I remember me
American Gladiators on TV. This is the show which featured gym rats from Venice Beach made good, guys with receding hairlines dressed in ill-fitting spandex outfits taking on carpenters from middle America in the ultimate pantomime of modern day roman warriors. I remember watching this show on Saturday nights at a friend’s house. His mom would make us cheddar cheese popcorn in the microwave as we cheered our gladiator of choice. Many fans of this show would probably later go on to fight in actual combat, in some sketchy desert somewhere, with the inherent notions of heroism. Where my fanaticism for dudes dressed in patriotic spandex outfits verged, I don’t know, but it was probably somewhere around the time of adolescence—or when I read that first Chomsky book, or somewhere. The details are not very important, but it’s with no lack of consternation that I notice that some executive somewhere actually had the insane idea of putting this show back on the air again. “Gladiator party, man,” Adam tells me when I get home last night. We whoop it up in the cathode ray, a motley assemblage of people old enough to remember when this show was on the first time around. It’s funny how the gladiators are still those same guys with receding hairlines and hilarity-invoking names. A gladiator named Wolf-Man, a 40-something with a ratty beard, whose presence elicits in him a menacing wolf call every time he appears, makes us laugh and laugh. And it’s a real good time. You have to decide: do you really want to cheer for the firefighter from East Orange, New Jersey or do you want to see him fall from his perilous perch on the bridge as the Wolf-Man pummels him with an oversized sack of potatoes on a string? These are the important life-questions, the ones which require a little more from you. On a commercial break, I catch myself brainstorming an idea where they would retrieve actual Guantanamo Bay prisoners and pit them up against the American Gladiators for the ultimate exchange of freedom. If the gladiators were defeated they would be at the opprobrium of the general public as the Guantanamo prisoners went free. But if the gladiators won, it would just be more of the same for the Guantanamo prisoners, waterboarding or whatever. The only problem would be they would have to come up with a new name for the show. American Jingoism, I would like to suggest, but it's still in the beginning phases. I am silently working out the details when someone asks me what I’m muttering. –What? Oh, nothing, I say. Nothing, really: I promise.