A Geek History of Time - Episode 204 - Damian's Attempt to Get People to Like Wrestling is a Lost Cause, Even on Office Hours

Episode Date: March 25, 2023

No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, 1.5-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1- This is a key history of time and this is a special edition. Sometime ago Ed and I both guessed it on a another one was from office hours, which we strongly encourage you to go check out subscribe rate and see you because they do an incredible job. Anyway, we wanted to be able to share what we did over there over here. So this next episode is one of the three that we recorded with them and we hope that you enjoyed this week as a bonus episode. As always, as Ed would say, keep rolling 20s. Hey folks, welcome to the Office of Eyes with Dr. C and today we have returning guests, Damien and Ed and in case you are just violating the social contract and listen to these out

of order, we have Damien and Ed introduce themselves for this episode. So who are y'all and what are you about? Well, I'm Damien Harmony because I was introduced first. So, keeping that social order, I'm Damien Harmony, because I was introduced first. So, keeping that social order, I'm Damien Harmony, we normally introduce Ed versus in our show, but I'm Damien Harmony, I am a Latin and a drama and a history teacher up here at the high school level,

up here in Northern California. And yeah, I am a union thug as I've been told. And I've been recently told that I yell louder than a bulldog, and I don't know what any of that means. So I just, I have to interject when you got called a union thug, was it admiringly as I would have said it or, or, was it an attempt at an insult? Well, you know how narcissistic I can be and how I guess I myself into thinking that it's more compliments. So compliments. So I was grateful to hear it regardless. Okay, well there you go. And on that note, I'm Ed Blaylock. I am Damien's partner on our podcast

Geek History of Time. And I am a middle school level history and English teacher here in Northern California. I just, I like to think Damien, that when you're called a union thug for doing you for doing your union thuggery. At some point you should just scream no, I'm a Marxist. Um, just to double down.

Sure, but for, well, I have it tattooed on my stomach like like two park and there's enough room to say union thug life born union thug life bread and when I die I will have had a lifetime of benefits Because I am now union thug life debt There's enough room to have all that in the same size font that two park had on his belly, so Some of us choose the pension life and sometimes the pension life chooses us Here you go So pension life and sometimes pension life. It's us. There you go. So last week we talked about token with Ed in particular.

And this week we are talking about things that I'll be honest as a Southerner, I did not draw a connection to. So I'm excited to hear about. And that is professional wrestling and the lost cause narrative. So Damien, why don't you give us a little bit of context and background for both of those things and then we'll get to marrying them together. Absolutely. Well, so I'd just like to point out that last week we did the vulgar art of J.R.R.

Tolkien and now we're going to get into some high-brow stuff with... I know it's a joke, but so hard. I hate you. I hate you so much right now. I hate you. Oh my God. And nobody can see this, but I get like one of these, but so much right now. I hate it. Oh my God. And nobody can see this, but I get like one of these kids is doing his own thing vibes because everybody else puts their head down while I'm laughing.

So it's just okay. So there's this little thing that happened. It was called the Civil War. It killed almost as many people as COVID has. And it was essentially over states' rights to own chattel slaves. And I wanna clarify something. To own chattel slaves. When you say chattel slaves, you mean people.

Yeah, human beings, kidnaps from another place and were born into said slavery, hence the Shadow aspect of it. Yeah, yeah, there is one part of the country, a very sprawling part of the country, is continuing to grow. Was that? Connecticut. Yes, Connecticut and New Hampshire. That's why it was called the new Hampshire because those people bore the mark of ham. And so they were creating the shire. And it's oh, hey, hey, we're back to Calvinism. I didn't know we were getting into the Southern Baptist convention. Well, that's that's a few pages down now.

