The Ne Plus Ultra of Obsessive College Football Commentary

Holy smokes.

United States of America v. Pelosi

(Sorry, short unfinished-ish message here. We’re about to head out of town for a week in San Diego, and I wanted to get it posted.)

Why exactly is Nancy Pelosi opposed to initiating impeachment proceedings against Bush and Cheney?

Last November she declared such action “off the table,” and he has held fiercely to that line despite the administration’s
continuing incompetence, lawlessness, and sub-Harding popularity.

There is little question that Bush, Cheney, Gonzales, and possibly others in the current administration have committed the sort of “high crimes and misdeamnors” that the antimonarchist Framers envisioned when they created the Constitutional remedy of impeachment.

The evidence of what they did and why they did it seems easily at hand, given that many of the details have appeared in the floodwater of coverage from the reinvigorated Post and Times and in several volumes of best-selling nonfiction over the past 18 months.

A telephone poll conducted last month by the American Research Group suggested that the public is not only open to but eager for such a remedy. Of voters surveyed, 46% supported impeachment proceedings against Bush and a true majority (54%) wanted to see action against Cheney.

And yet Pelosi — the Democratic leader of Congress, a fervent partisan (in the absolutely worst sense), and the biggest beneficiary of the last election cycle’s fervor to throw the bums out — refuses to do just that. The bums must stay.

In her latest statement (see http://www.thenation.com/blogs/notion/?pid=218930), she suggests that impeachment proceedings would divide the country, engender negative feelings toward the Democrats in Congress, and distract the legislature from the rest of their agenda.

This is all true, more or less, and yet it is hard to imagine a clearer case for action that a president and vice president who abuse their power of appointment, manipulate intelligence resources to further their own agenda, invent baseless legal grounds to justify instruct aides to ignore congressional authority, and on and on.

Presumably the Democratic Speaker of the House would want to exercise the Congress’s power to throw a corrupt Republican administration out of the White House. What gives? Sure, removing Bush and Cheney would put Pelosi herself in the White House, an end game that would tend to cast any championship of the impeachment cause on her part in a harsh light.

Still, the possible appearance of self-interest is not a reasonable defense for the shirking of duties. Bush, Cheney, and Gonzales swore to uphold the law, then violated it repeatedly. That’s a cut-and-dried case for impeachment, is it not?

What am I missing?

(Great podcast on the subject, by the way, over at Bill Moyers’ Journal:

http://www.pbs.org/moyers/journal/07132007/profile.html)

Missing

My best childhood friend, Mika, is long gone.

He’s still alive somewhere, probably, but I have no idea where or how to find him, even if I decided that I wanted to. And I guess I did want to, briefly anyway, since I tried emailing his old Hotmail address a while back. It felt eerie, like sending a message across time, and I was disappointed but not surprised when it bounced.

We saw this coming — me, Rosie, everybody. After high school, Mika never really grew up; he just drifted into adulthood by sheer inertia. He got a job installing windows, then casually lost it, barely mentioning the fact, and drifted into unemployment. One day he called me from jail, where he’d ended up after a long night of public drunkenness and a short argument with a cop. Several weeks in, a stupid altercation with another inmate stretched his nominal jail stay to 90 days.

We tried to help him when we got out, but he wasn’t interested. All he wanted to talk about was being inside. He said he wished he’d done something real, something worthy of respect in there, instead of some meaningless drunk-and-disorderly act.

We lost touch for a while.

When he resurfaced, it looked briefly like he’d turned a corner. In what would prove his only foray into regular life, he hooked up with a poor girl with a trailer court past, an awful family, and a grade-A meth addiction, but who seemed to like him pretty well. He claimed the woman’s daughter as his own, eyes gleeming with pride, and before long they had a second child together.

Things went downhill, though. He drank. They started using again. One of them tried to kill the other one, though which one it was depended on which one you asked. Mika left, first physically, then emotionally. His rants against the mother turned into silence about the kids. The last we heard, years ago, was that their mom was in jail and the kids were living in squalor with her parents.

