The Reality Check 9.27.06: TNA's Hiring of Kurt Angle Sparks Outrage Posted by J.D. Dunn on 09.27.2006
Whether or not Kurt Angle made the right choice, it's his choice.
Writer's Note: This is a special comment. It is not meant to be directed at a single individual, but rather a groupthink that is making its way down the hallowed halls of the IWC. Even if you don't agree, I hope it gives you something to think about.
While I'm sure it must have been common knowledge to most of you out there, I was startled to learn of the vast audience of teenaged girls in the Internet Wrestling Community. Generally, I tend to think of the IWC as a male-centric society made up of fans who are just slightly maladjusted. Not the kind of fans who would kill or maim anyone, but the kind of people who don't fit in well in society — the people who shun human connection in favor of scoring a "sold" response in their debate over whether Han shot first. I should know. I was a poster before I was a main-page writer.
Instead, I find that I've been writing to a group of pubescent girls, those old enough to have a poster of Jared Leto on their walls but not old enough to realize they'll probably get stuck with Jared of "Subway" sandwich fame. If you listen closely, you can hear the sound of the "Dateline: To Catch a Predator" production van pulling up. Yes, the IWC is filled with teenage girls.
How else would you explain the overwhelming outpouring of offers to babysit a 37 year-old man?
Perhaps it's Kurt Angle's bald head that's throwing people off. Babies, after all, aren't known for their flowing locks (outside of Suri Cruise). While teething would explain the mouthguard, it doesn't explain the German suplexes. No. No, this is something else.
Perhaps it's part of a worldwide conspiracy by Skechers to flood the market with babysitters who will, in turn, spend money on their products (30% off all men's, women's and children's apparel through Thanksgiving). Or maybe the Bush administration's way of lowering the unemployment rate to zero just before the election.
Or perhaps, just perhaps, it's the pretentious need to insinuate oneself into a controversy in order to siphon the energy for your own obsessive egostroke like some malignant mosquito. And, if there's no real controversy to be had…you invent one.
Not since the Harriet Miers nomination to the Supreme Court has a job hiring sparked so much outrage as Kurt Angle's signing with Total Non-stop Action. I, for one, was pleased to find that a wrestler who was looking for work, was qualified for said work, and who liked to be paid for doing said work found a home with a wrestling company who was willing to pay him. It seems to be the American way. Yet, to listen to these nettling naysayers, the hiring will be a worse disaster than Hurricane Katrina. Well, Dixie, you're doin' a heckuva job.
With the IWC levees of good sense breaking, a massive tidal wave of twaddle has flooded our dear streets of sanity. To hear the self-righteous tater-tot set tell it, Angle was ripped from his deathbed by the iron claws of a Vicodin monkey that he's been carrying around on his back and forced to sign a contract at gunpoint…in his own blood of course.
Think of the children.
The philosophy of this cacophony of claptrap is two-pronged, as is evidenced by the subtext of the discussion — some of them love the WWE in the way that Tom Cruise loves Xenu, and the others just hate the IWC, of which they don't realize that they're a part. And yet, there seems to be no wiggle room in this ever-expansive definition of reality and common sense created by those who would have us believe Kurt Angle is somehow less than mentally competent.
Vince McMahon, they would have us believe, cared so deeply for Kurt Angle's welfare that he saved him from himself. After all, the WWE wouldn't hire a man with only one hip to work Summerslam, would they? They wouldn't rewrite their own wellness policy to protect buyrates, would they?
WON'T SOMEBODY PLEASE THINK OF THE CHILDREN?!
Then, here comes Dixie Carter, pointy tail tucked neatly underneath her green-plaid Hockaday skirt, to make a deal with a desperate and deranged man. No longer can they simply dismiss TNA as bush league, so it becomes an evil organization. TNA is evil. The WWE is good. If you don't believe them, they'll sue you in England.
The other side of the counterfeit coin of concern seems to emerge with every major story and is no less specious than the first. The IWC is evil and filled with people that must be reminded that they don't matter! It doesn't seem to matter how well-reasoned the argument, how common-sensical the point. People with an Ethernet cable just can't be trusted. Nor does it matter just how wrong this group has been and how right the IWC establishment has been in the past.
Case in point: Remember about four months ago when Vince was restarting ECW? Many sensible fans questioned whether Vince could truly allow the creation of an extreme, daring promotion that didn't conform to what his vision of wrestling should be. What did the anti-IWC crew have to say? Well, amongst several utterances indicating that they'd mistaken their opponent for Oedipus, they chastised the questioner for "not being positive" and "not giving it a chance." Low expectations based on previous experience are a cardinal sin.
Fast-forward a few weeks to ECW's debut show on Sci-Fi. It was, for the most part, a bland exercise in wrestling, a Raw-lite, and fans said so. But what did the anti-IWC crowd counter with? That's right, people's expectations were too high! My, aren't they versatile?
And so it continues with the Kurt Angle situation that really isn't a situation. Xenu Vince McMahon must be elevated as a deity, the IWC establishment must be flagellated for supporting a 37 year-old man who really should be confined a padded room lest he bruise himself on the sharp corner of a kitchen counter, and those who called for concern and compassion for Kurt must make sure they have March 2007 in his death pool. After all, the important thing is not that you are outraged, but that people know that you are outraged so you can take credit for it at a later date.
"But," you may be asking, "didn't I just read somewhere that doctors told Kurt Angle he'd be paralyzed by one more blow?" You might have. In an article from 1996. When Kurt Angle broke his neck during Olympic competition, doctors told him he had a high probability of becoming paralyzed. And yet he took hundreds of German Suplexes. And yet he took bumps onto concrete floors. And yet he did moonsaults off 20-foot high steel cages. It's possible, in spite of certain people guaranteeing the opposite, that Kurt Angle just might be able to handle wrestling three times a month, one of those being a squash against Shark Boy or his heel equivalent.
And if Kurt Angle were to become paralyzed or die from a Shark Boy missile dropkick? Did anyone stop to think that Kurt considered that, and maybe he just doesn't care? The WWE recently released a DVD detailing the career of Superstar Billy Graham. Graham didn't just do a lot of drugs. He did mountains of drugs. It got to be so bad that he had to have a liver transplant while he was on death's door. His response? If he had it to do all over again, he'd do it the same way. Some things are worth the risk and it's the person taking the risk who does the deciding.
As a libertarian, the idea that someone who doesn't even know me thinks that they can decide when I work, where I work, how long I work and for whom I work is an anathema to me. From whom did you get this prescient knowledge to diagnose Kurt Angle as a crazed drug addict? From which medical school did you graduate that gives you a degree in diagnosing near-paralysis and insanity in a man via a television screen? And, most importantly, where did you get the cynicism to couch your self-congratulatory diagnoses under the auspices of outrage for a man's well being?
When you can answer those questions, you may regain some of the credibility you so casually squandered in your egotistical quests of mock concern.
And maybe then you'll realize that grown men don't need babysitters.
