Yesterday I tossed off a comment about the Republicans being framed by World Wrestling Entertainment and the Disney Channel. I said,
Ever watch WWE? Argh, I know, but you should for five eye-scalding minutes. Watch the crowd. That's Republicans in a nutshell, screaming, slobbering, and waving misspelled signs advocating ripping the "bad guy's" nuts off. Now turn to the Disney Channel. This is the other bookend of the Repubs: schmaltzy, saccharine, glossy, scrubbed from head to toe, and absolutely no connection to the real world. Palin is a Disney mom who carries on like a WWE fan. No wonder the Republicans love her.
It seemed to spark a response.
Two Kossacks, True Blue Majority and GGWoman55, commented that I should diary this. True Blue said,
damn--this should be a separate diary. can you expand upon this with some links and pictures? i think you have the germ of something really significant here.
I've actually been thinking along these lines for some time now. So here goes, my probably inartful attempt to document this little frame.
First, a little background. I grew up watching one precursor to the WWE, Mid-Atlantic Wrestling. Wahoo McDaniel and his "tomahawk chop," Paul Jones doing his low-rent impression of Captain America, pugs and broken-down yahoos named Sven and Blackjack and Rip Hawk. Ric Flair, the "Nature Boy," got his start there. The TV station I watched this crap on--WRAL in Raleigh, NC--actually produced the matches in its own studios, in a small ring with probably ten rows of bleachers stuffed with idiot fans howling and raving to "git em, boy!" I only went to one actual event, at the State Fairgrounds, and came away not knowing whether to be excited or disturbed at the bloody, senseless mayhem. When another station began challenging WRAL's hold on the bloodlusting teenage idiot market by showing Florida wrestling--Jerry Brisco, Terry Funk, and some truly scary Oriental gentleman named Professor Toru Tanaka--I was enamoured all over again. But two things began working against my love of sweaty hunks of bloated manflesh ramming each others' heads into tables. One, I was growing up both physically and emotionally, and the displays of rampant testosterone and almost animalistic challenging and territoriality became increasingly disturbing to me. Two, I became convinced on my own that wrestling was fake. When I later heard tales of chicken blood being injected under the skin of the forehead and such, it only confirmed what I already suspected. Fake!
I did learn two things during my time as a wrestling fan. One, suplexing your brother on Mom's bed can break the frame. Two, that fucking Figure-Four Leglock hurts!
As for Disney, I was never a fan. Too cute by half, and too contrived. The cute little puppy always, always, always finds a loving, well-scrubbed pre-teen to love and care for him. The bad guy, who always looks vaguely Eastern European and vamps it up like Simon Legree, is always thwarted, usually by a consortium of well-scrubbed pre-teens with capped teeth and a startling lack of acne. Mom and Dad are always bemused but well-meaning buffoons bumbling through life, ever lucky to have one or two of those cute moptop pre-teens to keep them moving forward without bouncing off of walls. Everyone lived in well-tended, neatly arranged suburban neighborhoods straight out of Edward Scissorhands, or at worst in slightly funky (but still upscale and clean, always clean) urban apartments, usually in a building with a genial doorman who would sneak the kid in and out of the building as part of the kid's requisite escapades. Yecch. The cartoons were just as bad. Mickey Mouse annoyed the shit out of me, and Pluto and Goofy made the Three Stooges look like a convention of theoretical physicists.
Okay, so what does this have to do with Republicans and Sarah "Mooseburger" Palin?
Well, I feel that Disney and the WWE form a set of social bookends that frame many Republicans' mindsets. Let's give some visual cues, shall we?
"Damn, but that's what McCain needs to do to that Obammer boy, just break him over his knee!"
Any problem seeing this scene at the Republican convention?
Wonder why the most popular WWE figure is John Cena, whose schtick is portraying himself as a Marine:
(No, he never served in the military. Need you ask? Plucka plucka, though I don't know whether Cena has ever publicly declared his political affiliation.)
On the wrestling side, you've got raw, idiot testosterone-driven behaviors below and beneath any standard of civilized behaviors. You've got simplistic black/white thinking, where every issue is either Right or Wrong and almost every problem can be solved by throwing a punch or a chair, or by dropping someone on their head. Everyone's a Good Guy or a Bad Guy, and on the odd occasion where one turns into the other, it's a plot twist worthy of Shakespeare, or at least Robert Ludlum. You've got display behaviors worthy of a sex-maddened tomcat screaming for booty and attacking any male that dares cast a lusty eye on their harem or invade their turf. Every problem is dramatized and simplified, and if it can't be solved by the end of today's broadcast, it will be solved by next week...or it will become a Big Problem to be solved during the big pay-per-view event, usually in a six-man cage match where blood flows like two-dollar beer and you might just be the guy who hands The Undertaker a chair to smash his opponent with. Be part of the solution!
Who needs to sound like a bunch of fairy Democrats, mincing around lisping about laws and civil rights and all that shit? Real men solve their problems by ramming the bad guy's head into the turnbuckle. Just give C.M. Punk five minutes in the ring with Osama bin Laden, and he'll singlehandledly bring Islamic terrorism to a bloody, humiliating end, complete with heavy-metal theme music, fireworks, and bikini-clad girls humping poles as a backdrop. And all in time for the next commercial break.
