Tuesday, November 6, 2012

When Greed and Neoliberalism Came to Professional Wrestling: On Election Day, Do You Really Want Mitt "The Million Dollar Man" Romney to be President?



Consider this an open thread on tonight's election.

The polls will be closing in several hours. Who will be the next President of the United States?

Mitt Romney is the prince of the plutocrats. While some self-interested--and very wealth voters--would find logical reasons to support him, there are other members of the public who will vote Romney in order to "get their country back." Little do they realize that Romney is an agent of the very forces which "stole" America from them long ago.

In my professional wrestling as politics series, I have tried to highlight the carnival-like aspects of the 2012 election, the role of racial resentment and polite racism in supporting Romney (and his use of said appeals to win white voters), and offered some advice about how Obama could perhaps win over white "working class" voters.

Ultimately, the low information independent voters who will decide tonight's election do not know much about policy. They are motivated by emotion and a given candidate's skill at storytelling (or professional levels of sociopathic lying as in Romney's case). In an effort to work within their learning styles, as well as cognitive limits, I would like to offer this public an example of what a vote for Mitt Romney translates into in practical terms.

Mitt Romney is the Million Dollar Man Ted DiBiase. The latter was a popular "heel" wrestler in the 1980s who flaunted his wealth, and was famous for his belief that everyone had a price. DiBiase was the embodiment of Romney's honest and plain talk in private to his donors about how half of Americans are lazy parasitic bums who live off of rich people like him. There is a significant difference between Romney and DiBiase. The latter was honest about his contempt for regular folks and the working classes.

The Million Dollar Man was a prototype for the politics of greed and Ayn Rand populism that has taken over the Republican Party and put them in a fever dream and mania state. DiBiase's character was also a great foreshadowing of the neoliberal turn: he believed in privatizing all things--including children's swimming pools--because the State and the public should be assets controlled by rich people like him. Because popular culture is a mirror for the sociopolitical, DiBiase was reflecting the trickle down lie that was Reagan-era tax policy by exaggerating its worst aspects.

Ironically, the grotesque caricature that was the Million Dollar Man was surpassed in the present by the recklessness of Wall Street, and robber baron gangster capitalists like Mitt Romney, who almost  destroyed the American economy.

With the power of the 1%, and because America is a corporateocracy run for the benefit of the few, Mitt Romney has taken a professional wrestling gimmick and elevated it to the grand stage provided by a national presidential race. The question then becomes, will independents, low information voters, people mired in white racial resentment, and those who support third party candidates help to elect Mitt Romney?

We will find out soon. Your thoughts? How do you think the night will play out?

43 comments:

Invisible Man said...

Good Lawd, Elizabeth, I'm coming to join you!

Are you kidding me? Mitt Romney is the prince of the plutocrats? Does this make Obama Robin Hood?
Obama 's cabinets and crew are nothing but Plutocrats. Timothy Geithner, Laurence Summers, jeffrey Immelt, Henry Kissinger, Ben Bernanke,The Pritzker, Jamie Dimon. The Harvard, Columbia, and the University of Chicago connections. In fact Obama is far more connected then that Mormon

You ring the battle cry about public assets being controlled by the wealthy elite. But Obama under a non qualified Education Secretary is doing just that with America's Public Schools! This is the Chicago way. Obama learned if from Mayor Daley

Brother Devega, in the immortal words of James Brown,

"Please, please, please, please,oooooh,
Please, please,
Please, please, please
Honey Please, please ohhhhh, please"

Be a fair and progressive broker, unless you're under contract by the Democratic Party, then just disclose it. Obama had his convention in the Bank of America Stadium. Come Chauncey, be our shepherd lead us to the Promise Land. I can understand being a tactician, but you cross the line with empty propaganda. Remember the brothers who aint here no more and the brothers locked up. Come now.

chaunceydevega said...

@Matter of degrees. As I say, quoting Fred Sanford., I would rather get electrocuted a little bit of a time than all at once.

Brothers locked up? Ain't got nothing for them. Sorry. For the innocents I hope they get free, the guilty? No pity.

Invisible Man said...

well honesty; that was just a last ditch literary device/ flourish to appeal to the Cooley High, corner do whoop pour out some liquor, jazz june spirt in you
Hotep!

Plane Ideas said...

4 more years!!!!

Plane Ideas said...

CD was wrong !!

Plane Ideas said...

Cd out of his element full of empty words that have no currency!!!

Plane Ideas said...

Obama!!!

Plane Ideas said...

I am herein Dc calling the shots not hiding behind an alias talking smack like CD

Plane Ideas said...

cd was compelled to post my comments not out of integrity or fairness but because I was right about Obama

Plane Ideas said...

