‘Rasslin and the Tea Party

The WWE is currently running an angle where a couple of bad guy wrestlers (“heels” in wrestling jargon) are acting like members of a quasi-Tea Party-like group while a Mexican wrestler is the good guy (“babyface”) standing up to their bigotry.

This is unique for a couple reasons – wrestling is not known for being politically correct at the best of times and the bad guys have traditionally been the foreigners – Russians, Sudanese and yes, even Canadians!  (Well, except all three people I linked to *are* Canadians by birth – but that’s just another element of how the sport is scripted.)

Although wrestling has played with the line between fantasy and reality forever with both its characters and storylines, the other unique thing about this angle is that the two bad guys completely broke character during a promo to explain exactly what they were doing – to say that they weren’t actually racists but played these characters to maximize crowd reaction.

Speculation is that this storyline was created as a jab against the Tea Party by Linda McMahon who didn’t receive strong support from that group during either of her failed Senate campaigns.

Glenn Beck is among the conservative radio hosts attacking the WWE for this angle and there is also speculation that the WWE is trying to point out that Beck is just like their wrestlers – an entertainer who doesn’t even believe what he’s saying but who is playing a character with the goal of maximizing crowd reactions – with the only difference being that WWE fans are in on the joke while fans of Glenn Beck (and Limbaugh and others like that) aren’t.

The irony is that, in wrestling, you often have to assume everything is an angle and this whole storyline just makes me think we’ll probably see Glenn Beck show up at Wrestlemania next month! 😉

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