"K-Fed's" Slap Heard Round the World and Miscellany

Finally, Vince McMahon is beginning to reinvigorate the Rhetorical Situation known as Monday Night Raw! First of all combining Raw with Smackdown and ECW by instigating a threeway rivalry of champions has been a brilliant move; it unseats wrestling fans' comfort zone, leaving them anxiously wondering what's going to happen with the belts come Cyber Sunday. It has a conspiratorial narrative flavor that can really get people sucked in. King Booker has done a wonderful job spreading his creds as a heel, and Big Show is rendering an even better performance, toeing the middle ground between heel and face--compared to Cena he's a no-account cheater, but compared to Booker he's a bastion of integrity.

Speaking of this troicha, Harrogate audibly gasped when Cena interrupted "K-Fed's" lovefest with King Booker, telling the Heavyweight Champion that by endorsing Playing With Fire , he had "Lost his credentials as a Black Man"!!!!!!!!!!!!! Shaky ground here, O vaunted followers of The Rhetorical Situation! The WWE for several weeks has been doing all kinds of strange things with race. The stereotyped tagteam Cryme Tyme "ganking" Booker's wallet a couple of weeks ago added kerosene to the rhetorical fire, and all along wrestlers have been openly referring to Jonathan Coachman as an Uncle Tom. Academes interested in representations of race really ought to be watching their Raw, as all kinds of weird rhetoric is going down in that department.

But, to the money part: Vince has found a veritable goldmine with "K-Fed," whose ersatz ethos, as Harrogate has said before, has finally found a rhetorically proper fit. The guy is really razzing it up, and Cena is doing wonderfully as populist good guy who sees through "K-Fed's" chicanery. Federline's tee shirt proclaimed "America's Most Hated": Harrogate means really, what more can fans ask for, unless they want to see Britney herself interjected into this story? Actually, Harrogate predicts that the pinnacle of class known as Britney Spears will be making an appearance on Raw within the next four episodes--but that her appearance will be totally unannounced, to rhetorically augment the surprise.

Anyway, that slap across the face (depicted above) must have sounded to Vince just like Daisy in The Great Gatsby: her voice is "full of money," and so was that sound of rhetorically corrupt skin striking the face of a Marine.

Finally, Harrogate's eyes welled up when Dusty Rhodes (inset) entered on behalf of Ric Flair in his match with Kenny. Yes, it was nice to see Sgt. Slaughter and Roddy ("I'm all out of bubble gum") Piper as well, but Harrogate has seen these cultural icons several times over the years: Dusty The American Dream Rhodes on the other hand was like an incarnation of Harrogate's childhood, live and in full color. Now, Vince must find a way to get Dusty into the narrative proper, keep him around a lot, perhaps even set things up to where he and Flair win the Tag Team Championship from the rhetorically hapless Spirit Squad, thus cashing in on a Rhetoric of Nostalgia for all us thirty-somethings in the audience.