Verisimilitude

 Stormtroopers in the streets of our cities.

Free speech being challenged on late night TV.

The Department of Education is being dismantled.

Overseeing all this chaos is a former game show host and convicted felon who is desperately trying to cover up his penchant for little girls. 

What can a person believe in?

Professional wrestling? 

Nope. Not even that once shining light in the firmament of entertainment. Even though there has been a resurgence in the popularity of men and women hurling themselves off the top rope for the adulation of the masses, there seems to be less and less of an attempt to convince us that it is real. 

Apologies to those of you who might have been harboring a notion that all those hammerlocks and clotheslines and suplexes were anything more than carefully choreographed martial ballet. I have written in this spot prior to today about my own awakening to this showbiz sham, but I confess that as a teacher of elementary school boys and some of the girls, I have felt compelled to keep a lid on the truth. We are still talking about the cash value of losing a tooth, so why not just go ahead and assume all that mayhem on TNT and now on Netflix is happening in real time?

Maybe because they don't always remember to get it right. Like the other night when actor, entrepreneur, boxer, actor and recently recruited professional actor Logan Paul was supposed to take a big surprise swing at wrestler, actor, and now wrestler again John Cena. Logan missed. Badly. Prompting the WWE Smackdown crew to back up and try to recreate the move from another angle. The second take was even worse than the first, and so the viewing public was left to have to fill in the reality bubble in which the on screen flailing about was actually something potentially dangerous. 

Traditionally I think you could say that the worst security in the world is that surrounding the world of professional wrestlers. Someone is always breaking into the middle of a planned backstage interview, or appearing suddenly at ringside with a folding chair. Why isn't someone doing more to keep these highly trained professional athletes safe from one another's steroid inflected rages? 

Perhaps because they are just staged for our less-than-evolved sense of what is amusing. To this end, I offer a suggestion: Instead of deploying them to Chicago or Oakland, dispatch the National Guard to the WWE studios. Since they seem to be in on the whole military theater sham, this might be a worthwhile use of our country's resources. Ten year olds and really dumb adults might believe that there was really something dangerous happening if the National Guard showed up.