Ideology

[With a click and a hiss, the recording begins to play.]

“At last he speaks. I know I’ve been waiting anxiously, as has the rest of the IWC audience, to hear what Johnny Kingdom had to say after his title was taken away at the OBE2, and he did not disappoint. Admittedly, he made us wait until the day before the show to hear it, but you know, I suppose it was intended to build anticipation. Johnny is, of course, a showman first.

“If you’re confused about the format of this promo, by the way, it was made using a magical invention known as a ‘tape recorder.’ I know it’s a fairly recent creation, only having been in existence since 1898 when the telagraphon was created by Vauldemar Poulson to perform the world’s first magnetic recordings, so I can understand why Johnny wasn’t familiar with them. I know you would prefer if I was on the screen talking and offering snarky parenthetical asides, but it’s all I realistically could put together given the vast amount of response time you’ve left me with to offer my rebuttal.”

“I suppose I’ll also mention that this is the same one I take with me to my sessions, to eliminate the confusion. The therapist wasn’t entirely crazy about the idea of me using my appointments for promo material, but since ultimately the only privacy I was violating was my own and I was willing to sign a release indemnifying them from any liability, she ultimately didn’t care. So, there you go, Johnny. I know this isn’t anywhere near as exciting as the infamous Bluhd Raige ‘invisible cameras,’ but I am happy to at last you in on the secret of how I’m recording my therapy sessions for publication in the IWC.”

“Why I’m doing it, however, is a slightly more complicated question. I know it bugs you, as do apparently all promos that don’t involve someone standing in front of a camera and blathering for entirely too long, IE promos that are different than yours. By the by, I haven’t mentioned before how incredibly ironic it is that all of a sudden we find Johnny Kingdom standing up for traditional, non-parody promos. Frankly, I find the majority of the stuff being put out by people like Savior just as revolting as you do, but still, of all people to be complaining that everyone needs to start doing classic, stand in front of the camera and spit out slander about one’s opponent promos, I think you probably have the least right to do so. The mastermind behind Creative Control wants us all to start doing things the old fashioned way? Say it ain’t so, Joe!”

“But I digress. I also find it somewhat hypocritical that you’re going to put me on the spot for getting help. First of all, we’re supposed to accept that you’ve evolved since we last faced each other at Paranoia, but somehow I’m not allowed to? I’m sorry for jumping to conclusions, Johnny, but you have to understand that I’ve basically got no reason to trust you. The only time I’ve seen you in this situation before you went completely apeshit and tore apart everything we built. So sorry if I’m a bit more cautious this time around. You haven’t exactly been the model of self-restraint before now.”

“You might want to stop listening for a few minutes, by the way Johnny, because I’m going to be sounding like a human being with emotions for the next part, and I know how much that bugs you. I promise later on I’ll go ahead and start yelling ‘AWOL Smash!’ at the top of my lungs so you can feel comfortable.“

“Anyway, I go to a therapist. It helps me. I didn’t really want to do it at first, but now I’m glad that I did. I feel better during the week because I talk to somebody. I know that that doesn’t do a whole lot to sell me as a big scary monster guy who dominates people in the ring, but I really could not care less. It’s my life, I want to live it the way I want to live it, and I’m putting it out as my promos. At first it was because I was lazy and thought it would be a good way to kill two birds with one stone. More recently, I got the crazy idea in my head that it would humanize me and, in turn, make me more relatable to the audience. And, more importantly, I’m doing it because it helps me to organize my thoughts into a sensible form that I can work with. It keeps me going when for a long time I didn’t believe I really had any reason to even wake up from one morning to the next.”

“And yes, Johnny, I was really that low for a long time. That’s what happens to people when they lose the ones they love. I had a plan for the way things were going to go forward from this day onward. It was all established and laid out. And no matter what happened, no matter what came, I KNEW that there was at least one person who would have stayed with me. There was one person I KNEW I could count on. I took a chance on someone. I dedicated myself to that person mind, body, and soul.”

“I made a mistake.”

