A few further thoughts on the feedback to my SLAM! Wrestling piece, “The unbearable ambiguity of Benoit.”
Many readers continue to prop up the straw man of a conspiracy theory. In so doing, some of them are being consciously manipulative. But others sincerely don’t understand that it is both possible and useful to discuss open questions related to the Benoit case without setting the bar so absurdly low. There is no real way to argue with either group, as they have no sustained interest in talking about much of anything except who is going to be choreographed to win the three-way at the next PPV. For them, pro wrestling is not a fantasy world; it is the world. And thus, for them, there is no such thing as “ambiguity.”
However, another group of readers is more reachable – they are late to the conversation, or they misunderstand a piece of it, or they have been misled by wrestling media that have reported in a muffled voice, if at all, the obvious fact that WWE decision-makers knew going into Monday Night Raw that they were doing a tribute to the perpetrator of double murder/suicide.
This fact is not unimportant, but it was established, beyond a reasonable doubt, by the reporting on this blog months ago. The question now on the table is what various players might have known earlier than mid-afternoon Monday; and if the answer is that some people did indeed know earlier, who they were, when they knew, and what was their agenda.
Irv Muchnick