On My Essay in the Cubed Circle Newsletter’s 2016 Yearbook

There are several cool posts on slow simmer right now for The Spectacle of Excess, so it’s relevant at this time that I ask: can you smell what the blog is cooking?

But currently, I’m excited to share a 2016 retrospective essay I wrote for the Cubed Circle Newsletter. It was an honor to be invited to contribute to CCN’s Yearbook and I hope to do so again next year! There’s a whole list of cool contributions to this collection, including a WWE financial review by Chris Harrington (aka @mookieghana), whose “wrestlenomics” project I very much admire (even when I’m sometimes too much of an English major to fully wrap my brain around the numbers and all of their glory).

Here’s an excerpt from my essay:

“This was truly an unprecedented moment: not only was a WWE Hall of Famer becoming the leader of the free world, he postured during the election and its controversial aftermath like a combative heel, making larger than life facial expressions as he called out his detractors, cutting bombastic Twitter promos on his foes, and formulating a foreign policy that might best be described as a crotch chop to the rest of the world, all before even taking office. With Trump now appointing Linda McMahon to head the Small Business Administration, a strange new reality seems to have taken root. What I describe as WWE’s carny-corporate aesthetic has spilled out of the ring and into the arena of “real” global politics. Professional wrestling has always been politics, but now politics has lost its own veil of kayfabe and has evolved into professional wrestling.”

You can find the yearbook here:

http://www.cubedcirclewrestling.com/blog/yearbook/ccn-yearbook-2016/

It’s a download with several options, so if you’re a dope and/or Safari user like me, might I recommend the link called “LINK CCN 2”. That link was kind to me.

 

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