My last cause you kind of have to it's not. Yeah, we did this over a five episode arc on our podcast and each one was roughly an hour and a half. So I'm going to give you a real condensed version here. So essentially the civil war happened turns out the entire constitution of Pound, which the southern states who tried to secede away from the Union, was in fact, based entirely around the idea of slavery, because it was mostly word for word, but also like, you can't make any laws against slavery. They lost. It didn't mean that they liked black people anymore

than they had previously. They just realized, okay, well, this is not a winnable thing, and they were brought back into the Union. There were three amendments passed to kind of make things okayer. There's the 13th Amendment, the 14th Amendment, the 15th Amendment, the 13th Amendment basically defined what is, it's been a while since I've taught US history, 13th Amendment basically outlawed slavery. 14th?

Except four. Unless, of course, you're incarcerated. So they gave people a work around. It's good. Louisville's want to bring exactly. Yeah, sure. Yeah. Who doesn't love a good loophole?

But 14th Amendment basically said, hey, if you were a traitor to the country, you can't hold public office. Apparently, we found loopholes around that. And then the 15th Amendment said that black men could in fact vote. And to ensure all this, armies came down from the North to occupy

or safeguard the rights of people in the South so that they could vote. And that went fine until there was an election in 1876 and you get to what's called the compromise of 1877. Wherein, it was almost a Roman kind of thing. You pick the person in charge, we'll pick the people who, you know, the pool from which you can do it.

The Tilden Hayes compromise, which essentially removed federal troops and allowed Jim Crow South to reign. Into this vacuum also came a group called the daughters of the American Confederation, the confederacy, pardon me. UDC.

Yeah. And they essentially said, well, we need to teach people that we weren't wrong. And. Well, that's a really, really good way of condensing it down to its absolute essential core. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So they did that. And they put a lot of effort and a lot of statues up to do that. And a lot of effort into the textbooks because public schooling was starting to be a thing.

And they essentially controlled the narrative. And you have this narrative of essentially the narrative. And you have this narrative of essentially, we can all agree that slavery was bad, to what extent, I guess, is an argument you can have at different dinner tables, but we can all agree that slavery was bad, our mistake. But to be honest, the Civil War was, we were very valiant in protecting our honor. And that's the core of the lost cause. It was they were fighting, yes, they were fighting a cause that was wrong, but the way they fought is really, really the story here. So we're gonna focus on their courage.

It combines also in that vein of the courageous, this idea of yes, we were wrong, but also we were fighting a tyrannical government that was not respecting our political agency, which is bullshit, but. Yeah, and it was called the War of Northern Aggression. I went to school in Florida for a part, and it was called the War between States there. There was also the War for Southern Independence. There was the Second American Rebell rebellion I'd heard it called by my teachers in middle school. Now, interestingly, there were some rank amateurs who called it the Civil War.

There's a guy named Jefferson Davis, Ulysses S. Grant, Robert E. Lee, William T. Sherman, PT Boehrgard, Nathan Bedford Forest, Abraham Lincoln. Never heard of clowns. Yeah, nobody would have. Yeah, they're important footnotes. Exactly. To the historical narrative. Yeah, like Andy and a toy story, right? Just a poor note. You have a hair of Plato, Socrates, Moorons. So the law's cost really focused on the how the war was fought, not the why. And you could construct a mythos around that because there of course were instances obviously

on both sides, but there for the south there were instances plenty of instances of courage, a personal courage that you could go to. And nobody's going to speak up about cowardly Uncle Jim, but they will all speak up about, brave Uncle Cletus. And I'm just pulling names out of a hat there, but like, it might be a little bit biased against my teacher from Sixth grade, he was a terrible PE teacher. Okay.

He had us run around the cemetery. It was weird. It was weird. I have a running sociological theory that we're all at any point in our life just working through middle school. And the high school teacher can confirm. I'm sorry, did I mention at the beginning of the episode what level I teach at? You're literally working through. I'm literally working through light.

But if you eliminate the why of the war, then you can make heroes out of any trader. And that's what the daughters of the Confederacy did. And you can make it so that your neighbors and your own relatives were just misguided. They weren't trying to wreck a country to keep other people in chains. It's also worth noting that they capitalized on a vacuum of knowledge, right? So in particular, with like the narratives of the enslaved. So in, I think it was FDR, in his project to, or to capture the testimonies of the formerly enslaved and what their life was like, that kind of thing.