Mika disappeared again. For a year or more, he cycled around the country, living out of a tent and a backpack. He came back lean and strong, surprisingly healthy, but still aimless. He hopped from one strike-it-rich idea to another, never taking action on anything; job hunting was a theoretical pursuit. Chief among the possessions packed into his weathered duffel was a bulky case of nitrous oxide canisters, and on those he did take action, scouring the city after a few days to find a source for replacements.

He stayed with us briefly, in our little house on Ferry Street. We were happy to do it — any would have been obliged anyway — but he started making Rosie nervous. His moods were raucous and unpredictable, and I was off at work all day. One night he made the mistake of lamenting his poor daughter (he seemed to have forgotten he briefly had two of them) who was stuck in sordid conditions by her awful mother. I blew up at him: taking care of his children was his responsibility, but he was too busy doing nothing to stand up for them; if he was ready to step up and take care of them we’d get in the car and drive him to California ourselves, etc.

He stormed off and before long he was gone: first to a rundown apartment in a fetid old house full of what appeared to be squatters, then onward and into the ether.

The last anyone saw him, he came into Esther’s store, and he was dirty and apparently homeless and muttering to himself in a crazy sort of way. We learned later that mental illness runs in his family, and it may have been undiagnosed schizophrenia.

When I think of Mika now, of the rough but loyal friend from when we were kids, not the troubled man he became, one moment sticks out. It seemed like an aberration at the time; now it feels like a flash forward.

His dad, Phil, moved to Texas, leaving him behind with nothing but an alcoholic and overwhelmed mother. Mika was hugely resentful: he wanted to go with his dad, but Phil’s plans after their divorce did not not include children.

Before Phil left, though, he and Mika and Mika’s brother dad came over to my dad’s place one night to play poker. Mika was winning, and no doubt being obnoxious about it, and as a lark my dad picked him up and tossed him out the front door, throwing the lock behind him. Everyone laughed: it was a light moment. Until we heard the glass break.

We all ran into the dining room. Dad pulled open the door, and we saw Mika dumbstruck on the step. He was looking at his right hand, suddenly meaty and mortal, streaked and pulsing with blood. Then he shifted his gaze to the glass, smashed to bits all over the entryway, smashed to oblivion by his bare hand.

Just as we gawked at the pointlessness, the ridiculousness of the overreaction, he grinned at the achievement, the evidence of his power, and his own heady sense of bravado. “Wait till I tell everyone at school,” he said. “Idiot,” I muttered.

But Dad was up and out, jerking him upward by his elbow, spanking fiercely, vengefully, even if it was Phil’s kid and he was really too old to spank and Phil was anyway sitting right there at the nook table, still holding his cards.

Dad was no stickler for rules, but money was tight and windows were not cheap.

There was no repeat performance, at least not until he showed up bloodied after a fight in high school. Still, it’s hard not to see the window-smashing incident and its aftermath as a harbinger of disturbances to come.

We tend to treat mental illness like a binary state (sane, not sane), but the reality is a lot messier. Did Mika have chemical problems in his brain? Almost certainly. With the right treatment, could he have lived happily and been a good friend all these years later? Could he have been satisfied getting up every day and going to work and raising his kids and living some version of regular life?

I have no idea.

Research Day: Can Bin Laden Win?

As a young man, Osama Bin Laden studied economics at the Management and Economics School of King Abdulaziz University in Jeddah. At age 23 he joined fellow hardcore Sunni Islamists, unwelcome in Saudi and Egypt, in a virtual pilgrimage to Afghanistan to oppose the Soviet invasion.

