In the second part of Part 2 of “We Need to Talk About That F*g Election that Just Happened” I finally get to the bit about wrestling.
World Wrestling Entertainment makes content that is a form of melodramatic theatre centred around partially improvised but largely scripted “wrestling”. Over the last few decades, though, the content occurring outside of the ring has become more complex, with ever more convoluted storylines.
WWE provided a model for and a lens with which to view modern Western electoral politics. Many of the techniques of professional wrestling have entered the world of politics.
In this episode I forget the name of Henry Wallace and tentatively refer to him as George Wallace (who was a famous segregationist Governor of Alabama). Sorry Henry :-(
I discuss the fact that the Democrats clearly did not campaign to win the 2024 presidential election, and what circumstances contribute to that behaviour. I talk about the increasingly fraudulent nature of politics at the highest levels and express how much I hate the commentators who base their “analysis” on their evident ability to read the minds of political figures and talk with absolute assurance about what their subjects think and feel.
I discuss the way the unrelenting and sophisticated dishonesty of modern politics creates splits in the consciousness of both the individuals and groups of people, essentially making us all a bit mad and highly vulnerable to intellectual and moral degradation.
This is the first part of Part 2 of my election analysis. Part 2 was too large to do in one part so I will post Part 2 of Part 2 later. In it I will discuss the role of professional wrestling in the 2024 US Presidential election – which goes far beyond the involvement of Hulk Hogan.
READING MATTERS: The Mold of Yancy – Philip K. Dick, 1955
The Assassination of Julius Caesar – Michael Parenti
History as Mystery – Michael Parenti
The Korean War: A History – Bruce Cumings
Doppelganger – Naomi Klein
The Gulf War did not Take Place – Jean Baudrillard
In a different approach to a postmortem of the US 2024 Presidential Election I try to avoid focusing on the campaigning choices of each party and look instead at the systemic constraints that have made US presidential elections into a spectacle – a spectacle almost devoid of actual politics. The history of US presidential politics has been dominated by public sentiments about their policies on issues of war and peace, but the electoral politics have evolved to keep such issues well away from the ballot box. I run through the history from Woodrow Wilson deceptively running as the antiwar candidate in 1916 under the slogan “He Kept Us Out of the War”, while already intending to put the US into the War, to Lyndon Johnson running as the antiwar candidate while engineering a massive genocidal onslaught in Indochina. In Part 2 I will explore the way in which US elections are constrained to produce only pro-empire, pro-genocide results and the way in which the system is simultaneously a means of controlling public opinion.
On Genocide 