That has come around until like the 1930s, right? Yeah. Oh, yeah. It's part of the WPN. Yeah. Right. So it's decades, almost 50 years after the end of the war. And in that gap, you have, you have the oral histories that were passed down from generation to generation, but those are largely within black communities, right? Right. And so you have in that vacuum, the propagation of narratives like, Right. And so you have in that vacuum the propagation of narratives like there's this old trope that made it to a textbook because the United dollars of competency also did a lot to shape education. Right. Like you said, of like a sort of Uncle Tom kind of trope, but a old black formerly enslaved man who just spends his days by his former master's tombstone, right?

As opposed to what we understand now of like narratives from even sometimes like the slave masters themselves or from the enslaved of like, there's one in particular that comes in mind where from a diary journal entry, slave master recounting the siege of his plantation and he's telling his enslaved folks, y'all, let's run for the forests, right? Let's run to the tree line we can escape.

And the response is, sure, you go ahead. And then he makes a note like, and they didn't move. So I took off with the assumption they were behind me and then lo and behold, they were not. move. So I took off with the assumption they were behind me and then lo and behold, they were not right. To his undersharked surprise. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. Like, how can you think about the point so hard that it flees from you? Right. And so you think about the disparity between those two narratives, right? And how the UDC just, you know, flooded that vacuum with agreed justly wrong information. So yeah. Yeah. Now, the best part I thought about

Alexander Stevens' speech, which was called the cornerstone speech, was that he never stuck to it after the war was over. He fled from it. He absolutely tried to backpedal. He claimed. Ran, ran like a chicken with his head cut off.

Just as, yeah. As far from it as he could, he said, no, no, it wasn't about slavery. It was about economics because the north was attacking them for their use of black people as labor. So again, wait a minute. What the point there? Hey, Mr. Stevens, if I may call you that, because what I'd like to call you is fuckface, but I'm going to try to be respectful here. You didn't you in that speech say something about white supremaciliterally using the phrase white supremacy is the cornerstone of our policy. Natural law. Yeah. Yeah. Didn't you wait? Is that you?

Yes. One of the highlights of that speech is that he comes down on the founders of the Constitution as being too soft on slavery. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. It's like, oh, oh, this is where we're at. And so for that guy to turn around and be like, no, no, these were just two different constitutions.

The whole war was just a disagreement over how to run a country. It was a culture clash since the South has a culture of honor and the North has a culture of making money. Yeah. Which absolutely echoed the Hamilton stuff between Jefferson and Hamilton as told by, I mean, that's fan fiction. I mean, so, but it's that same kind of culture clash and that absolutely ties into professional wrestling

because, so that's the lost cause is there more that we wanted to cover on that. Yeah, let's get into the professional wrestling. So professional wrestling again, this was like the meat of of three and a half episodes, but essentially professional wrestling starts in the United States shortly after the Civil War. It had gotten brought over different wrestling tactics and different wrestling styles. Style. Yeah, came over with different immigrant groups.

And those immigrant groups would often be somewhat cloistered in their regiments, right? So you would have the Irish volunteers of Vermont and volunteers, of course, as a in quote of Vermont and they had their own catches catch can wrestling or some of them had their own collar and elbow wrestling or jacket and elbow wrestling. So when you see because I was gonna I was gonna explain that no no I was paying attention Jack elbow collar and elbow I remember collar and elbow. Yep. Okay. So when you see a wrestling lock up in the current day, you see them lock up their arms and that kind of thing.

And of course, we all know that wrestling is contrived. It is, I believe Ed, you called it sparkly murder gymnastics. Yeah, I got that from a web comic somewhere, but yeah, yeah. Which I absolutely adore. But you know, and the thing about wrestling that I've always loved, it's always been a work, it's always been contrived since it started making money. Do you want to explain the difference between working a shoot? Just because that's kind of, yeah.