I am going to post all night in WARN....Obama!!!

Plane Ideas said...

WARN read my commentary on voice of detroit

Washington rumors,,,

Plane Ideas said...

Goggle washington rumors writer Greg Thrasher

makheru bradley said...

The Republican Party will become the functional equivalent of a third party.

Mitt Romney will be the last waffling moderate that Tea Party loyalists vote for.

That boom you heard going off was Rush Limbaugh's head exploding in Florida.

President Obama now has a bigger mess on his hands than he had four years ago. With austerity on the horizon millions of people who voted for him are going to be real pissed off a year from now.

Afrikan Americans just wanted him to win. He doesn't have to do anything else.

Plane Ideas said...

Stop hating enjoy win for Black America!!!

Plane Ideas said...

Obama!!!!! 4 more years!!!!!

Plane Ideas said...

I am standing in front of white house!!!!! Yahoo !!!!!!!!!

Plane Ideas said...

CD has been posturing all month about Obama losing the election !!!!

CD is the loser... Chatterclass drama queen who hides behind an alias posting chatterclass bullshit..

Obama!!!!! 4 more years!!!

Plane Ideas said...

CD= low information forecaster !!!! Lol Lol

Where is CNu now!! Lol lol lol

CD's cheerleader CNu is nowhere to be found sorry ass losers!!!

Obama!!!! 4 more years!!!

chaunceydevega said...

@Thrasher. I am leaving this up because I will allow you your online ejaculations in order to give more evidence for why you are informally banned, and because I am happy that Obama was reelected and don't have time to police this stuff.

Have fun! I know others will comment on your shtick.

nomad said...

careful what you wish for.

chaunceydevega said...

@nomad. how you feeling Nomad?

nomad said...

Great. I started not to vote, then I decided to cast a vote against the system. Since my vote could not have affected the election one way or the other it could only benefit myself. Voting my conscience was strangely liberating. How I feel? My word is much more powerful than my vote. Look how I changed the tone of Respectable Negroes? Where the Obots at?

A. Ominous said...

It's going to be damned interesting hereabouts c. one-year-from-now... *damned* interesting! Let's synchronize our watches...

(On the film history website "Self-Styled Siren", in a thread for a post that was a tribute to the black actor Canada Lee, soon after BHO's inauguration 1.0, I engaged with several well-meaning white brothers and sisters who had the hopeful audacity to try to make a case for racism in America being DEAD (I had to toss in a "BHO is great" just to keep them talking to me, obviously)

Four years later I went back to that thread and left the politest possible "I told you so". I expect to "enjoy" the same dubious pleasure here, at WARN, on the topic of BHO's *actual* form/function/agenda/impact.)

nomad said...

Steven, maybe you can help me. You or some other WARN reader. I'm trying to remember an essay where (I believe it was) Langston Hughes criticized a young New Negro for the phrase "happens to be black". Does that ring a bell?

nomad said...

Nevermind. I forgot I was living in the age of Google. I think it was this:
http://www.english.illinois.edu/maps/poets/g_l/hughes/mountain.htm

though I can't seem to find that phrase.

A. Ominous said...

Nomad:

Didn't ring a bell but I will gratefully read your Google-result!

A. Ominous said...

Okay, I've read it, Nomad, and I understand the era it comes out of, but I can't help feeling that the essay finds Langston getting tangled in the samo ironies and contradictions of the "Negro" knot: stereotypicality vs authenticity / assimilation vs deracination: which is which? Plenty for a Negro Artiste to fret over there (as if wrestling with the Muse weren't hairy enough).

Poor American Negro! Has any other specimen of humanity been tugged in so many directions at once for so little profit? And Langston holds up the example of the "low-down" ("natural") Negro, ululating in the Baptist church, to shame the prissy, anal, aspirationally "Nordicized" middle-classes... but, Hey, Langst! Those natural Negroes rocking the pews were serenading (in all but the most anachronistically radical cases) a lustrously Teutonic Jeezis, no? And not in a Bantu tongue.

What Langst identifies as "acting white" is probably more a case of refugees wrestling with the anglophone inheritance. The choice is to master (and extend) the language, or to fight against it. Which approach makes more sense?

Langst was a fair-skinned fairy (I know, low blow) writing in The Nation for a not-entirely-Negro (cough) readership, so who was he to draw any lines? Not to mention the fact that the woes of The Hood, almost 100 years later, are not exactly caused by Brothas "acting white".

We might almost accuse Langston of doing The Man's bidding in this essay. Taking a little slap at the Uppity Types and encouraging "the eternal tom-tom beating in the Negro soul". Did Gertrude Stein help Langst with that essay?

STFU, Langst.