“It happens. It may be difficult to believe, given the character I portrayed for a number of years in the ULW, but I was naïve enough to think that even though ninety nine percent of the people in the world are assholes that wouldn’t piss on you when you’re on fire, that she was different. I thought that I meant the same things to her as she meant to me, and I was wrong. You of all people in this company should understand how that feels, Johnny, but apparently you are some sort of fucking heartless robot, so I’ll explain it to you. It’s not just sadness. It’s not just depression. It’s a complete blackening of the fucking world. It’s a malign paradigm shift straight out of an M. Night Shyamalan film. The sun doesn’t shine as brightly as you remember it did just a few days earlier. Nothing matters. My entire world was completely turned upside down and shattered, and your advice to me is ‘Hey, buck up buddy, it’ll be ok.’? Wow. So that’s what I’ve been doing wrong this whole time? I’ve got to say, I wish we would have had this match earlier so that kind of incredible insight could have been laid on me earlier. It would have fixed my everything. And here I thought that sort of self-denial would only work for miserable bastards like you with no trace of humanity.”

“Now that might seem harsh, but you started playing the personal life cards first. You’ll notice I’m not saying ‘If you really believe that, I’m not surprised why your wife left you,’ or anything along those lines, because I know that life doesn’t work that way. Sometimes marriages don’t work. There isn’t a 50% divorce rate in this country because that many guys drink and beat their spouse. Ultimately you do just have to put the past out of your mind and move on, and I understand that. It’s what you’ve done, and what I’ll do once I get some distance and perspective between her and myself. However, for the time being, I needed a little help, if only to try and find some meaning in life again when I couldn’t see one previously. You will be happy to know, then, Mr. Kingdom, that I have made progress. I have a new cause, a new reason to get out of bed in the morning. That cause, as you have astutely pointed out, is the utter and complete termination of this failed experiment we call the IWC.”

“And as another aside, did you really quote Ledger’s Joker in regard to me? Really? You are aware how bush league that sounds, right? That’s the sort of thing I expect from Too Magnificent, not you.”

“Anyway, back on topic, I don’t think you really understand WHY this place needs to be destroyed, so I will take a moment now to enlighten you. You seem to be under the impression that I’m interested in destruction for destruction’s sake. This is simply not the case. I am simply doing what needs to be done for the sake of progress. Our goals, you see, are not that dissimilar. I too want to see this place improve. However, I have a different perspective than yours. I was the GM of ULW/ICW for quite a long time, and I did everything I could to try to push the roster to improve. I booked interesting matches. I made people defend titles. I encouraged the advancement of character and tried to get the quote-unquote talent to do everything they could to put out the most entertaining product we could put on the television screen. I truly, honestly believed that, if it was pointed out that it was in their own interest to make this company great, that the individuals that were holding the IWC back would get the message and get onboard the fucking train before it ran over them.”

“And again, I made a mistake.”

“My naiveté seems obvious now, but that is only apparent in hindsight. I realize the truth, now. This company is overrun from top to bottom with rot. It’s malignant. It cannot succeed because it is saturated with a spoiled, entitled roster full of children. Everyone thinks they deserve a title or a top-run storyline. Everyone thinks that the main-event should, simply by virtue of their being there, include them every night regardless of their win-loss record or the quality of their performances in and outside of the ring. It’s the same thing that is ruining regular society, really, this atmosphere of entitlement. It pervades every level of our culture. It makes girls think they will all be beautiful and famous and every guy deserves a top-end high paying job or a future as an athlete or a rapper, and none of them think they need to work to achieve it. No one believes they need to earn their rewards, and maybe most horrifying of all is the fact that society is changing to support this notion. People get famous by being the biggest horse’s ass on a reality program. Celebrity debutants get top billing on our news networks because we see them blowing some equally unknown asshole in nightvision on the internet. Our music is saturated with auto-tuned garbage done by people who make a good TMZ clip but don’t have clue one about how to actually make music. Do you understand what I’m saying? WE HAVE CREATED A DEVICE TO SING FOR CELEBRITITES! The world is a sick, poisoned, dying heap of shit, and it is time that someone did something to stem the tide.”

“See? I told you the old AWOL was still in there somewhere. AWOL SMASH!!! Indeed.”

“The same filth has made it into our beloved IWC. As you point out, people win world championships and then don’t bother to defend it. Teams get eliminated from the Tag-Team Gauntlet, only to be magically re-entered into the competition by people in the backstage because presumably they want them to be a part of the match finish. At the very least, the bookers at least appear to understand the mistake they’ve made, given that they’re burying Cagero in the mid-card against Psycho who, it should be noted, played just as much of a role in earning him the world title as any other competitor. I look around at it all, and in a word, it sickens me.”