But it's always been that, and I love that about our culture now, because Rome had people actually fighting potentially to the death for entertainment. We have people pretending to do so. And there's something about that that I've just always really appreciated about us. But yeah, you had Irish volunteers, their style was dominant amongst the Union soldiers. And so it became the style. Oh, I really like how you did that.

Can you teach me? And it kind of,. Oh, I really like how you did that. Can you teach me? And it kind of, it's spread, it's diffused. And of course, you add little different aspects of the local flair and the local style into it and things like that. And what ends up happening is, and there's a whole story about how Lincoln actually was one of the first professional wrestlers

because you could actually do this for money back when it was called a shoot. Now, shooting and working are carny terms and I mean that respectfully. Believe you mean Carnival Americans? Yes, Carnival Americans. Sorry. Americans of Carnival heritage. So you want to be people first. The lady with the beard.

But the man fired from the canner. But as trains were pulling everything west, you had towns popping up. And as a result, you had moving entertainment troops. And you would have a wrestler. And he was known as a hooker or a shooter. And what it basically meant was that he could really handle himself and he was the one that you brought out. And you'd have a few other people and you say,

anybody who wants to beat this guy, it's five bucks for you or whatever, you pay to fight him. If you can last more than two minutes, we've all read Spider-Man. And he essentially, if he beat your guy, then you would have him come out against the hooker or the shooter. And the hooker would know the proper moves and techniques to actually stop this guy. Now, if the local champion was so good, you'd offer him a job on your truth

and on you would go. And it so it absolutely followed the rail lines. Well, one place where rail lines were slower to grow was in the south. Some people would say that Sherman had something to do with that. I would say good. I am right. So, you have the explosion, though, of Westward migration, and that brings wrestling everywhere as an entertainment form. And then you start to have the professionalization of it.

And the color and elbow style really starts to work its way through the Midwest. Now the majority of what I'm talking about actually is going to be mostly the southern territories compared to the New York territory, because New York is a special place unto itself. The Southern territories, um, are their style is essentially this. There is always a bad guy who is the champion. If not always, 95% of the time, he is the champion. Now, he is one of three things usually. One, he is a bad guy Now he is one of three things usually one. He is a

bad guy because he's an aristocrat. Two, he's a bad guy because he is a northerner. Three, he's a bad guy because he's a coward that anyone could beat but he has enough people on his side that could just keep interfering with you. He's a bad guy, yeah. So we've got carpet baggers, flamboyant Yankees, and cowardly unionists. Yeah, or you have carpet baggers, flamboyant southerners who could have afforded to buy their way out of service,

because Rick Flair, depending on when he was champion, was either from Minneapolis, Minnesota. So if he's in Virginia, you know they're going to be pissed about that. Or if he's in the mid-south territories, and by the way, the country is carved up into about 32 different territories, if he's in the mid-south territories, he was from Charlotte, North Carolina. I guess the dark humor in all of this is no one knows where he was from because he was part of a orphanage. And crying babies. Yeah. So. But so and Rick Flair is absolutely the guy that everybody

and his strength as a wrestler in the 70s and in the 80s was absolutely to make everyone look like they were just about to beat him. And then he would find some way to cheat and win. And he had a stable of guys. The four horsemen were with him. You had Arn Anderson, Oli Anderson, both also known as the Minnesota Reckon crew and Tully Blanchard, who was a Texan. And Tully was great, they call him chicken shit heels. So it was a great, who was very technically adept, but he would find ways to just book cowardly as he's doing it. So, in the South, you would have this heel champion,

almost always Rick Flair in the 70s and 80s, but even prior to that, you almost always had a heel champion and he would go from town to town, making your local territory guy look like a million bucks. Well, the local territory guy was almost always a, what we call a white bread baby face. So he's almost always a white guy. And he's almost very often blonde.

