Austin Kleon

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Tecnicos y Rudos, wrestling and politics

“There are two camps of wrestlers in lucha libre: the técnicos, or experts who abide by the rules, and the rudos, or rough ones who break them.”

After I heard that photographer Lourdes Grobet died, I checked out a collection of her photos of Mexican wrestlers from the library. Lucha Libre: Masked Superstars of Mexican Wrestling is a wonderful book — a feast for the eyes, for sure, but it also has some great writing.

There’s an essay in the book by Superbarrio Gómez about when he made explicit the connection between politics and wrestling:

In the real world, you have the referee and the state, the rage you feel before underhanded politics and the demagogy that thrives without censure or scorn on television and in the press. In the lucha, the rudos do what they want. They don’t hide their behavior. A dirty wrestler isn’t sneaky about his wrongdoings. It’s all there for the public to see. In fact, he goes out of his way to offend the public, to give the finger to anyone who calls into question his corrupt ways. A rudo with a referee in his pocket is capable of anything, of using any available ruse to take down the scientifico, the clean fighter. This is how it is in the real world too.

Meanwhile, the good guys, the técnicos, can be a bit wide-eyed. They’ll extend their hand to their crooked opponent only to have the gesture of good faith paid back with some treacherous blow. The rudo will hold out his hand and, despite the crowd yelling “No! No!” the técnicos will accept it and get whacked. How many times have the people told their leaders “No!” only to be ignored and then suffer the consequences. Wrestling fans know perfectly well who the rudos are. When they’re spotted on the streets, they’ll yell out, “Enough! We’re sick of all your screwing around!”

Sound familiar?

artwork for Dan Sinker’s unproduced podcast by Aesthetic Apparatus

My hipper friends have told me over the years that if I wanted to understand politics, I needed to get into pro wrestling. (Heck, Dan Sinker put together a whole podcast about politics as wrestling, but couldn’t get it picked up before the 2020 election.)

The only other piece of writing I’ve read about wrestling is Roland Barthes’ essay, “The World of Wrestling,” which opens his famous book Mythologies, published in 1957.

“Wrestling is not a sport, it is a spectacle,” Barthes wrote.

“The public is completely uninterested in knowing whether the contest is rigged or not, and rightly so; it abandons itself to the primary virtue of the spectacle, which is to abolish all motives and all consequences: what matters is not what it thinks but what it sees.”

“Thus the function of the wrestler is not to win; it is to go exactly through the motions which are expected of him.”

As I understand it, in American pro wrestling, the terms “tecnico” and “rudo” are replaced by “face” and “heel,” respectively.

A “face” is the good guy, and the “heel” is his opposite.

There are lots of other terms to get acquainted to get acquainted with, like:

  • “kayfabe,” the “portrayal of staged events within the industry as ‘real’ or ‘true,’ specifically the portrayal of competition, rivalries, and relationships between participants as being genuine and not staged. The term kayfabe has evolved to also become a code word of sorts for maintaining this ‘reality’ within the direct or indirect presence of the general public”
  • “the heel—face turn,” in which an evil wrestler (a ‘heel’) sometimes has a change of heart and becomes good, thereby becoming a ‘babyface.’”
  • “promo,” an interview a wrestler gives before a match
  • “work,” anything scripted, or part of kayfabe
  • “shoot,” anything “real” or not scripted
  • “worked shoot,” work + shoot put together, “something that is definitely part of the act, but attempts to trick the viewer into thinking (if only for a second) that it’s real”
  • “heat,” a (usually) negative crowd reaction, or the animus between the wrestlers
  • “pop,” similar to heat, but positive

And so on. As Sean T. Collins points out, you can see how all of this is applicable to contemporary politics. (And art, music, etc.)

Even more becomes clear when you read about the history of Trump and the WWE. (Kurt Andersen: “WWE is, if not the key, a large key to the Donald Trump phenomenon we’re experiencing today.”)

