Its been almost a year and a half since WWE lawyer Jerry McDevitt last threatened to sue me, and he has never done so with the flourish just exhibited by the company in its letter to Manchester (Connecticut) Journal Inquirer columnist Chris Powell. WWE demanded retraction of Powells opinion that recidivist Senate candidate Linda McMahons family business was, is, or ever will be pornographic.
Frankly, Im jealous. Downright attention-starved. My seven-year-old daughter wont even let me neck-fart her any more, and shes the last of the litter.
Colin McEnroe, a columnist for the Hartford Courant, has a good one about all this, headlined Wrestling With Linda McMahon Past And Present. See http://www.courant.com/news/opinion/hc-op-mcenroe-wrestling-with-linda-mcmahon-past-pr-20120531,0,5078066.column.
McEnroes running joke, and its a real rib-tickler, is his attempt to bait a WWE flack into setting ground rules for what a journalist can or cant say without getting threatened.
This is pertinent for me, because pornography is not the first word I would use to describe how Linda McMahon and her husband Vince became centimillionaires. (Though admittedly not the last, either: the introduction to my 2007 book Wrestling Babylon refers, with pseudo-intellectual verbosity, to pornography of the spirit.) My effort to get the good people of Connecticut, or anywhere else for that matter, to drop the cultural-values critique of the McMahons in favor of something more substantial widespread and avoidable industrial death has mostly fallen on deaf ears.
Damn that Powell. He calls Linda a porn purveyor and what does he get? A letter from the party of the first part sternly instructing correction on behalf of the party of the second part. Meanwhile, I call Linda a death merchant and what do I get? Not so much as a voicemail from Triple H.
So Im working on a new strategy, one that should be easily understood by the denizens of the gated communities of Fairfield County, where the McMahons live. Its an offshoot of the old joke about how to get around water rationing during a drought so you can wash your car.
If a roving inspector sees you hosing down your Mercedes, hell likely point out that that is not allowed. However, if you have the foresight to park your Mercedes on your tennis court, you can simply inform the inspector that youre spraying the molten tar off the asphalt, and theres no regulation against that.
OK. Here goes:
WHY, LINDA McMAHON, YOU EVIL-DOER. THE COCKTAIL OF DEATH IN THE INDUSTRY OVER WHICH YOU AND YOUR HUSBAND HAVE PRESIDED IS AWFUL. ITS ITS TERRIBLE. ITS EVEN PORNOGRAPHIC!
There.
I await the papers from Jerry McDevitt and his Twitter-stalking secretary Eileen Wargo.
Irv Muchnick