I don't know what it was that was in the water in the 70s in 80s, but he's almost always blonde. Rocks on. But yeah, yeah, there you go. Not enough lithium. But he was, so he was almost always white and all of us always blonde, and he almost always lost. But that wasn't the point of the story. The point of the story was how he worked his way through Arn Anderson, how he worked his way through Barry Windham, unless he was Barry Windham, how he worked his way through On Anderson, how he worked his way through Barry Wyndham, unless he was Barry Wyndham,

how he worked his way through Oli Anderson, how he worked his way through Tully Blanchard, how he finally got to Rick Flair, and he won, but then the referee reversed the decision on a technicality. Dusty Rhodes was famous for this. This is called a Dusty finish, actually. And Dusty Rhodes completely understood Southern wrestling, and he would always book it where the audience would leave having rioted at the fact that their champion lost. And when I mean rioted, I mean actually rioted. Like there were times where Ric Flair was in fear for his life.

And that's not him telling tall tales. That's other people. This firming said tales. This that's not him telling tall tales. That's other people. This firming said tales. This reminds me of a story of, um, and what you're saying about Ric Flair tracks for a couple of reasons. And one is because of a story that I'm remembering from like a friend of a family. Um, it was, it was a friend of a family whose cousin who I knew, uh, went to a, uh, wrestling show in Ric Flair was there. And because the it is theater and it is theater that is very engrossing. And this friend of this cousin was under the influence and had a knife and made

a go at Ric Flair. Yep. That was considered a compliment by the way for heels. Like heels will brag about how many of their cars have been burned out. And that's why they would actually find themselves a local ring rat, which is what's a very derogatory term for a woman who is a groupie to wrestling, who is a superfan, as it were, because rats stood for reasonably attractive talent. I thought that phrase couldn't get grosser. No, no, it's bad. It's real bad. And especially in Tennessee, but like just the way they, like it was part of the economic plan of the book or of the territory was, well, I'm going to pay you less because you're

going to find a rat. It was, it was bad. Oh, no. So the way that we left that out in our episode, I don't think you mentioned that did. Holy crap. Yeah, it was bad. It was bad.

But so yeah, Rick Flair epitomizes this bad guy, this heel, but there were others. And if you look into wrestling in the 1990s, you have the NWO, which you probably have some living memory of, the NWO started off with Hulkogan, Kevin Nash, and Scott Hall, may he rest in peace finally, but the three of them coming down to WCW, well, class wrestling, and taking over WCW and being interlopers, and the only reason that it worked so well was because Hulk Hogan had already come down and he's Hulk Hogan, right? Everybody cheers him, except he'd gotten stale because in a Southern territory, you don't have a face as your top attraction. You have a heel as your top attraction. And they got tired of this guy who always wins. Where's the story in that?

Where's the cultural buy-in in that? This is the South. We don't win. It's how we fight that matters. So you flip the script. Hulk Hogan trades in his yellow and red for his black and white. And suddenly you have this whole wave of people who came down from the New York territory, this Union interlopers creating their own occupation of the South.

And now it's about sting going back to JR Tolkien. But no, it's about sting. Literally is coming from the rafters. He's descending from the heavens to rescue everyone after about 18 months of NWO occupation. In the meantime, there were several other wrestlers who put up a good fight against NWO, but ultimately lost, but that made their careers because they didn't have to win. It's not about winning in Southern wrestling. It's absolutely about how you do it. That's interesting because so a good friend of mine from high school is a, was for a long time.

I think he's maybe since retired, but he was a independent wrestler right on the Indian circuit around where I am. And he was, I mean, he's, you know, that in the wool southerner, but his character was basically Andrew Dice Clay. Like, yeah, yeah, yeah, he was, you know, modeled right after him. And he was always, he was always the heel. He was usually the headliner. And yeah, now that I think about it, like, it was less about seeing when he did lose. It was less about saying the triumph of the champion was more about the fall of this character. And he didn't lose often, at least not in the shows that I saw. So that's an interesting way then of sort of, I guess, post-war catharsis for, because, and for people who, I don't know how many folks who listen to this are from the south, but if you're not, you should know. We so call you Yankees.