Within two years of his arrival he and his fellow mujahadeen were receiving (indirectly, through Pakistan) Saudi and American arms and money. Within four years of his arrival he was heading up the Maktab al-Khadamat, actually handling the logistics of the guerilla war against the Soviets. Shortly thereafter he began to assume operational command of guerilla forces. Six years after his arrival in Afghanistan, in 1987, he won: The Soviet retreat began. It could not have escaped his notice that, just months after the withdrawal concluded in 1989, the entire Soviet Union began its abrupt collapse.

As illustrated in 1813 and 1944, The Russians have a tradition of absorbing and overcoming galling loss of life in their military endeavors. By this standard, the Afghanistan conflict was mild: all told, the Soviets lost just 15,000 dead and 53,000 wounded. The Soviets didn’t abandon the field because of the bloodshed. Nor could they be accused of not trying hard enough: Soviet generals killed an estimated 1,000,000 Afghanis. The Soviet withdrawal is better understood, and the 30-something former economics student probably understood it this way, as a matter of dollars and cents.

The Soviets kept between 80,000 and 100,000 soldiers and support troops stationed in Afghanistan throughout their occupation. The cost of maintaining this occupation is estimated to have cost the Soviets dearly; military spending accounted for 15-16% of their GDP by the mid-1980s, and in 1984 they budgeted another 45% increase in their five-year plan. They lost hundreds of planes, more than 100 helicopters, more than 100 tanks, thousands of vehicles and artillery pieces, plus they burned through loads money trying to prop up a puppet government and train a pet Afghan army.

Bin Laden would have watched the Soviets flee and collapse, and felt pride in his role. You can argue that the Soviet Union collapsed because of slowing growth, demoralization, weakening oil prices, Ronald Reagan’s defense spending… whatever, there’s some truth in all of that. It’s impossible to think, though, that from his perch on the roof of the world, Bin Laden wasn’t convinced, rightly, that by harnessing jihadist guerillas he helped bring a superpower to its knees.

The funny thing is, I distinctly recall Bin Laden explaining exactly how he intended to defeat the US (sound of me rummaging on Google) back in 2004. Here’s an awkwardly translated Bin Laden quote :

“Al-Qa’ida spent $500,000 on the event [9/11] while America lost in the event and its subsequent effects more than 500 billion dollars; that is to say that each of Al-Qa’ida’s dollars defeated one million American dollars, thanks to Allah’s grace. This is in addition to the fact that America lost a large number of jobs, and as for the [federal] deficit, it lost a record number estimated at a trillion dollars.”

We know his history. He’s showing us his playbook; he targeted the World Trade Center, for heavens sakes. The only way we can lose is if we spend our way into a macroeconomic hole; which is what we’re doing. It’s embarrassing, is what it is. The United States is burning almost $3 billion per week in Iraq alone; big picture, we’re blowing at least 20% of our federal budget (4.3% of GDP) on military spending (<–corrected; earlier version of this post read “20% of GDP). The indirect costs–in terms of security lines, gas prices, poorly allocated resources, international prestige–defy calculation.  We are piling up debt with no new investments in infrastructure or education to show for it, and a record 44% of that debt is now held outside of the United States.

We don’t take Bin Laden seriously enough. He’ll be glad if we leave Iraq, but unsatisfied. For a true, Soviet-style victory, he needs us to continue hemmorhaging blood and treasure in a futile conflict on foreign soil.

Sources (partial):

http://www-wds.worldbank.org/external/default/WDSContentServer/WDSP/IB/1994/04/01/000009265_3961006063138/Rendered/PDF/multi0page.pdf

 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bin_laden

http://www.whitehouse.gov/omb/budget/fy2008/pdf/apers/borrowing.pdf

What Cost, War?

With the money we have spent–or budgeted and are about to spend–on our war in Iraq (excluding Afghanistan), we could have purchased two new Kia Sportage mini SUVs for every Iraqi of driving age. We would probably want to add AC on all of those cars, which would cost an additional $27 billion, but that would still leave us with upwards of $110 billion left to cover shipping costs.

