Friday Morning Backlash – Revisiting the Purpose of Stand up for WWE

Columns, Top Story

Penny Allen-Fife is back and she’s taking me to task!

I didn’t send Glazer a guest column last week because I was busy being an angry activist LGBT blogger outside of the wrestling sphere trying my best to convince my fellow gays and lesbians down in the US to NOT be complete and total fucktards and vote Republican just to punish the Democrats for their abuse of the GayTM. (If you can’t figure that term out, Google it). As I keep my wrestling and the rest of my life separate online as much as is humanly possible, I didn’t want to get into the whole bullshit about Vince’s incredibly insulting “Stand Up For WWE” campaign.

Well that and I don’t get paid for this so I have no deadlines to meet, HAW!

Especially given the guy who publishes my guest column in his daily bit here was completely wrong on the subject to be quite honest. Here’s hoping he’s secure enough to print this so I can say why.

Glazer’s contention was that any IWC wrestling fan who had the nerve to chastise Vince for his very obviously politically motivated campaign was a hypocrite and should feel obligated to support the company whose DVD’s and teeshirts we buy and whom we watch every week so loyally.

I have two glaring issues with his logic on this.

First of all, Reneke and Kieth are probably the only Pulse staffers who actually spend decent money on WWE product. I’d bet money most of us smarks online either only buy one or two DVD’s a year from the ‘E, if any. I watch my WWE stuff online if I can find it, given I can barely afford to keep food in the house some days. Just because we WATCH the product doesn’t mean we help pay for it. And frankly, I watch it most weeks out of habit, as the product has become so abysmall that if there were anythng better on from 6:15 to 8:30 PM in Canada I’d nt gripe about missing Raw by switching channels.

Second is Glazer’s assumption that because we watch a product we ought to be loyal to it when they ask it of us, no matter how condescending or transparently selfish that pitch may be. I don’t know if Glazer MEANT to sounf like this but to me this came across as “When your company asks for your support you should just be blindly loyal in a pinch, you’re a hypocrite if you question it”.

Let me give an example outside of wrestling of a celebrity who asked for moral support from entertainment fans, who had multiple celebrities echoing support for him, albeit in a different context.

Roman Polanski.

I’ve seen a few of his better movies, plus The 9th Gate. He does good work. If I like the cast and concept of a Polanski movie enough, I might watch it. This of course is only after I dissociate said movies in my mind from the fact that he’s a fucking pedohile child-rapist, CONVICTED mind you, who fled from the USA to avoid sentencing and worked in Europe avoiding extradition for nigh three decades.

When he was finally stupid enough to enter a country that would extradite last year, he and nearly hundreds of stars asked the public to support him in this difficult time, because hey, we enjoy his movies! We should just overlook that silly CHILD RAPIST stuff and be supportive of the guy who provides our entertainment! Let’s not sully the waters by acknowledging that pesky CHILD RAPIST stuff, because we enjoy his movies!

Celebs I actually liked like Whoopie Goldberg and Johnny Depp came out in support of him as an artist and downplayed the CHILD RAPIST factor. By the logic Glazer presented in his defense of the “Stand Up For WWE” campaign last week, because I happen to sometimes enjoy the product Vince puts out, I should jump at the chance to defend WWE from it’s political or media critics and not get all hypocritical and uppity by pointing out that most of the criticisms I’m supposed to defend it from are perfectly valid.

No, I’m not comparing Vince to a child rapist on sheer scope of the value of his mistakes. For all his sleazy repulsiveness, to the best of my knowledge Vince has never raped a child. He did publicly admit on his personal DVD that he wanted to run an incest angle that would have required kissing his daughter on live television though, so I suppose there’s room for doubt there.

But as a fan of the product, no, I do not feel obligated by my enjoyment of the product to blindly gloss over everything Vince has done wrong to defend him and his product against ACCURATE accusations of the sleaze he’s done over the years, or his mistakes. I will not support him farther than his right to make a living and his right to run his company.

He’s continuing the SUFWWE segments post-election only to try and squelch the idea that the whole thing was done to encourage votes for his wife. Thank God THAT failed.

The bottom line is that Vince got called to the carpet for shit HE ACTUALLY DID, not for imaginary made-up stuff. If Vince and Linda and the WWE had been getting maligned for things that never happened, or things they never once showed on the air, or backstage bs they could easily prove was a blatant lie, yes, I would have supported them to high hell and done so publicly.

But they weren’t. Every single one of the accusations levied against the company during Linda’s doomed-from-the-start campaign was 100% true. Vince HAS aired a tasteless necrophilia angle on TV. Vince DID make one of his female performers crawl on hands and knees in her underwear and bark like a dog. Vince DOES run a company that, until the Wellness Policy did little to nothing to take care of it’s contracters.

Vince has run racist, sexist and homophobic angles on TV, which, while given the product IS fictional entertainment, is non-disputable. What Vince SHOULD have done was just drive THAT point home!

It’s just entertainment! It’s a man’s soap opera! None of it is real! A sexist storyline on Raw is really no different than a rape storyline on Law & Order! Both are completely FICTION! Trish Stratus was ACTING people! She was playing the victim to my evil boss character! I’m not actually THAT big of an asshole off camera! IT’S ALL JUST FUCKING TELEVISION YOU STUPID BASTARDS!!!

THAT I would have stood by in spades.

But no Glazer, I’m sarry but your fellow Pulse staffers are NOT hypocrites for refusing to defend Vince and his idiot wife against the FACTS. The entire campaign was pure self-serving condescension from an overgrown child having a temper tantrum because his ego was bruised when someone told him “Yes, that WAS your hand in the cookie jar young man”. It was not a “grassroots movement to fight back against slanderous lies”, it was a billion dollar corporation’s chief executive whining that people were telling the truth about things he hoped his customers were too stupid or short of attention-span to remember.

So if refusing to be a figurative human shield to protect poor Vince’s feefees from being hurt by the truth makes me a hypocrite because I turn my TV to the Score twice a week without paying Vince a dime makes me a hypocrite, fine, it’s Glazer’s right to view it that way. Even if he’s completely wrong.

Now, can we all stop arguing about what a douchebag Vince is and start worrying about how much shit the Tea Party is going to fuck up down there?

Glazer is a former senior editor at Pulse Wrestling and editor and reviewer at The Comics Nexus.