On the other hand, you've got Disney. Equally disgusting, but so different in style. Sugar-diabetes sweet. Clean, always squeaky clean.
Know this girl? Your kids do, that's for damn sure. Hannah is the flavor of the school year, an engagingly tousled, mall-crawling, dad's money-spending, junk-jewelry bedecked, little moptop with a powerful appeal to painfully self-aware sixth-grade girls and just enough implied jailbait appeal to give the old lechers something to look at. I see your tummy, Hannah, whoo hoo. She looks a lot like last year's model:
That's Hillary Duff, aka Lizzie McGuire. Hillary's getting a little old for the teen-squeal bit, and judging from some of the pics I saw on the net while looking for this one, Hillary's starting to give off that Lindsey Lohan-Jenna Bush vibe of post-adolescent depravity that can only be fueled by large doses of unearned celebrity and vast influxes of someone else's money. But that's all right. We can either cheer her on her upcoming roller-coaster ride of drugs, bulemia, and rehab, or we can gloat over her crash and congratulate ourselves on how much more superior we are to those rudderless, amoral celebs. Whaddya mean, you're sold out of People Magazine?
Disney portrays an equally fantastical world as WWE does. Where WWE is bloody and violent, Disney is sanitized. Where wrestlers solve their problems with a chair upside the head, Disney solves problems with winsome smiles, cute wisecracks, wide-eyed, lip-catching appeals to your better nature, and a good strong dose of Americana. No one bleeds, no one misses meals, no one gets raped or mugged or abused by the crossing guard. Mr. Clean just swabbed the entire world antiseptically immaculate thirty seconds before you got there. The Disney world is filmed with Vaseline on the lens--and they're fully aware that that particular trick originated in the porn world. They use a lot of tricks that the porn meisters came up with. (You do the Internet search if you want. I'm not getting "porn-stormed.") No one gets welfare on Disney, no one needs it. No one needs government handouts--we're all born with big honking sets of boots to bootstrap ourselves with, and if we have a problem, why, Joe the next-door neighbor will come ambling along to give us that all-American helping hand. No one sheds blood, and when they get sick, it's with Ali McGraw disease, where they get better-looking as they sink into a dramatic, pre-commercial death. You can tell the foreigners because they have comic accents, and they pant and slaver to ape the behaviors and mores of True Americans. Although they never will, it's entertaining to watch them try. The condescension is rampant. The tragedy, the comedy, the range and gamut of human emotion is wide as an ocean and as shallow as a pumpkin seed. You can wallow in it all day and never really get wet.
But the similarities are startling. Both WWE and Disney focus on simplistic, black-white solutions to drastically simplified problems. Every problem can be settled before the commercial break...or if not, it must be a two-parter and we'll solve it next week. Everything works better with a big American flag pasted over it, whether it's a teenage relationship (kisses during the 7th inning stretch, where they're playing sprightly tunes just like the band in Willoughby), an automobile, or a third-world country. Foriegners either want to be Americans more than anything, they're idiots who we can safely patronize, or they're enemies who we should, and will, bomb into oblivion.
I could go on. But let's get to Miss Bull Moose of 2008, Sarah Palin. Cheer if you like. But check this out:
Holy moly, Miss Governor, you're beautiful! Well, she was a beauty queen, don't forget. But look closer. She's a Disney governor! She looks like Hillary Duff! Yes, indeed. Perky countenance, huge doe eyes, that firm but slightly fleshy jawline that steers clear of any exotic hint at lean foreign extraction, that wide charming toothy (perfectly capped teeth) smile. She'd be perfect as the young, engaging schoolteacher or the slightly adventurous aunt on a move like The Parent Trap. If she were your mom, you know the kitchen would always smell like cookies and she'd be waiting in a modest but form-fitting dress and a little apron to kiss you hello after the school bus took you right to your door.
But even better: she lays the WWE Smackdown on those Democrats! God, I love a beautiful woman who talks tough. And she does, even though you and I know that her convention speech, barn-burner as some think it was, wasn't even written for her. Doesn't matter. She talks tough, and that's one exciting step from talking dirty. Yowsah! We all know that 90% of what WWE fans love is the trash-talking, the sizzle that promises the steak. It's not enough to watch Chris Jericho put the beatdown on Batista, we have to work up to it with a carefully crafted period of time where he trash-talks his victim. Tell me just how bad you're going to bust him up, get my mouth watering, get me ready for it, oh baby you know just what...um, sorry about that. Anyway, that's where Sarah Palin comes in. A Disney mom who can trash-talk like John Cena. Republicans' hearts go pitty-pat.
I understand there's a market for women WWE wrestlers. If you're game, you can no doubt draw some pretty apt comparisons. Me, I think I'm about tapped out on this subject for now. Some of the Web sites I went to for "research" on this site were pretty tawdry.
What do you think? Is the framing apt?