I hope WWE lawyer Jerry McDevitt and his secretary, Eileen Wargo (who appears to have been stalking me on Twitter), contact me to be an expert witness in a potential lawsuit against Chris Powell of the Manchester Journal Inquirer for labeling as “pornographic” the business undergirding Linda McMahon’s two runs for a United States Senate seat from Connecticut.
You see, I’m not sure I agree that WWE content is pornographic. Powell, you deliver terrible opinions! And you deserve to be punished to the fullest extent of increased circulation for your newspaper.
I think the real reason citizens of Connecticut should be ashamed to cast votes for McMahon is that she has run a death mill.
In 2010, when her former wrestler Lance Cade dropped dead at age 29 in the middle of the campaign, McMahon agreed that the subject was “fair game.” This is the same phrase used by the Norwich Bulletin in an editorial about the current Powell pornography controversy.
See below.
Linda McMahon now calls fair game the question of why her wrestlers die young at rates astronomically higher than those of astronauts or football players or rock stars. No matter how disingenuously rhetorical this concession may be, it is welcome.
One of the most welcome aspects is that McMahon has made the remark in the wake of the death of former World Wrestling Entertainment performer Lance Cade, who does not fit her historically cramped definition of the only five wrestlers who died while under contract to WWE. Cade like Eddie Umaga Fatu, who died last December was an ex-and-maybe-future star when his particular fatal variation of heart failure kicked in three days after Linda won the Republican Senate primary in Connecticut. So, presumably, the McMahon campaign and her husband Vince will not complain while Senate race watchers proceed to examine the papier-mache realities behind a corporate Wellness Program that supposedly includes cardiovascular screening.
Linda answers a question with a question: Who knows what causes people to have addictions and do what they do? The root question was designed to make people reflect on corrective measures. Her twist on it is designed to dismiss them.
There are indeed multiple components of the wrestling death pandemic, and some of them are indeed unflattering to the individuals who died. McMahon, however, is running for an office of public trust. We dont need her chattering about her ants. (I might have met [Lance Cade] once, she told Brian Lockhart of Hearst newspapers.) We need her taking account of her ant colony.
In that connection, the medias shorthand term steroids cruelly truncates a phenomenon that is lot more than a one-off choice by a glory-seeker to artificially pump up his or her physique. The drugs causing wrestlers hearts to burst arent just steroids, but a cocktail of steroids, prescription painkillers, and antidepressants. (And that is without even getting to brain damage, an increasingly well identified ingredient of the mix.) These are not incidental offshoots of fame and fortune, but direct byproducts of daily working conditions, for the few who achieve fame and fortune plus the many who are induced to try and fail.
Back in January I ran a seven-part series on this blog called The Question Senate Candidate Linda McMahon (Still) Cant Answer It. And she still, still cant. My earlier series (which was consolidated into a single long post at https://concussioninc.net/?p=1474) included these points:
Irv Muchnick