Terry Crews as President Dwayne Camacho, Idiocracy (2006)

All of this tells me that Mike Judge’s Idiocracy will continue its prophecy and one day we will, indeed, have as president a former wrestler named Dwayne.

Fossil records and paper trails

Trilobites at the HMNS

We took the kids to the Houston Museum of Natural Science this weekend, and afterwards, I tweeted this thread:

The more I’ve gone over it in my mind, the more absurd and funnier it gets. Here is an institution dedicated to what we can learn from seeing physical objects in the fossil record in person… and they’ve gone “paperless” — no paper trail! (I should note, however, that they do print admission tickets so you can prove that you’ve paid to get in.)

Petrified wood at the HMNS

I have also been meditating on my own absurdities concerning my life in paper. For example, my diaries are an attempt to make my own paper trail in an increasingly paperless world. My own “paper of the past.” My own fossil record.

But these archives are mostly for the short term, the short past: they’re to trace my own patterns, remember what I did last week, last month, last year, last decade. I am under no delusions that they will last, although they’ll probably last a lot longer than the hard drive I bought last month.

Meanwhile, I’ve stopped carrying a pocket notebook because I am in love with Apple Notes — the simple “notebook” on my phone that syncs across all my devices. I have files going for the newsletter, new books, shopping lists, etc. I am aware that these artifacts will mostly be lost, probably in the close future. They are the equivalent of “scratch” paper that will be tossed in the recycling later.

One final reach: The big news yesterday was that the FBI had searched the former president’s house to retrieve records he’d illegally removed from The White House. (Previously, he’d flushed paper down the toilet.) To a paper junkie like me, it is thrilling that paper can still, potentially, bring you down.

Like a good American, I have my pet conspiracy theories, and I wonder if the move to “paperless” is an attempt to rob us of our paper trails, the proof that things really happened the way we remember them happening.

So, I keep my paper trails going.

(Paper is a wonderful technology.)

Spend time on something that will outlast them

a stack of my notebooks in a crate
RIP The Trump Administration 2017-2021

I have exactly one thing to thank our outgoing president for: my diary habit.

I have always kept notebooks, but starting in January 2017, I started keeping an old-fashioned, bonafide diary. 3+ pages every morning, no matter what. (Before anybody asks me what brand of notebooks I use, just shop here.) I realized early on in this administration, I was going to need a good place to have bad ideas, a place not Twitter, to shout into the void.

spreads and a stack of my diaries
A spread from the back of my book, Keep Going

My diary habit led to starting to blog daily again in October 2017, and by February 2018, I had the “How To Keep Going” talk written. That talk led to Keep Going the book, which came out in 2019. So, I guess I could thank the ex-president for the end of the trilogy, too, considering I wrote it as an answer to the question, “What if we have to live through a second term?” (I did not anticipate that “second term” would be swapped out for “global pandemic.”)

spend time on something that will outlast them

I forgot, somehow, that the original ending of the talk was: “Spend time on something that will outlast them.” This was based on the Leonard Woolf “Planting Iris” story I wrapped the talk with:

For the book we went with the more — positive? — line, “Plant your garden,” which was a better container for thinking about seasonal time. I still like that original line, but I would change it now to: “Spend time on something that will outlast them this.”

“This” is whatever the this is in the phrase, “this, too, shall pass.”

What seeds are you planting now that will flower long after this pandemic, this administration… maybe even this life?

I’m hopeful and I’m happy, today, but I still have the same mission:

Stay alive, get weird, and plant your seeds.

Unfit or inexcusably stupid

Here are a few frames from the Gene Deitch’s animated version of “The Emperor’s New Clothes.” The original Hans Christian Andersen story is essential reading for understanding our times, but, as I have noted before, you must pay close attention to the ending. I would also point out that in the Nunnally translation, the emperor’s new clothes are invisible to anyone “unfit for his position or inexcusably stupid.” (Show me a fairy tale more on-the-nose!)

