Empire of Illusion - Chris Hedges [5]
“So what you’re saying is, your son is a bastard?” the Boss Man asked the bawling widow.
“Yee-ess,” she whimpered between sobs.
“Hey, Paul Wight,” the Boss Man turned and yelled into the hidden camera, using Big Show’s real name. “You’re a nasty bastard and yo’ mama said so!”
“You know, I thought it was real funny when Big Freak Show’s fake daddy died and went to hell,” the Boss Man told the crowd afterward from the ring. “But you know what’s ten times funnier than his fake daddy’s dying? That’s Big Show walking around, ‘Waaa, waaa, where’s my daddy? Who’s my daddy?’ Well, that’s the million-dollar question. Your daddy could be any one of these stinkin’ morons sittin’ in this arena tonight. But the fact remains: After I get through kicking your ass, I will be the World Wrestling Federation champion, and I guess that makes me your daddy.”
City after city, night after night, packed arena after packed arena, the wrestlers play out a new, broken social narrative. No one has a fixed identify, not the way a Russian communist or an evil Iranian or an American patriot once had an intractable identity. Identities and morality shift with the wind. Established truths, mores, rules, and authenticity mean nothing. Good and evil mean nothing. The idea of permanent personalities and permanent values, as in the culture at large, has evaporated. It is all about winning. It is all about personal pain, vendettas, hedonism, and fantasies of revenge, while inflicting pain on others. It is the cult of victimhood.
The wrestler known as the Undertaker frequently battles a wrestler known as Kane. Kane is the supposed result of an affair between the Undertaker’s mother and the Undertaker’s manager, whose stage name is, appropriately, Paul Bearer. Paul Bearer, fans were told, was at the time of the affair an employee at the funeral home in Death Valley owned by the Undertaker’s parents. Kane, in the story line, “accidentally” burned down the funeral home as a child. The parents died in the fire. Kane was hideously scarred. The Undertaker and Kane each thought the other had been lost in the conflagration.
Paul Bearer had, it turned out, hidden young Kane in a mental asylum. It was when Paul Bearer had a falling out with the Undertaker that he had Kane released and signed Kane on as his agent of revenge. Kane and Paul Bearer, during one event in Long Island, ostensibly exhumed the parents’ bodies for the crowd. They carried the purported remains into the arena. The younger brother had a series of bouts against the older. Paul Bearer was finally kidnapped and trapped in a concrete crypt. The Undertaker refused to rescue his manager. He buried him alive. As Paul A. Cantor notes in his essay on professional wrestling, “All the elements are there: sibling rivalry, disputed parentage, child neglect and abuse, domestic violence, family revenge.”4
Those who were once born with the virus of inherent evil, the Russian communist or the Iranian, now become evil for a reason. It is not their fault. They are victims. Self-pity is the driving motive in life. They were abused as children or in prison or by friends or lovers or spouses or employers. The new mantra says we all have a right to seek emotional gratification if we have been abused, even if it harms others. I am bad, the narratives say, because I was neglected and poorly treated. I was forced to be bad. It is not my fault. Pity me. If you do not pity me, screw you. I pity myself. It is the undiluted narcissism of a society in precipitous decline.
The referee, the only authority figure in the bouts, is easily distracted and unable to administer justice. As soon as the referee turns his back, which happens in nearly every match, the second member of the opposing tag team, who is not supposed to be in the ring at the same time as his or her partner, leaps through the ropes. The two wrestlers pummel an opponent lying helpless on the mat behind the referee’s back. They