By PETER THUNELL
After watching the Iowa straw poll last month, I hung my head in shame. Seeing the candidates run around giving out free burgers and T-shirts, busing in folks just so people would vote for them in a meaningless poll. It smacked of `The Three Stooges meet Mr. Smith on his way to Washington.’
If I have to put up with all of this for the next year, I say let’s take politics to its next logical level: the wrestling ring.
There already are so many similarities between the two. In wrestling there are always warring factions with different alliances. Ditto politics. And every now and then someone will all of the sudden switch sides in the middle of the match. What do you think Al Gore was doing when he started bagging on Clinton a few weeks ago? It would have been the same thing if they were tag team partners and Al snuck up behind Bill, grabed his head and slaped him into a figure four.
Another similarity is the filibuster. In this maneuver the congressman would stand in front of everyone and talk and talk until everyone gave up and they moved on to a new topic. It’s the verbal equivalent of a sleeper hold. In either case, the only way to get out of this deadly manuver is to ram your elbow into the gut of the perpetrator.
And aren’t all of those committees that are looking into finance misappropriations just like those bumbling refs in the ring that somehow seem to miss all of those illegal holds and turn their backs right when someone whacks their opponent on the head with a chair?
It’s so obvious when you look at Jesse “The Body” (or is it “The Mind” or “The Liver”?) Ventura, that I can’t believe that no one has thought of this before. Obviously, deep down, Minnesotans and all Americans want someone who will talk trash and intimidate those cheese-lovin’ heathens of Wisconsin.
Honestly, when was the last time more than 23 people in the United States (excluding the old people in Florida) have watched C-SPAN at any given moment? It’s time to give the people what they want.
Every hour or so the lights will get low, “Thunderstruck” by AC/DC starts to blare, and then all of the sudden, walking through a cloud of smoke, the Senate Leader of the Judiciary Committee will burst onto the floor to tell everyone about how much damage he is going to cause to the Senate Minority Leader’s face when he shows up for tomorrow’s session.
All of a sudden, C-SPAN would be on almost every TV throughout the Union (and 95 percent of the South). Who wouldn’t watch “Monday Night Nitro with Dan Rather and Connie Chung”?
All we need are a few minor changes to the way things are run and we, as Americans, will be placated. First, there needs to be more pre-session verbal sparing. Having Orrin Hatch call the President an “idiot” just isn’t going to cut it anymore.
I want Orrin “Snowball’s Chance” Hatch to be wearing a unitard and a cape and I want him to tense up the tendons in his neck, look straight into the camera and tell Clinton that he’s disrespected him, his country, and the presidential office and that now it’s payback time. Then he can tear something up like the Payson phone book to drive the point home (We gotta start small, Hatch isn’t the ripped young man with cut abs that he once was.)
Next, we need to relax the parliamentary procedure a little bit. No longer is it like your high school student council classes where everyone spends half an hour every day trying to figure out whose turn it is to complain that they do all the work. With the new wrestling procedures, if you don’t like something, people know it fast and furiously.
Democrats will think twice in the House when trying to pass bills involving more taxes knowing that Dennis Haskert (whose former vocation was wrestling coach at a high school, I might add) can jump out of the Speaker’s chair and fly in from the top for an atomic elbow drop to the head.
On the other hand, Republicans will be careful in the Senate when trying to pass gun control legislation, knowing the long arms of Sen. Ted Kennedy (“The Pantless Avenger”) are swinging in without warning for a vicious clothesline from the side.
How swarmy do you think Sam Donaldson would be with President Clinton knowing that he might run onto the press floor and grab him by his petrified hair and slam his head into the turnbuckle? (Oh yeah, turnbuckles in every room.)
One of the big advantages to this new style of politics is that wrestlers will now have something to do after they retire instead of staging embarrassing comebacks after failed acting careers. The names Hulk Hogan, “Rowdy” Rodney Piper, and Ronald Reagan jump to mind (Well, Reagan had the failed acting career part.)
I look forward to seeing a Secretary of Defense that refers to himself casually as “Stone Cold.” And do you really think that North Korea would continue nuclear armament or Indonesia continue human rights violations knowing full well that Secretary of State Goldberg would “spear” them?
What about the Iron Sheik as ambassador to Iran or Koko Beware as ambassador to Jamaica? The list is endless.
Heck, even here at BYU, our wrestlers will be out of jobs next year. Let them wrestle control (couldn’t resist) from BYUSA and then we’ll see how many people complain about how BYUSA doesn’t do anything.
Okay, you’re not buying any of this. Wait, let me offer a different perspective on what to make of Jesse “The Body” as Governor of Minnesota.
I believe it obviously shows us it is high time we gave Minnesota to Canada as a gift. Any state where they punctuate sentences with “eh” is begging to be a province. Maybe we could just swap them for Quebec.
Quebec is kind of like a free agent that wants to leave at the end of the season anyway. Canada might as well trade it and get something for it. We’re used to people not speaking English in this country anyway. What’s a little French going to hurt?
Canada gets the Vikings, Garrison Keillor, and we’ll even give them back Michael J. Fox to show good will (but Alex Trebek stays here, period). In the land where the brutal sport hockey reigns, Governor “The Body” will be hugely popular. Heck, I give him two years and he’s Prime Minister material. Then President Hogan and Prime Minister Ventura can grapple it out on pay-per-view.