I’m assuming that if you place an order for 34 million Kia Sportages, your Kia dealer will give you a 10% discount off of MSRP.

Grease thieves

Just remembered this article from a few years back: a peek into the odd, underground trafficking in used grease that is stolen from restaurants and resold on the black market.

http://archive.salon.com/business/feature/2000/11/06/grease_wars/index.html

Harper’s, July 2007

The July issue of Harper’s has a couple of notable pieces worth seeking out, if you haven’t already seen them. Both are available online.

The first is Ken Silverstein’s excursion into the murky world of lobbying for despots. Apparently even the most prominent of Washington lobbying firms have been known to take on contracts to rehabilitate the image of unpopular dictatorships and failed states. Not much was known about these contracts or the tactics involved, though, since no one involved was eager to speak about them.

Silverstein went undercover to get the story. He invented an investment group with supposed business interests in Turkmenistan, then approached two large lobbying firms to help improve the image of the country’s horrid government. The eagerness with which they responded, and the specifics of their resulting proposals, are alarming.

Check it out at http://harpers.org/archive/2007/07/0081591.

The second piece of note is about Detroit, the oddness thereof, which is appropriate since Detroit city central is without a doubt the oddest place I’ve ever been.

If you haven’t had the pleasure, imagine Chicago after an eerie holocaust: classic buildings intact but abandoned, streets empty, wild grasses overwhelming empty lots and busted-out storefronts. And no people. It’s straight out of one of those ’60s sci-fi films, City of the Apes, except there aren’t any apes either. I was on a PeopleMover in Detroit, travelling from hotel to convention center, and every single person on board was wearing a name tag: no residents, just conventioneers and train-line staff sent to clean up after conventioneers.

An alternate analogy: central Detroit is New Orleans without the flood. Or after a slow-motion flood, an inch per year, just as destructive but too gradual to make the papers or inspire relief efforts. The people wandered away or succumbed, one family at a time, until almost no one was left.

If Oprah decides to fund an adaptation of The Road, they can shoot it for cheap right there in Detroit. Just add a layer of ash.

Anyway, it’s an interesting read:

http://harpers.org/archive/2007/07/0081594.

Spotted in Eugene: Kansas

Walking by the hospital the other day, and thus just blocks from the state’s largest institution for higher learning, I saw a beat-up Mazda pickup with the crassest of bumperstickers. “SCREW DIVERSITY,” it said.

I’m disgusted that someone would choose to advertise their bigotry that way, especially right here in my hometown, which as you know is located nowhere near Mississippi, and I had a puerile and undignified impulse run my keys across the paint job or attack the tires with my Swiss Army knife or maybe just crumple up the vehicle with my bare hands and leave it lying there in a heap.

In the end, though, I just took a cell-phone snapshot and thought for a couple of days about what exactly it meant. What a sissy.

Obviously, on its most literal level, the slogan is simple racism. It is a rejection of nonwhite people, of the modern idea that they might have value and rights and deserve to be respected, of the long-running but only semi-successful effort to reverse the wrongs of the Indian wars, slavery, segregation, and the rest.

It’s the original Oregonian sentiment, really. The path to utopia begins with racial purity. Keep the others out, and everyone will get along fine.

That’s probably not really what the truck owner intended to communicate here, though, is it? The underpinnings of “Screw diversity” are almost certainly white supremacist — unless I missed a bunch of Nation of Islam or Kill Whitey stickers on the front bumper — and everything to do with the victimhood of backlash conservativism that Thomas Frank writes about in his book.

“Diversity” is more than just a codeword for nonwhite, nonstraight, non-Christian people. It’s also a metonym for a whole contemporary school (or alleged school) of thought, the cultural bogeyman of “political correctness,” multiculturalism, affirmative action, reverse racism, antiassimilationism, and the rest. In the context of backlash ideology, opposing “diversity” doesn’t mean you don’t like black people. It means you don’t like lazy, opportunistic black people, along with humorless academics and self-serving activists and having your kids read I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings instead of The Deerhunter.

