It's June 1 on the East Coast ...

... but not out here in Berkeley. I'll start things off anyway, though.

Hi, I'm John Schwenkler. This post was supposed to start off by announcing that - announcing that it was by John Schwenkler, I mean - but I didn't want to interrupt the thought. I'm a Ph.D. candidate in Philosophy at UC Berkeley, and a parent - together with my lovely wife Angela - to a fifteen-month-old, strawberry eating machine named Jack. I write a bit, too, and I usually blog here.

Just so that you know what kind of box to put me in right from the start, I like to think of myself as having communitarian-libertarian-urbanist-agrarian-conservative-decentralist-reactionary leanings, which means - in practice - that I tend to spin. (I am still not half as interesting as Reihan, though.) So expect unpredictability.

Like, say, my decision to link to this from Dylan Waco at Left Conservative. Together with Helen's tantalizingly brief treatise on how the death of place killed music, it strikes me as providing as good a case as one could want against the Modern World. To wit:

Many laymen are totally unaware of the economic realities of the wrestling business. Even most fans have literally no idea that wrestlers do not receive pensions or health insurance from their employers. They do no have a union or any other collective bargaining agency and the paranoid nature of most of the performers almost assures they never will. For the most part they pay their own travel expenses and are required to get themselves from place to place while keeping up with their hectic road schedules. When these details become known the most common response is "regulate it", but would that help?

Regulations would likely have the same effect on the independent wrestling companies that they had on small artisans and farmers during the Progressive Era. In other words it would make them extinct. This would strengthen McMahon and the corporate class even more and would leave those concerned few who take the lives of pro wrestlers and their families seriously back at square one. In light of these facts Randazzo's implied call for abolition hardly seems crazy.

The modern wrestling industry has no true parallel historically, but I like to compare it to Hassan I Sabbah and The Assassins. Vince McMahon is the "Old Man On The Mountain" himself guaranteeing glory, immortality and honor, but dispensing only copious amounts of drugs and loose women. His empire promotes placelessness, if not outright homelessness, in service of an undefined "greater good". The Assassins were promised heaven. What the hell is McMahon really promising other than a place for long time marks to fulfill their fantasies by showing their creepy level of commitment to a business that leaves their bodies broken and homes shattered?

No wrestling fan, I, but it seems that there are important lessons to be drawn here. Discuss.

Comments

[Salemicus]

I gave my overlong thoughts here.

[Joules]

Maybe a cooperative effort with Bollywood could be arranged to employ wrestlers as actors so they could continue to earn money when they aren't wrestling, but stay away from American cinema and t.v.