You remember the guy ... way back in 1983, he lost the WWF heavyweight title to none other than Hulk Hogan. Hulk proved his metal by extricating himself from The Sheik's power move - "the camel clutch" or some such move it had been dubbed, I'm sure it had a more sinister name but I can't recall as of this writing - a move that NO MAN, WOMAN OR CHILD had been able to get out of previously.
Once The Iron Sheik got his move on, you knew it was over. (Everyone's mind's permanently etched with U.S. men and women bound and blindfolded.) But some how, some way, The Hulkster - long before all his little Hulkamaniacs got busy with their ripped yellow t-shirts and started screaming at one another on playgrounds about their "22-inch pythons" - yes, The Hulkster endured and made his way out of the camel clutch and prevailed to the glee of all the patriotic Americans in the Georgia night. Catharsis reigned.
The Iron Sheik, you remember, was from Tehran, Iran and was out their clutching and grappling with the good, red-blooded Americans in the ring, night in and night out, letting the angst and revenge ebb and flow from our Patriotic Cold War hearts.
After the Sheiks humiliating loss to Hulk Hogan, more folks in the WWF were able to follow the Hulkster's lead and get out of, and unbelievably, reverse the camel clutch. The Sheik was forced to make his new living tag-teaming with Nikita Kruschov and later, Nikolai Volkov.
During Perestroika in the Soviet Union, the characters Volkov and Kruschov were made to team up with folks like the Nature Boy Rick Flair (of WCW fame - the wrestlers were moving fairly freely back and forth between leagues and the fierce rivalry for who would dominate the wrestling empire in the 90s was beginning to unfold), because, you know, the Russian's are our buddies (large nation of new consumers - don't want to piss them off).
Much later, in or around 1989 The Iron Sheik, while still representing the veiled evil lurking in Tehran (even with the death of the Ayatollah Komeni), was caught in the mirror-world called REAL LIFE snorting coke in a limo with Hacksaw Jim Dugan (The Sheik's new American enemy in the ring - a little lower on the scale of combatants than Hulk Hogan at the time).
Fast forward to 1997 when Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Perle, Cheney, and Co. form the Policy for a New American Century. They new they had a plan for America - to protect our interests (corporate interests) and to dominate the globe via control of the flow of the one resource that literally greases the industrial complex we know the western world to be today - oil.
They had the plan, and they knew the American people to be just bright enough to follow the comings and goings of the second-level representation wrestlers in all their guises and leagues. If anyone could pull it off, it was that rich bunch of white guys, right? I mean, come on, throw Dr. Conaleeza Rice's (Aunt Jemima) smiling face and General Colin Powell (Uncle Ben) on the cover and you gots it goin' on ... Corporate America, CNN, The Bomb and the Poster Children for Dr. King's "I have a dream" all rolled into one. How can "we" lose?
This time, it would be on with the all the Iron Sheiks of the world. We could put the world's remaining oil supplies in the hands of freedom (to drive a larger SUV to my even larger house on the ever-expanding suburban shores) for all time.
We know the Sheiks get TV. Our TV. They know who always wins. They also know our history. So when George W. Bush started talking, after the crime against humanity of 9/11, of greater crimes possibly to come - of all those Iron Sheiks in caves and in our cities and our airplanes and sewers, we all bought in - and thought that all the Sheiks must have bought in too.
We know the story. We understand. There has to be someone - real or fabricated - for our Red Blooded Hulkster to fight - always. Or we don't sell enough tickets to sell out the Superdome for Wrestlemania Bazillion and Four.
George Bush sprinkles the stolen words of Christ in his speeches and "his people" are mobilized. We know. We understand our duty. It's in our culture. It's in our blood. Rise up against the infidels, against the Iron Sheiks - no matter if we made them who they are.
But this can't be real because everybody knows that The Iron Sheik was a Chicano guy from L.A. anyway. Or was he?
So YOU tell ME: "Is it time to get down on your M*F*n' knees?"
While you make pretty speeches,
I'm being cut to shreds.
You feed me to the lions,
a delicate balance
When this just feels like spinning plates.
I'm living in cloud cuckoo land.
And this just feels like spinning plates
Our bodies floating down the muddy river.
You ready to sit around your job, at your home, at your parks and wonder where the next dirty bomb is going to go off? (Not quite strong enough to kill massive amounts of American men, women and children - but enough to kill a few dozen in the blast radius and injure hundreds more; not to mention make many extremely ill from the radiation poisoning and the litany of cancers it causes in the unsuspecting bodies.)
Then there is The Fear, beamed directly to you 24 hours a day by our smiling news media.
Saddam's gone, but the latest tapes from Osama say that the occupation of Saudi Arabia and Iraq and Palestine must stop or another bomb will be unleashed in a U.S. city. He gives us the time, but not the place. One bomb has already gone off in Anaheim - little bodies and Mickey ears everywhere; makes for riveting television. "Where are the Peace Marchers now?" Rush Limbaugh asks on his nationwide broadcast.
Will you watch the news, will you go to a cabin with your friends and drink wine in the San Juans, or will you stay home, going about your business? It's a Wednesday night for Christ's sake. You have to work in the morning.
So what if it's Code Red all the time now. You have customers to help and deals to make.
Insurance seems meaningless and the markets are down. Business is off from last year, but the promise of summer has the sales staff excited.