The other half of the slogan is similarly loaded. “Screw” is the verb of choice, rather than “eliminate” or “destroy,” because it is all about being fed up, about not wanting to take it anymore, about having it up to here with these people, while at the same time acknowledging that you are really just venting and probably not prepared to actually do anything about it. It’s a talk-radio rant, not a call for action.

I suspect the person who bought the bumpersticker sticker thinks it says, essentially, “Enough of this PC bullshit.” Except that it doesn’t. Because choosing to display a message like that means taking responsibility for all of its reasonable interpretations, and in this case that means having black and Asian and Latino kids, and lesbians, and Muslims and Hindus, and even no-nonsense athiests like yours truly (the forgotten minority!) walk down the street of their hometown and see a sign that says, “I hate you and wish you didn’t exist.”

And that is a really disgusting message with which to be accosting people on the street.

Postscript: Rosie and I saw another bumpersticker recently: “KANSAS, AS BIGOTED AS YOU THINK.” Which is sort of funny but mostly just odd, especially to see on a car in Oregon with Oregon plates.

Post-postscript: I still fully intend to write my own What’s the Matter with Kansas? but it will eschew politics, focusing instead on establishing once and for all the wrongheadedness of the pretentious claptrap known as ’70s prog rock. The subtitle will read Why Steve Morse, Not Johnny Rotten, Is the Real Antichrist. Coming soon to a bookseller near you.

Liz Phair, 1998

I’m working, sporadically, on a post about an offensive bumpersticker I saw the other day. In the meantime, though, here’s an account of one of the great disappointments of my concert-going life: a 1998 Liz Phair show at La Luna. I’m still convinced it may have been an imposter, a clever joke, but mostly that just makes it easier to still enjoy Exile in Guyville and Whip-Smart on occasion.

Doors opened at eight; we got there around 8:30. The show was a sellout, and the intersection outside the club was busy with ticket-seekers. By the time we got to the door a half-dozen people had asked us if we had an extra ticket.

La Luna is a classic example of modern grime. The floor is ancient, boot-scuffed hardwood, like a poor school’s gymnasium. No idea of the building’s history, but it obviously has one. The architecture is early-century, ornate: tall double doors to enter, dark wooden structures. As you enter the main hall, the stage is against the left wall, small but respectable. Room enough, but just barely, for a keyboardist, guitarist, drummer, bassist, and backup singer, with Liz herself out front. In front of the stage is maybe a 50×50 foot square of standing room. Behind that is a narrow entrance to a slightly smaller bar. A security guard sits on a stool and checks IDs, applying an iridescent hand stamp to everyone admitted. Above his head glares a black light, which makes these stamps appear, and bathes everyone in that end of the bar with an eerie purple sheen. Plain white clothing looks particularly cool.

Above the bar is some balcony seating fronted with chainlink fence. The effect upon looking up from the main floor — masses of people jostling in an elevated cage, fingers grasping the mesh — is of a futuristic penal colony, or a Klingon social event. The punk/indie circuit has always been fond of this sort of brutal imagery: cultivated ugliness. It goes with the industrial boots that so many people at the show were wearing. Joseph says the balcony is flat seating and it’s impossible to see unless you’re in the front. Which doesn’t stop dozens of people from climbing up anyway.

The early arrivals staked out patches of the wooden floor, the very first sitting with their backs against the stage, ensuring the equivalent of a front-row seat. There were 30-40 people on the floor when we got there, and spaced liberally enough to allow us to claim a spot front and center, one person from the stage and only a foot or three off the main microphone stand. The best seats of my life, bar none. The downside, we would learn later, was absolutely terrible sound. The main PA speakers where on the sides of the stage, far from us, and we caught only their reflection off the back walls. On the first song, a relatively quiet one, I could hear the unelectrified clacking of Liz’s pick against her strings as well as its amplified result.

