Seven hundred columns here, and I have managed to avoid a single word about mixed martial arts and anything to do with MMA and its apparently various organizations. But now I feel obliged to weigh in.
Now, as a kid I remember watching professional wrestling, which was not really "wrestling" in the sense that amateurs in high school and college wrestle. It was more of a show, with the lead players being people like Buddy Rogers, Bruno Sammartino, Arnold Skaaland, Bearcat Wright, and various brothers named Lewin, Bastien and, well, you get the idea. I'm old and I watched some crazy stuff as a kid.
Of course, that was what was on TV; back when you had three or four channels.
I think that sort of thing has been completely subsumed by MMA fighting, which still seems to be a bit, um, not necessarily unstaged, but people do get hurt, and there are enough people who watch it to where it will be around for a while.
I do not watch it. Ever. I don't hate it, but I don't exactly know how much of what I watch is real and what isn't, and I'm not a real fan of tattoos on women (lots of women in MMA), so it doesn't compare to regular competitive sports like baseball and whatever passed for the NFL playoffs this past weekend.
But I still have to defend it, at least a little. Because the term "mixed martial arts" is a reflection of the fact that it (assumedly; remember, I never have watched it) is derived from actual martial arts, like karate, jiu-jitsu, t'ai chi and that sort of thing.
I never did any of that, either, but I certainly have seen it practiced. I can assure you that by most people's definition of what those people who do those arts are doing, it is indeed "art." Those with actual talent at performing karate and the like are really fascinating to watch; the fact that they are a sort of self-defense form does not detract from the fact that people would (and do) spend money to watch exhibitions by black-belt types that are not really fights. It's art, all right.
That seemed to be lost on, of all people, Meryl Streep, the actress who foolishly ruined the celebration of her lifetime of achievement in the theater and in film at the Golden Globes in January. Instead of sitting appreciatively like the awardees at the Kennedy Center Honors, who don't speak, or simply saying a humble "thank you" (by the way, I didn't watch this either; I'm not a fan of theater people giving awards to other theater people in a big love-in), Miss Streep decided to make this a political event.
After working up a self-righteous storm about Donald Trump, who was not even president yet, but had even then already boosted the job opportunities in this country of a large number of union auto workers, Miss Streep apparently imagined that Mr. Trump wanted zero immigration and the deportation of all people not born here. Then she acted on views that Trump does not, in fact, hold, but facts never get in the way of the left.
“... So Hollywood is crawling with outsiders and foreigners,” she said, “and if we kick them all out you’ll have nothing to watch but football and mixed martial arts, which are not the arts.”
Of course, amidst all the howls from the MMA types, and their then being drowned out by the adulation from the Hillary types who were enraptured, and for whom Miss Streep, like Mrs. Clinton, could do no wrong, I reacted a bit differently.
How pompous, I thought, of Meryl Streep to decide what is and what is not "art". She is, after all, an actress, not a painter, not a musician, not a sculptor. She is not a dancer, and she is not a lot of other things that are "art", however defined. And she is certainly not a practitioner of martial arts.
I thought of that the next morning when I heard what she had said. I don't really care whether MMA is or is not an "art", but I really care when people take it upon themselves to decide what an art actually is, especially when they are so immodest as to decide at the moment they are being honored for what they do in one art, that another one does not deserve her regard.
This is one time we can actually ask, "Who the heck does Meryl Streep think she is?" and be morally justified.
You see, hypocrisy is rampant in Hollywood, so rampant that no one even seems to notice that the same people who clamor for "women's rights" and the end of the "over-sexualization of women" showed up for the Golden Globes specifically dressed in as little as possible, designed to expose as much of themselves as possible. They pose in those outfits before going into the venue, for God's sake.
Dear Lord, Miss Streep, you will never get it. You will never understand why we, in the part of America you only fly over between LA and New York, don't agree with your assessment of what the country needs.
You will never understand that no one asked to "kick all the foreigners out of Hollywood", not ever, not by anyone and certainly not by Donald Trump. If you do not even distinguish between green-card, legal immigrants and illegal aliens, then you don't understand why we didn't vote for your candidate.
You will never understand that if you that grossly misrepresent what someone says, and then use your incorrect statement of what the person says to make a point, well, we see past that. We recognize that if you have to use a strawman, you have already lost the argument.
You will never understand that you lost. I guess "understanding" is an art, also.
Copyright 2017 by Robert Sutton