We so refer to you all as such, and I try not to, but from time to time. as such, and I tried not to, but from time to time. You know. And so that mindset is still very much there, and that sense of divide is still very much there. Not maybe as prominent as it was, even my parents' generation or the generation before, but it doesn't really leave. Right. It's baked into the culture.

And what I didn't really cover was the bloodletting that would happen along that journey. As the feud would intensify, as Magnum TA would be going at it with Tully Blanchard, as Sting or Barry Wyndham or Dusty Rhodes especially, they would bleed and bleed and bleed. And it was not it was not your regular to leave the face bleeding in the middle of the ring by the end of the night to have your blow off you. And that's when you'd bring in the cage and that's when you'd bring in all these other things because you're amping up the emotionality and you're amping up the essentially like the narrative of we have been

bled, we have been victimized and it doesn't matter if we win, it matters that we fought with honor. It's almost like sacrificed by FG. Yeah, and what I want to bring in here at this point is

because it's one of the things that came up in our podcast about this is, there is a very strong charismatic, southern Baptist religious kind of aspect to this that, you know, the cultural differences in, you know, religion between the North and the South, you know, in Northern Presbyterian mainland Protestantism, you know, in northern Prisbyterian mainline Protestantism, you went to church and church reaffirmed, you know, the social order and, and you know, we all sang hymns and yay. In the south, you had, you know, traveling revival tents and you had this

religious experience that was built entirely around this powerful moment of catharsis and spiritual bloodletting because of the subconscious guilt everybody was carrying from slavery being such a central part of intense raising the emotional stakes and raising the emotional stakes in that kind of way. And having this intense cathartic kind of experience, whereas in the North, because we haven't talked about that storyline at all, but I think the contrast is illustrative. In the North, the bad guy would rise up in rebellion.

The bad guy would be an interloper who'd be showing up and breaking all the rules and violating the social contract, and the champion would come along and knock him off his peg and restore order. Exactly. It was a, it was a face territory in the North, specifically in the WWF, then WWE.

But what I wanted to come back to was that once the Monday night war's got started and you had Hulk Hogan as a bad guy in the South. You also had this, this nationalization of these culture wars that were brought about by guys like Newt Gingrich and Papu Cannon. And the result was in New York, they were losing to the South. So what they did was they took a Texan badass who was pretty much no nonsense and he will stop a mud hole in you. And they put him against the boss, the guy in charge of everything. And he would win, but he would win at just the very last moment. He would find a way to pull out the victory. Now, he was an anti-hero.

Now, he was ultimately a good guy, but he was an anti hero and he wrestled as a bad guy. He wrestled as a heal the whole time, heal tactics, punch, punch, stom, stom, kick in the groin. But he was cheered because he was going against a more evil, corporate boss. And Stone Cold Steve Austin becomes this, he becomes the most white, hot baby face there's ever been in wrestling. And what I loved is that the success of the WWF was its adoption of the Southern strategy when it came to wrestling. And that's what nationalized out to us. And that's what became this national thing. And we all suffered

for it, ultimately. But and most of Stone Cold, Siobhawkson's matches absolutely had people in blood in the late 90s. But that whole attitude era was 100% an adoption of the defiance of the South and the honor that you're fighting for it. So it doesn't even matter your tactics if you're fighting for the right thing. More importantly, if you're fighting against

an enormous monster who has all the power. And so that's what became, and it still is today. I mean, they still run those storylines over and over again. Daniel Bryan versus the McMahon, the McMahons and Hunter Hurst Helmsley in 2015, 2016, those times. You still have that. Two things came to mind The as you were saying that and one I think that's awesome connection but Whenever I think of Stone Cold Steve Austin, I can't help but think of him and Some movie and might have might have been the replacements where he's a football player Oh, the one with your it's but he's in a locker room and there's

Mississippi queen by mountain playing and he's like this is how the white man plays guitar and it's in a locker room and there's Mississippi Queen by mountain playing and he's like, this is how the white man plays guitar. And it's just a single line that's thrown out there. And I don't know what purpose it serves other than just to see him say that and an airplay air guitar. And so every time I think of Steve Austin, that's the first thing he comes to mind. But that's an interesting point. I hadn't thought about that as far as, yeah, Stone Cold was,

was an anti-hero. He was a Frank Castle of a sort. But the second thing that came to mind was that this idea of the suffering and the bloodletting and the sort of sacrifice and the scapegoating in some regards is interesting because, so this out has a lot, the white American southern population has a lot to resent for reconstruction. You know, martial law is not pleasant for anybody. But reconstruction was also a time of boom for the African-American community, for a lot of, you know, black communities.