A tale of two health cares

The cartoonist Gahan Wilson died two Thursdays ago in Scottsdale, Arizona, USA, at the age of 89.

The poet and critic Clive James died three days later, in Cambridge, England, at the age of 80.

Reading their obituaries, it struck me how neatly their end-of-life care situations split between their two countries.

* * *

Gahan Wilson died of complications from severe dementia. After Wilson’s wife, Nancy Winters — “his guide through the world” — died earlier in the year, his stepson, Paul Winters, had to move him out of the assisted living facility the couple had been living in.

Wilson was profiled by the Arizona Republic in April. He was still drawing.

Gahan lives in a memory care facility not far from their house. The staff is kind. Gahan is safe. But it’s no way to live, Paul said.

“As an old person without money, you are not respected. You are no one,” he said. “It seems our society doesn’t really honor elders as we should.” […]

Paul and [his wife] Patty navigate the health care system for Gahan. The care he needs is expensive.

They have raised $58,000 on a GoFundMe account. Paul knows people donate because his stepfather is famous. He can imagine how other families must struggle.

“Memory care is wildly expensive,” Paul wrote. “If we could cover the cost ourselves, we would. We can’t, and Gahan and my mother did not save for anything like this.”

* * *

Meanwhile, across the pond, Clive James died “peacefully” at home thanks to a team of hospice nurses, “surrounded by his family and his books,” almost a decade after he’d been diagnosed with leukemia, kidney failure, and emphysema.

Now, any rich person in America can die this way, maybe, but thankfully, James had the National Health Service, whose praises he sang just last year:

The result of all this careful attention is that I have lived several years past my predicted time of extinction, and that my credibility as a dying man is in tatters. Lifting a Paper Mate Flexgrip Ultra ballpoint pen takes all my strength, but the resulting prose says I am still alive and full of energy…. So I’m stuck with still sounding healthy when I write, and the impression is only mildly misleading because the NHS has been doing a marvellous job on me.

In his last years, James wrote everything from death poems to a book about binge-watching television.

He addressed the cost of it all:

The NHS will go on for ever being almost broke because there will always be more things it can do. You might profess to be appalled that the NHS has spent millions on a new drug to stop people suddenly turning upside down and falling on their head, but you will be less appalled the first time you yourself suddenly turn upside down and fall on your head.

It wasn’t just Clive James and his friends and family who benefited from the NHS, it was readers all over the world and into the future.

* * *

“I think one way I could be helpful to British voters is they could imagine me as the Ghost of Christmas Future,” says American comedian Rob Delaney.

He recently posted a video about his experiences with the NHS after the death of his son, Henry.

He said his American friends all hear about what a mess the NHS is on Fox News.

On the contrary, he says, “I’m crazy about it.”

Our American healthcare system is killing us. It’s bankrupting our families, chaining us to jobs we hate, and keeping us from doing the work we’re meant to do.

It is especially hard on artists and other kinds of creative entrepreneurs.

It is why I’m a single issue voter.

The Emperor’s New Clothes

Yesterday, I was looking at this Stairway to Nowhere in my hotel — the kind of “luxury” hotel with lots of fancy finishes and no ice in the ice machine — and I was thinking about the news, and Hans Christian Andersen’s “The Emperor’s New Clothes” came to mind, as it often does these days:

Many years ago there was an Emperor so exceedingly fond of new clothes that he spent all his money on being well dressed. He cared nothing about reviewing his soldiers, going to the theatre, or going for a ride in his carriage, except to show off his new clothes…

“It’s strange people think they need Arendt or Orwell to figure things out,” Jeet Heer tweeted not long ago, “when everything was spelled out in ‘The Emperor’s New Clothes.’”

The story was published almost two centuries ago, in 1837, along with “The Little Mermaid,” as the third installment in Andersen’s Fairy Tales Told for Children. You might remember the child shouting out the truth, but you might not remember the whole ending:

“But he hasn’t got anything on,” a little child said.

