Still more good news for John McCain!

Hobart Bosworth in Rowland V. Lee's The Sea Lion (1921). Via Fritzi.

Shorter David Brooks, "Donald Trump Isn't Real", New York Times, February 2 2016:

1. Donald Trump draws his political style from the theatrics of World Wrestling Entertainment, in which what matters isn't whether you win or lose or whether you are good or evil but how aggressive you show yourself to be, so if he wins it won't be real, right, Dad? But it's real if he loses?

2. Marco Rubio's surge in Iowa is amazing.

(That's Brooks's 140th career use of "amazing/amazingly" in his Times column since September 2003, for the record, maintaining a steady rate of just over once a month.)

Actually it matters a great deal who wins and who loses in WWE, and who is good and who is evil, which is why they script it fairly carefully in advance. When Donald Trump fought his last great fight, against WWE CEO Vince McMahon in Wrestlemania 23 in 2007, his victory was as inevitable as the defeat of Oedipus in the Sophocles tragedy, and that's an aspect of Trump's WWE career that doesn't get discussed enough. (Rolling Stone's Aaron Oster just posted a great rundown of the whole affair which informs what follows; Brooks, for his discussion, links to but can't bring himself to name a fine piece from last July by Tierney Sneed for Talking Points Memo. What, David, The National Journal or The Weekly Standard hasn't covered this issue?)

I happened to be watching a lot of WWE myself, or rather seeing it out of the corner of one eye, at the time of the Battle of the Billionaires, because my baby boy was of the right age and following the whole shebang pretty intently, and it was a very political drama, for one thing. The world of WWE is a familiar one, where working stiffs struggle, battling the forces of evil (as represented by other working stiffs of sneaky manners and in darker costumes), but the profit goes to the owner, the ruthless Mr. McMahon (as he's always called), who is in a manner of speaking the most villainous of all, poisoning the wrestlers' lives with all kinds of idiotic tasks and conditions, playing infuriating favorites, surrounded by unthinkable luxury and luscious women the lunkheaded underlings can never attain. All they have, proletarians forever separated from the fruits of their labors, is pride in the work that they do, competing to destroy each other like slave gladiators except that the fights aren't supposed to be lethal, and it is that priceless pride that animates the trash talk duels between them that fill most of the spectacle.

But in this superficially Marxian setup it is not Mr. McMahon's structural role that makes him exploit the workers, it's just that he is a heartless bad guy; and though the wrestlers can never hope to defeat him, it's possible that he can be defeated at his own level, by a light-haired, smiling, good guy of the upper world. This is what happened, of course, in the Trump episode: weeks and weeks of preliminaries, Thucydidean speeches of attack and counterattack and then the challenge, in which Mr. McMahon threatened Trump's most important possession, the apparent source of his power, his strange and magical, animated, hair: they'd have a battle, not with their own bodies (it was Mr. McMahon who refused to fight in person, citing doctor's orders, leaving the implication that Trump himself was fit enough), but with proxy warriors picked from the WWE stables, and the winning billionaire would shave the loser's head.

Not that there could ever be any doubt whose head was going to get shaved. It was Mr. McMahon who had to be humiliated, and Trump who triumphed with his mane intact, the workers' avenger.

All Brooks wants to make out of this thing is to take it as a demonstration that Trump isn't "real", just like John Cena and The Undertaker, which, as any 11-year-old can tell you, is quite wrong: Cena and The Undertaker and the rest of the crowd are gifted and disciplined athletes, the thing that distinguishes them from ordinary athletes being that what they perform isn't an open-ended contest but a predetermined narrative, like ballet dancers really (only much more harmful to the performers, who really are exploited, sometimes unto death, by McMahon's company in the world outside the narrative).

And what would it mean, anyway? That Trump has wandered confusedly where he doesn't belong, like the Umaga into a professional boxing ring, and then what? Then he'll get hurt, I suppose, losing to that amazingly gifted athlete Marco Rubio, which is what the column is really about, contributing to the framing of Rubio's expected third-place finish as a stunningly unexpected victory. Which, as Steve has been predicting, is now the project of a massive media campaign. (Steve thinks it will succeed, too, but I'm convinced the traditional Republican gathering around a mainstream candidate is going to be very difficult or impossible this year, partly because of the craziness of the party, of which the Trump effect is one big part, partly because Rubio is a really shitty candidate; I can see how he is now likely to get most of the 30% or so of the primary vote that he was dividing with Bush and Christie and Kasich, but I don't see how he can get beyond this, no matter how much the media decides they love him; he's already as crazy as Cruz and the Cruz supporters still think he's a "moderate".)

Or could it mean to the contrary that the primary contest itself is rigged like a wrestling match (as I was kind of thinking around the first Republican debates), with a certain amount of tantalizing indeterminacy, aleatory, like a wrestling match composed by Witold Lutosławski, or a colossal improv whose ending isn't known in advance? The Undertaker doesn't always lose, you know! Or the case we seem to be living with, where the scriptwriters aren't communicating with each other, in deep conflict, and hurling their drafts at the situation, with the players picking up pages more or less at random?

What's fascinating to me in the WWE story is the sense that Trump has been polishing this wrestling character as a political character for a long time, under the direct inspiration of former Minnesota governor Jesse Ventura, a real wrestler who went into the no-labels postideological brand of politics in 1991 as the mayor of the Twin Cities suburb of Brooklyn Park, served his term as governor from 1999 to 2003, and was associated with Trump in their presidential attempts on the so-called Reform Party in 2000 (Trump) and 2004 (Ventura). It's the false consciousness theme, again; the text is that the only thing that can save you from a bad man with a few billion dollars is a good man with a few billion, and it's transferred from Mr. McMahon's ring into the political arena with more or less no changes.


David Brooks Plagiarism Watch: Just a little one: a paragraph of the substitution method, with Tierney's TPM piece in red (linked in Brooks's column) and Brooks in black:

Trump's involvement with pro wrestling goes back more than a quarter of a century.

He’d been involved with professional wrestling for over a quarter century.

In the beginning the logic was pretty simple: WWE was staging big events at Trump-owned venues, so he had a vested interest in promoting the "sport."

At first his interest was on the business side, because so many of the events were held at his hotels.

But over time, Trump got drawn into WWE's staged storylines.

But then he began appearing in the ring as an actual character.

Maybe, Driftglass suggests, it's David Brooks who isn't real. Update: Chauncey De Vega reminds us of his own original piece on the Trump campaign and his WWE identity, from Salon last August, which surely influenced me here and deserves reading and rereading (the only one so far to cite Roland Barthes, which ought to be a requirement, and based on a deep knowledge of the art itself).