“Something has to be done, and unlike you I am going to do what’s necessary for change to happen. This is not an Obama campaign promise, it’s simply fact. I realized a long time ago that all the pretty, encouraging words in the world will never change these people. I mentioned Bluhd Raige earlier, you’ll recall, and I’ll bring him up again as an example of what I’m talking about. You remember the good old days with Bluhd as well as I do. You remember the promos where he would use the aforementioned invisible cameras to show him careening through the streets at top speed in, if I remember correctly, a gun fight with someone. You remember him waking up in piles of naked women. You remember him accusing me at one point of being a pedophile because I used a character representation of his daughter in one of my promos. He was awful. Everyone hated him, and we told him over and over again the things he was doing wrong. But some people just don’t listen. The only thing that fixed him, the only thing that finally made things improve, was when you and I made his life so completely miserable that he had no choice but to walk away. He left the company, and things got better. I realized this, and realized that, in truth, this was the only way progress could be made. This was the only way, and it’s been true time and time again. I got rid of Andre Bates at the first Paranoia when I threw his nearly eight feet of arrogant prickishness through all three levels of the Weapons Lair and ended his ULW career. I did it at the beginning of my career when I broke a competitor with an equally undeserved high opinion of himself named Anarchy, and when I forced a waste of genetic material named Shawn Hall to retire from wrestling entirely to avoid any more of the hell I was turning his life into.”

“Hell, there were people who told me the same things were true when I beat you at Paranoia and put you on the shelf.”

“Sometimes the village has to be burned down to save it. It’s cruel, and it’s hard, but it’s also true. Nature knows this. When a cell is infected with a virus, the body doesn’t coddle it and provide encouragement to try and make it all better. The immune system kills the infected cell to stop the virus’s spread. Doctors don’t try to talk cancer cells into not metastasizing and killing the patient, they pump their bodies full of chemotherapy poisons and radiation to destroy the tumor cells. Only when the corruption has been expunged can the healing begin, and this is why I want this place to fail. Robin Brooks has not progressed in the entire time I’ve been here. Other than the presence or absence of face-paint, Simon Cagero promos are identical today to what they were from day one. Too Magnificent will fade from his current string of actually promoing. Psycho will continue to put on masks or take them off based on his mood, and through it all this place will continue to stagnate and fester unless someone has the will to act and force this place to change, and I am that person.”

“You’ve tried it your way before, Johnny, and it didn’t work. You criticized my therapist for just asking obtuse questions and sounding concerned, but your own tenure here is evidence of why preaching at people and telling them what they should be doing is doomed to failure from the start. Do you understand that, Johnny? Can you admit it? The Team Leader has failed, and he was going to fail from the start, because people have to want to change. You think you can inspire them by example? Maybe, but all you’ve inspired is their hatred and dismissal. The argument could be made that this place is actually WORSE because of you, if only because rather than getting better from week to week they’ve simply banded together, combining their mediocre talents into equally mediocre stables that are still unable to actually draw fans or even attempt to entertain. So I’m taking a different approach. Criticize it if you want, but if these people have failed to be inspired by your example, then I will inspire them with horror. I will make this place a nightmare for people like the Brat Pack. I will brutalize them. War is the answer, Johnny, and the only solution is a final solution. I will break them down one by one, and this place will be stronger for it. They’ll hate me, but I’ll take their hate eagerly. I thrive on it.”

“It’s tempting, then, to sell this match as perhaps a clash of opposing ideals, with the future of the company on the line. If you want to cast yourself as the white hat, I am more than happy to don the black one. And unfortunately, Johnny, you’re going to lose. Yes, I did take the diplomatic route last time, but I did so out of respect for you. Since you clearly can’t return the favor, I won’t bother. I’m better than you, always have been. You’re quoting me out of context when you said that I believed I could take the title away from you at any time, but ultimately it’s still the truth. I have the evidence. I’ve got the tape to prove it. I did it once, and if I had been so inclined I could have done it again. But I didn’t, because I enjoyed working with you again and because having the World Title has no bearing on my life. It’s got no luster to me because it’s a lie. But tonight on Riot! I am going to beat you, and I’m going to do it for the same reason you believe you’re going to beat me. I believe I’m the best competitor in this place, and frankly the opportunity to create a losing streak for you, even if it only lasts two matches, is too good to give up. When you were describing this place devolving into anarchy as a result of your losing two matches in a row, I was honestly salivating. It helps my goals, so you’re going down tonight. Hate to break it to you, but then again, we both understand that this is just a match and we’re both professionals. You’ll lose, we’ll move on, and that will be that.”

“But we’ll see if you still feel like giving me that hug once all is said and done.”

[There is a clatter as the tape recorder is clearly being picked up, and with a click the sound shuts off.]