“Did you ever hear such innocent prattle?” said its father. And one person whispered to another what the child had said, “He hasn’t anything on. A child says he hasn’t anything on.”

“But he hasn’t got anything on!” the whole town cried out at last.

The Emperor shivered, for he suspected they were right. But he thought, “This procession has got to go on.” So he walked more proudly than ever, as his noblemen held high the train that wasn’t there at all.

After I finished the story again, I thought of 16-year-old climate change activist Greta Thunberg, whose autism informs her approach: “I don’t fall for lies as easily as regular people, I can see through things.”

To the politicians, she says: “You don’t listen to the science because you are only interested in the answers that will allow you to carry on as if nothing has happened.”

But will anybody listen? Will anybody change? “Is my microphone on?” she asks.

Children are able to see through our bullshit, but if we don’t respect them and listen to them, we learn nothing from them, and nothing changes. The Emperor is allowed to proceed, because “the procession has got to go on.”

Travel as a political act

“Have you noticed how riddled with fear our country is lately? We’ve never been more afraid. I’m concerned about that. Because when a society is afraid, people with a wrong motive can take advantage of that society and make them become something that they’re not. There’s a lot of fear right now in the United States of America and the most fearful Americans are the Americans that are buried deep in the middle of this country with no passports. This is a concern. Fear is for people who don’t get out much. The flipside of fear is understanding, and we gain understanding when we travel. I think it’s important for our very democracy… that we get out there, we travel, and we gain an empathy for the other 96% of humanity.”

I caught this talk last night on PBS, and it was so well done that I felt compelled to keep watching past my bedtime. (He’s been giving some version of the talk since 9/11.) It’s pretty brilliant in that it’s both a genuine plea for a saner, more thoughtful politics in this country, but also basically an infomercial for his travel services, his book of the same name, and his classics, Europe 101 and Europe Through The Back Door. (It feels very American to me in that way — both heartfelt and capitalist.) Worth a watch.

To be or not to be

I bought so many Beto signs for our yard I thought I’d cut one up into a campaign slogan that more accurately reflects the dire state of our country.

Someone suggested if I made a bunch and put them next to each other they’d still work as Beto signs:

Single issue voter

Ad Reinhardt, 1943

Whenever a heartwarming story about a community rallying to support someone with a medical issue pops up, one of my smarter friends will point out how absurd it is that any citizen of the richest country on Earth should need a GoFundMe campaign to pay for their medical bills.

Again and again, I come back to this post by comedian Rob Delaney:

I’m almost a single-issue voter. I’m not, but my thinking about government and elected officials and what their purposes are begins and ends with how they approach health care. My thinking certainly visits all the other issues along the way (or a few of them anyway; I don’t have to have an opinion on everything as I’m not running and never will run for president) but number one among all the issues for me is health care. My reason for that is that I believe that you can’t really effect positive change in any other area if your body (or your child’s body, or your partner’s body) is sick or not working. Nor can you effect change if you’re struggling to pay for – or even get – vital medicine for yourself or a family member. Nor, again, can you effect change in areas you care about if you’re in significant debt for medical care you’ve already received. You can even have a hard time effecting change in the political issues you care about if you merely live with the specter of not being able to access or pay for medical care for yourself or your family.

For me and my family, it’s the black cloud that hovers in the background of every decision we make: What will we do for health insurance? What if one of us gets sick or hurt? 

Health care is my #1 issue, as I think it should be for everyone in this country. (It also happens to be the one issue my conservative dad and I can agree on: Medicare for all.)

Inevitably, someone will say, “I read you for art, not for politics,” so here’s a hook for you: Bad health care has killed more American artists than I could list here without my fingers falling off.

The midterms are coming up, so if you want to support the arts, register to vote and vote for politicians who support universal health care.

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