Grappling Geopolitics

My kids and I have had a lot of big wrestling sessions lately. It might be the early sunrise. Sunlight causes them to get up and come into our bedroom and yell. Sunlight makes plants grow, water evaporate, and children get out of bed in order to shout at their parents.

Since I am not similarly effected by sunlight, I prefer to stay in bed quietly moaning and cursing Apollo. So my kids jump on me. This is better than getting up, they aren't that big. So we wrestle. My favorite tactic is when my son has me "pinned" to get his little sister to climb on top of him. Technically she is on his side, adding her weight to his to dominate me. Then I pick her up and drop her on him. Effectively, I use my daughter, to batter my son. (There are lots of blankets so no one is really getting hurt. And the combat is purely physical - if this were psychological someone might get hurt.)

So as I drift in and out of sleep, occasionally waving my arms to brush off little combatants - my mind drifts and I start to think of my daughter as Italy in World War II. That is, the British determined they were happier to have Italy as an enemy - weighing down the Germans.

Then I wondered why I so readily associated wrestling with international affairs. Then I remembered that my introduction to wrestling came in the era of The Iron Sheikh and Nikolai Volkoff who teamed up as "The Foreign Legion." Volkoff sang the Russian National Anthem before bouts. This was the 1980s, the symbolism (as with everything else in the world of Vince McMahon) was ummm... unsubtle.

I doze again, thinking "The Influence of Professional Wrestling, American Public Opinion, & Foreign Policy" might be a good PhD thesis. It might explain a lot. It would be way more fun to research than anything else.

Then I awoke with a start, the Axis powers were attempting an assault on a peripheral position by head butting my legs.