinating to me that the whole basically feel-good TV series was not only a small part of the book, but it was clear that it was a part that as arecovering alcholic Boyington looked back on with shame and regret.
YOU WOULD SAY THAT LIBTARD BECUZ YOU GO TO OPERAZ