It's, you know, you have a population that is still terribly terrorized and murdered and you can't downplay that at all, they were also some of the few skilled labor in the area and were in some cases able to build up a fair amount of wealth and political power. And we started to see like, you know, black senators and congressmen and state legislators and things like that in the South during reconstruction.

And in 1898, woman to North Carolina was the largest and wealthiest trade of hub trade. What am I trying to say here? Hub of trade? Hub of trade. My words have failed me. Hub of trade in North Carolina. And then in 1898, we, there's the coup, right, where the fusion government of white politicians and black politicians take the, the city government. And then the coup, the coup is from racist white folk who are not okay with that.

And so they overthrow it literally in the span of 24 hours and you know, there's folks that are killed and hundreds of you run out of town and all that kind of stuff. But the other thing is, and the reason this connects to the bloodletting is that the the series of domestic terrorism events that happened across the South post-reconstruction were absolutely shooting ourselves in the foot. Because we benefited from, there's no way we wouldn't have benefited from all of the economic advancements, all of the educational advancements, all the things that the African-American and larger black community was bringing in and helping to sort of revitalize the South. If nothing else, like if there is a bunch of wealthy black store owners,

and I have a place to go shop, that is helping me, or if I have a place to work or things like that. And the destruction of those places brought everybody down. And it is sort of this fascination with grief and self-harm in many ways, I guess. Agreedment. Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. And I would say in a wrestling perspective, there were plenty of times where a good guy

would be offered a place in the bad guy's stable as a way of making sure the head bad guy didn't have to fight him. And he would turn it down, even though it's clearly a good offer materially, you know, but he'd turn it down because honor demands it. And the stone called Steve Austin had an episode where right after he beat Sean Michaels, the night after WrestleMania 14, Vince McMahon hands him a new title. And he, I think he, Steve Austin, I think he comes down a couple weeks later wearing a suit and tie. And he says, I want you to see this because the last damn time he takes it off and kicks

McMahon and the Chones and then stuns them and walks off. And he takes his own title, his own snake belt title, which was that was another thing. And it's just this, even though you're being offered a very good deal and you can go along to get along here, look how villainized that is culturally in the world of professional wrestling at that point. Yeah, it's also worth noting that Stunco, T. Lawson, also once Stunco,

is stungered the 45th president of the United States. But yeah, that's a story for another great. Oh, it looks in history, right? So as we pull this to a close, um, is there a or working folks find you? How can they support you and all your, you know, glory? All right. Well, our podcast as, uh, I mentioned the top of it of we mentioned as a topic of everything is a geek history of time We can be found on the Apple podcast app and on Stitcher and

if you want to bypass Subscribing to anything or per signing up for any app so you can just go online to www.geekhistorytime.com and that's where all of our work will be found. And I personally can be found at EH Blalock on Twitter and as Mr. underscore Blalock on TikTok. You can find me at Dohr Harmony on the Twitter and the Instagram.

If you live in the California area, I do live shows when the pandemic allows it. You can always look up capital, C-A-P-I-T-O-L punishment for our pun tournament to find dates on that. And you can find me also on TikTok at Der Harmony 1, or you can just look for the hashtag How I Torture at, and you'll find most of what we do there. All right, and of course, folks can find me on tiktok at dr.nbs.c and on Twitter and Instagram at gacruz.com. I'm just for PhD. And you can email any sort of questions, comments, concerns, requests for subject matter to gacruzphd at gmail.com. All right folks, thanks for talking about the office and we'll catch you next week.

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