Why so subtle?

The new storyline involving Jack Swagger and Zeb Coulter (Dutch Mantell) peaked my interest right away when it started. First of all, I really like Dutch Mantel and secondly I think adding an old hand to a young superstar who has potential is always a good move. However, in its short time on television it hasn’t gone the way I thought it would.

When Zeb first took the microphone and cut his promo, I was interested because I saw how edgy this sort of angle could be despite Zeb’s subtleness. Thoughts of Col. DeBeers and his incredibly racist programs entered my head, I thought about Greg Valentine and the Junk Yard Dog, and other angles on this wavelength. With a Mexican World Heavyweight Champion, it wasn’t hard to see where this was going. Sure enough Jack Swagger won the number one contender spot and will battle Alberto Del Rio for the World Title at Wrestlemania. However the most recent Raw has seemingly taken this in a direction that I didn’t expect. 

On Raw, Zeb Coulter and Jack Swagger both had significant amounts of time to talk to the audience and it was announced that they have a YouTube channel. However, unlike any of my expectations, I found both Swagger and Coulter to be very mild in their rhetoric. Sure they talked about how dozens of illegal immigrants crowd into apartments, how they can’t speak English and that the only reason they are coming here is for free handouts that real Americans give them with their taxes. Is that the most polite thing to say? No, not really… it includes stereotypes and overarching falsehoods, but it is completely tame compared to what you will hear on talk radio, Fox News, or from the crazy callers on C-SPAN. The natural instincts of me as a longtime wrestling fan was to dismiss this as a half-assed attempt at being edgy and blame it on the evil “PG Era” brought to us by Linda McMahon’s Senatorial ambitions. However, it has occurred to me that WWE might have an ulterior motive for this angle.

WWE craves mainstream attention. They love to trot out politicians and community leaders who support their community efforts, they brought on dozens of uninteresting guest co-hosts for Raw, they’ve brought in Snooki and other celebrities just to get mentioned on E! or Extra. The WWE has also tried to get attention for negative things. More than once, WWE has tried to invoke the ire of the religious. In a move that I thought would raise a stink, they started calling Triple H the King of Kings usurping the title from Jesus Christ. Vince McMahon started his own religion and booked God in a PPV match. Yet these outrageous things barely garnered any attention. Long gone are the days that WWE could cause a stink by conducting a gay wedding ceremony or make a wrestler a foreign sympathizer. People just expect wrestling to be outrageous and outlandish. That is where the brilliance of Zeb Coulter and Jack Swagger may lie. 

Right or wrong, non-wrestling fans have pretty firm assumptions about pro-wrestling. They have to point out that it is fake and they all tend to bring up the Iron Sheik to point out how absurd it is. They reference how hokey it is and that everyone in it is just a stereotype on steroids. The evil foreigner exists so we can all support the heroic American. You can’t be any more of a stereotype than the Iron Sheik, and in their minds all wrestlers are just like that.

Zeb Coulter and Jack Swagger exist not on the far end of right-wing extremism, but actually in a much more mild and centrist spot than most of the immigration nuts in this country. What WWE is doing is giving this “Iron Sheik stereotype” set of opinions to a pair of guys who aren’t the complete stereotype. In this positioning almost everyone in the right-wing media is more extreme than a wrestling character. If you ever saw someone more extreme than the Iron Sheik would you take them seriously? I doubt it.

Now the sane course of action, if you personally hold a more extreme view than Coulter and Swagger would probably be to ignore the WWE. Wrestling does not have the appeal or fan base that it did 10-20 years ago. Fortunately or unfortunately (depending on your perspective) most of these people are nutjobs. These are the people who think that the President is actually a Kenyan anti-colonialist who secretly conspired with a cabal since his birth to become President and destroy America… these are also the people who really thought that Mitt Romney would clean the President’s clock on election day and pick up states like Minnesota and New Jersey. To them the WWE is nothing more than an elitist entertainment company in cahoots with Hollywood to destroy traditional America. Fringe commentators and blogs started to write stories about this. Famous conspiracy nut Alex Jones talked about it on his radio show and it has even had some play on minor Fox News shows and more widely read conservative outlets. If WWE continues to play this subtly, expect the outrage in the Right-wing media to grow and have this move up the food chain. The Hannities, Limbaughs and O’Reillys of the world will bash it and it wouldn’t start to shock me if individual Congressmen started to come out and denounce this character given how likely a comprehensive immigration bill is going to pass. All of this will happen during the buildup to Wrestlemania which this year is going to be located in the media center of the universe, New York City.

WWE will get an incredible amount of attention because of this angle if they stick on the current path. The fear and paranoia that those on the right would have about becoming caricatures like the Iron Sheik will ensure that this stays in the news. They will try to delegitimize the WWE, and will employ all the tricks they complain about liberals using. They will call it racist, they will call it bigoted and they will call it low brow.  Also, despite popular opinion, the demographics of wrestling aren’t a bunch of southern white men in their 40s and 50s, so they won’t be offending a large part of their audience.  

Do I think that Vince McMahon or the corporate WWE structure actually care about immigration? No, I really don’t think that they do. The McMahons being Republicans themselves, shine a little more light on what this is, a way to garner press and attention. Does it also give the WWE an in with a growing Hispanic audience that has felt shunned and rejected people like Zeb Coulter? Yes it does. However, I imagine that I’m probably just giving the WWE way too much credit and this is actually just a half-assed attempt at being edgy in the new “PG-Era”