The crowd was typical La Luna except heavier on the short-haired 20-year-old girls and lighter on the new-metal grunge boys. The girls wore jeans and T-shirts, or remodeled fifties-housewife dresses (yellow florals, blue-and-white checks), or all black — black tank, black skirt, black boots. A pair of sandals here or there, but otherwise mostly well-worn industrial footwear (the trend’s been around a while); I particularly remember a pair of women’s Doc Martens with a pink and blue flower pattern that had faded to tan leather around the toes; they looked like worn-out linoleum. Three people asked us for a light, two for cigarettes. Several asked for drinks of the ice water we’d gotten from the bar.

Initially we had these two women sitting right behind us, in one of the half-dozen spotlights illuminating a cone of smoky haze and creating an orange circle on the floor. Both women were around 20, thin, dressed like they spent a lot of time at places like La Luna. The one on the left had short bobbed black hair, pale skin, a sharp-looking face, wore a black tank top, a short black skirt, and banged-up black knee-high boots, and carried a hefty black bag. Her companion was slightly rounder, unattractive, wore a short-sleeved button-down shirt, tight enough for the fabric to pull slightly around the buttons when she sat, and dark blue gas station pants, and shorter (but not short) black boots, and had blondish dyed-orange hair, fairly short and heavily moussed but with two heavy strands hanging down like daggers on the sides of her face. They talked the whole time, louder than they needed to, the way people do when they want to be overheard, about themselves. Whether or not they looked trashy or whorish, mostly, and whether or not they cared. (They didn’t.) How little they were interested in looking glamorous. How proudly they guarded their individuality. “Somebody’s going to take them home tonight,” I overheard some guy saying, “and really regret it for a couple of weeks.” At least three other women in our field of view were dressed in pretty much the same black & black & black outfit as the one declaring her fierce individuality.

At 9:30 they started a slide show, shining pictures of Liz and presumably her friends and pets on the white drapes behind the stage. Everyone stood up and got excited, not having seen (as we did coming in) the schedule taped up in the mixing booth that showed this going on for half an hour. Some of the slides looked like the sort you get at a Woolworth’s photo booth: Liz grinning, Liz grimacing, Liz wearing a backwards baseball cap and scowling, Liz and several band members jostling for camera space. Others were publicity shots, album covers, snapshots of Liz and other people wearing silly costumes, bikinis, big Russian fur hats. In several stills Liz appeared to be topless, or at least exposing a nipple, and one showed her full-length and nude, although Joseph laughingly insisted it was a body double. The soundtrack during the slide show played “Lust for Life,” a Violent Femmes song that may have been called “Two of a Kind,” “Little Red Corvette,” that Lyle Lovett song that goes, “It was a private conversation…” The crowd sang along with almost all of this, especially the Prince song. After fifteen minutes or so the slides started to repeat, and a loud, intoxicated young woman behind us started in on a loud, intoxicated explanation of how pissed she was becoming. Another girl kept bellowing, “Hi, Portland!” as if Liz were ready to go and just couldn’t remember what she was supposed to say to start the show. A group of guys behind us passed the time by passing a pipe. In front of Joseph a pleasant-looking, energetic frat boy with a cowlicky blond buzz cut and a light cotton Gap sweater, navy with a lime green stripe around the middle, bobbed and shook his head and sang every word of every song on the soundtrack, just as he would throughout the concert itself.

Liz herself was disappointing, I thought. Having known her only from her records and a few publicity stills, I had an entirely misconceived notion of what she was. What did I expect? A certain amount of guardedness, unpolished, a bit uncomfortable, like “I wrote these really personal songs in my bedroom, with no expectations, and now I’m supposed to perform them in public.” A little coyness, sort of enjoying the interaction but standoffish, too. I don’t know, the stage equivalent of David Foster Wallace maybe?

