Professional wrestling, with its monstrous egos,
blowhard rhetoric, and bad solutions (use the chair!), is kind of
like politics except that it’s got better acting. And, you can
actually use wrestling as a sort of barometer for the average
person’s views, instead of the government’s, on hot-button issues.
This past Sunday World Wrestling Entertainment (WWE) showed us how
Americans perceive Russian President Vladimir Putin and
whistle-blower Edward Snowden.
At a pay-per-view event in New Jersey, C.J. “Lana The Ravishing
Russian” Perry riled up fans for a fight featuring Miroslav
“Alexander
Rusev” Barnyashev, by dedicating his performance to Putin.
Perry
announced in her best fake accent:
I am proud to be Russian. I am proud to come from a country with
the most dominant and powerful president in the world, Vladimir
Putin. He makes fools out of every one of you. You are merely pawns
in his game of global dominance.
The jumbotron displayed Putin’s mug. The crowd started booing
and chanting U-S-A so loudly, you could feel the Cold War
rekindling. The negative response to Putin was expected, since the
WWE knows its marketing. It is, after all, a billion dollar
business with 15 million weekly
viewers. Unlike other sports that occasionally stumble into
American’s ongoing debates on
race or
drugs or
sexuality, pro wrestling’s scripted game explicitly
relies on popular culture outside the sport and the ability to
reflect them in a way the audience wants.
Still, the fact that the WWE is reviving nationalistic gimmicks
not seen since Hulk Hogan spat on the
Soviet flag, Rocky clocked Drago, and the Wolverines
valiantly battled the Red Army, shows
just how bad the perception of America’s foreign relations have
gotten lately. And it’s not because there’s a threat to American
lives any more real than pro wrestling itself. Rather, it boils
down to the fact that the Obama and Putin administrations have
dropped the ball on two decades worth of relationship repairing the
U.S. and Russia did after the Cold War ended.
But, that’s not even where The Ravishing Russian’s speech ended.
Her final blow was supposed to be that Putin “welcomes with open
arms the patriot Edward Snowden” in his quest for power.
The Washington Free Beacon, whose editors have
collectively stated their dislike for Snowden
and Russia, saw the match and reported “audible
ire from the audience” for Snowden. You can judge for yourself, but
that’s not what I heard. The response from the crowd sounded
conspicuously muted to me. The fans were worked up into a lather by
the Putin bit but the Snowden insult, which was supposed to be the
final straw, just fell flat.
It fell flat in the same way big
government advocates and apologists like
President Obama, Sen.
John McCain (R-Ariz.), and Rep.
Mike Rogers (R-Mich.) do every time they try to unambiguously
paint Snowden as a traitor who deserves time in prison for drawing
attention to the massive surveillance state that continues to
violate virtually every American’s privacy.
Wrestling and politics both rely on framing issues as dualities:
red
versus blue, face
versus heel,
with us or against us. But neither of these groups can elicit
outrage about Snowden, because his personal legacy is too mixed. In
a recent YouGov poll that asked if Snowden did “the
right thing” by exposing government surveillance, an almost
equal number of people said yes as said no, and slightly more said
they weren’t sure.
And, far less ambiguous are the feelings for government snoops
that Snowden awakened in the public. Exposing the National Security
Administration (NSA)
immediately and dramatically shifted Americans’ concerns from
terrorism to civil liberty violations as one poll shows. Another
survey demonstrates that a record number of Americans see
big government as the greatest threat to the future of America.
Reason-Rupe poll
data indicates that only 18 percent of Americans trust the NSA
with their personal information and that many people think the
agency is violating their privacy.
The WWE is savvy. It pays attention to how fans feel and
responds quickly and accordingly. The Russophobia will continue as
long as the international political showboating does, but I bet
they’ll stop lumping Snowden in the bad guy camp after this goof.
Public servants who value their own popularity should take
note.
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