A. Ominous said...

Speaking of which, check it out, Darth Vader’s Daddy! (who appeared in one of Langst’s plays)

Invisible Man said...

I'm just wondering if Chauncey will actually reflect that President Obama was the candidate of the Plutocracy and of the American Empire and Romney was the Mormon outsider and mere patsy to keep up the pretense of a Democracy. For the last four months our host Devega spent the majority of his blogging time casting this race in last century racial demagoguery aimed at the Black middle class and white liberals, that big bad Romney was a modern day night rider, despite the facts that Obama had as soon as he got elected sold out the movement that elected and joined the empire, then
mastered the machinery and mechanisms of the empire, which he clearly turned on Romney with full bast.

chaunceydevega said...

@IM. It was a beautiful thing to behold. We all have our role to play in the game. I played mine just as designed and intended. And it all worked perfectly.

To quote the A-Team: I love it when a plan comes together.

Invisible Man said...

"and the game is the game"

nomad said...

@Steven
Thanks. Not really trying to apply the article to the present situation. Just trying to track down where I had originally heard that phrase and the difference it implied about being a black _____ and a ______ that happens to be black. Fill in the blank with anything. This is the mistake I see black sheeple making with Obaama. They vote for him like he's a black president. He ignores them like he's a president that happens to be black. I hope this term they criticize him like a president who happens to be black instead of building a black wall around him. Hold this happens to be black president's feet to the fire. As if he were white. For all pragmatic intents and purposes, he is.

nomad said...

@Steven
"Darth, I am your father!" LOL.
BTW what was that zombie game series you linked to a while back?

makheru bradley said...

Stop hating enjoy win for Black America!!! – Thrasher

Black America didn’t win a dayum thing, unless you count 14.3 percent unemployment as a win—lol

Austerity is going to hit Afrikan Americans hard, but they’ll probably blame George W. Bush.

nomad said...

"Brothers locked up? Ain't got nothing for them. Sorry. For the innocents I hope they get free, the guilty? No pity."

That's a rather narrow perspective for a progressive black blog. No concern for the discriminatory practices of the criminal justice system (new jim crow, war on drugs/black people. Hmmmm...Almost sounds conservative. Neo(faux)-liberal. Very Obamaesque.

chaunceydevega said...

@Nomad. Reset your positronic brain ;)

I am not a "progressive" whatever that means. I am a pragmatist. I can about folks who are innocent and happened to end up in jail. I care far less for knuckleheads and ninnies who made poor choices and are now in lockup. We have too many good folks out there who are being hurt for me to worry about brigands and highwaymen.

A. Ominous said...

Hey, CdV, was my response to Nomad (to which I appended the answer to his question about the "Zombie Series" I posted a link to) deleted? Can't find it, but it shows up as recorded in my email

A. Ominous said...

This was the whole comment; the first part was about our Langston Hughes exchange (if Nomad didn't catch it first time around):


"@Nomad: now I get it, and I agree, though the chances of anyone (other than the standard micro-minority of the fair and rational) on the planet seeing BHO as anything other than a symbol of black progress, are nil. The problem is complicated by the fact that the presidency itself is symbolic; is BHO actually making *any* decisions of any importance? Did GWB? They're just spokesmodels hired to keep the Agenda on-track without waking the Serfs up. The current spokesmodel/symbol in office is two symbols in one and will stay that way for the rest of his term and in history books. I guess we forget that JFK was, for a while, The Catholic symbol in the way that BHO is The Black symbol; as Catholics assimilated, the effect faded. Any chance of Blacks assimilating? Laugh

"Re: the Zombie game: that was from an online comedy troupe [on YouTube] called Reckless Tortuga, the ongoing character is The Gamer.

nomad said...

"I am not a "progressive" whatever that means. I am a pragmatist. I can about folks who are innocent and happened to end up in jail."

Yeah, I don't know what a progressive is either. So, what's a pragmatist? Whatever easiest? The way the wind is blowing? Halfway between liberal and conservative? Centrist?

There are an overwhelming percentage of black folks in jail, and unless you believe blacks are intrinsic criminals there is something wrong with the system. The innocents as well as those given inordinate sentences deserve more from the educated class, especially someone that has a podium from which he addresses issues that effect black America than "hope you get free". "Hope you get justice some day."

nomad said...

@Steven
Thanks. I was intending to bookmark that. Wanna see if they got any new episodes.

A. Ominous said...

@nomad: they've got c. 20 episodes you haven't seen: very funny stuff

nomad said...

Funny stuff!!!

Anonymous said...

Okay, so the "white working class" voters that supported Romney have "cognitive limits" but the "hip hop heads" in the ghetto, caught in a trance by Obama's hope and change propaganda, are somehow much more enlightened?