Anyway, what I didn’t expect was what we got. Liz looked like a society wife: freakishly gleaming white teeth, bony buff physique, her semiexposed stomach rippled with muscle, her blond hair pulled up on one side by a flowered hair clip. Onstage she was polished, and her band was good. But her performance seemed vapid, remarkable only for its frequent, impersonal, unengaging sort of flirtation, the sort of packaged fake sex appeal you expect from a Spice Girl. She wore a shiny sagegreen sleeveless top with spaghetti straps, designed it seemed to show off the outline of her tiny breasts. The shirt was a bit short, showing off a minimum of three inches or so of rigorously toned abdomen. Below she wore a floor-length dark brown skirt, tightly tubular but with a slit up one side to mid-hamstring, and ridiculous platform sandals.

The effect of all this, to me, was a coquettish prettiness as charmless and vacant and unsexy, really, as Barbie’s, or Miss America’s. I had expected more, I don’t know, innuendo? The sexual frankness of Liz’s records always struck me as half-pretend, admitting fantasies, striking poses in a bedroom mirror. But this was charmless and crass, like the topless model turned pop singer Samantha Fox back in the ’80s: sex for sale, but not really.

And making matters worse, Liz totally played into this fantasy role. On the songs she sang without a guitar, she was prone to gratuitous aerobic stretching, slowly bending over, in half, for no reason. The crowd went along, joining her in relishing her body, I suppose, but it all just seemed to stupid. I kept thinking, “This twinkie wrote ‘The Divorce Song’?” And when she, inevitably, sang “Flower,” her famously explicit fantasy from Guyville (“I want to fuck you like a dog/I’ll take you home and make you like it…I’ll fuck you till your dick is blue…I want to be your blow-job queen”), the crowd erupted in by far the loudest cheers of the night. Liz laughed a bit, but made it through like a pro. The real calls all night, though, were for “Fuck and Run,” which along with “The Divorce Song” and “Mesmerizing” is one of my favorites. She finally played it for the encore, and it was good but not great. Not really the house-rocker you’d expect at the end of a show. But then again, this show wasn’t really about kicking out the jams, just moving merchandise.

From the vault

Not that anyone needs to hear or think more about professional wrestling, but I came across the following in some old notes and found it sort of interesting. –Josh

So I grilled Joseph the other day about his lingering affection for professional wrestling. Back in his 20s, he was an enthusiast, the editor of a behind-the-screnes wrestling zine (The Turnbuckle) and well connected among the so-called sheet readers who follow closely the machinations of the WWF, the WCW, and their various cousins.

Joseph calls professional wrestling “soap operas for males.” By looking through the illusion (the seemingly spontaneous happenings on the pay-per-view telecast) to see the inner working of the business (the deals, the betrayals, the rises and falls). In this sense sheet readers are not so far from political junkies, especially in the Matt Drudge mold. There are also obvious parallels to be drawn to the world of porn and the journalists who cover its business machinations. These are people for whom the game is more important than the illusion it serves.

There is also a hipster element, as unlikely as that seems, and that gives a hint of why it would appeal to Joseph, the lover of obscure films, nascent bands, soon to be successful (or, more often, wrongfully ignored) artists. The thrill of being in the know runs strong among the sheet readers—or perhaps the better word is “subtext.” Because they know what the regular audience doesn’t—who is supposed to win and why, what effect a “shooting” (a deviation from the script) would have at any point, what is really going on in the minds of the participants, and how that differs from the impressions they are trying to give—they are somehow empowered, raised above the level of the masses who throw down a couple of beers and head down to the Silverdome to see Stone Cold kick some ass.

Seen from this angle, this business of following wrestling becomes both elitist and postmodern. It’s meta-wrestling, a peculiar sort of puppet show where the audience (or at least of fraction of it) ignores the marionettes and focuses on the strings.

About the suddenly ubiquitous “Stone Cold” Steve Austin: Austin has been around the WWF since the early ’80s, the last big swell (before this one) in interest in pro wrestling. According to Joseph he was a fantastic wrestler—meaning that he was very good at executing the physical moves, or “spots,” in the script and making them look realistic—however, he was rarely interviewed, suggesting a deficiency. Still, he stayed around for years as a “midcarder” until a few years ago.

According to a candid interview that Austin did with one of the wrestling sheets, he found his inspiration—his persona—while watching a documentary on serial killers. Austin shaved his head, practiced crazy looks, and started acting like a badass. His standing in the WWF rose. The public arrival, though, took the form of a match with Jake “The Snake” Roberts, who was making a comeback as a born-again Christian, making a big show of turning the other cheek and spouting John 3:16 every chance he got. In their pay-per-view match Austin pretended to beat the hell out of Roberts, culminating by making a big show of slapping him across the face and hollering, “Turn the other cheek! Turn the other cheek!” Afterward Austin grabbed the mic and said (famously, it seems): “Forget John 3:16, how about Austin 3:16. ‘I just kicked your ass, son.’” Hence the “Austin 3:16″ shirts popping up at the mall.

Hulk Hogan, the biggest star of ’80s wrestling, retired in the early ’90s. He quit taking steroids and quickly stopped looking quite as “Hulk-like.” When he decided to make a comeback—back on the “juice,” of course—it was in the Ted Turner–owned WCW, a step down from the main stage. What revived his career, though, and got him back in the WWF was his conversion to a good guy (in the happy Manichean universe of wrestling, anyway) to a bad guy. Joseph applauds it as a shrewd business move; he says it added two years to his career.

The conspiracy angle, and those who know better. Sheet readers live for the unscripted moment: the spot where the script shows through, where real-life passions spill over, where one of the actors slips in a veiled reference that circumvents (for those in the know) the scripted illusion. (The promoters are of course aware of this and thus what we’re really talking about is two levels of illusion, like a higher security clearance for the elites of the audience. But their money still ends up in Vince McMahon’s bank account just the same.)

Recently the sheet readers were all abuzz over a very soap-opera-ish development at the top of the WWF. Bret Harte was slated to give up his title to a wrestler named Shawn Michaels. He accepted that decision, but asked McMahon that it not happen at their upcoming match in Canada, his home country. The promoter agreed: Michaels would drop the match in Canada, then win a rematch a few months later in the States.

In the first match there was a spot where Harte was supposed to execute some move, Michaels was supposed to reverse it, and then Harte was supposed to grab the rope, negating the pin. When the time came, though, Michaels reversed and the ref signalled, called an end to the match, and pronounced Michaels the new champion. Harte looked around, dazed. He locked his eyes on McMahon, sitting ringside, who had a big smug grin on his face, like “Yup, I just screwed you hard.” The sheet readers, knowing what was supposed to happen and then watching all this, went apeshit.

The interesting part is, the next week McMahon acknowledged what he had done publicly, even adding some extra footage of the betrayal to the last-week-on highlight reel, and started up a new storyline with Steve Austin, jeering that he was going to find a way to screw him out of his title, too. Which now very neatly sets up a conspiracy angle where the WWF—farce that it is—is no longer fair and open but rather dominated by McMahon and his cronies. That’s how it actually is, of course, and everyone knows it, but it’s never been like that on the surface. The official version has always held that anything can happen, that victories and promotions are merit-based: “I just kicked your ass, son.”

All of this has the peculiar effect of both tapping into the anticorporate and antigovernment tendencies of wrestling core audience (beer-drinking white men) and casting as crusaders/rebels/Davids/defenders of liberty those just as Stone Cold who are scripted to oppose McMahon’s apparently favored fighters. It’s too bad the postmodernists are entirely the wrong breed to put up with the craven, pointless, and anti-intellectual aspects of professional wrestling, because they might really enjoy the levels of realities with which it toys.