I had mixed emotions when I read that the delightful Matt Hughes...


...might be retiring from UFC.  He just got his ass served to him on a platter by this fine young manimal:


Thiago "Pitbull" Alves, a minute and two seconds into the second round of the main event in London yesterday.  Gotta watch those flying knees, Matt.  Alves is more agile than the Zohan. 

It may have to do with my blue collar beginnings, but I have to admit I find the spectacle of guys beating the shit out of each other behind a chain-link fence sort of exhilarating.  Reminds me of schoolyard chants of "Fight! Fight! Fight!" from the storied days of my golden youth.  To me, there was nothing sexier on a guy than a black eye and a split lip.  You just want to go up and kiss it and make it better, don't you?

Of course, there are limits...


But back in the day it seldom came to that.

A lot of people don't think about it — and we're lucky not to have to too much — but the thing about defending yourself — your person or your personal beliefs — is: it's not as easy as you might think, and there's a good chance you'd look ridiculous doing it.  Which is why we hire people — armies, attorneys — to defend us.  I mean, who wants to look ridiculous?

There are, of course, many more things you look ridiculous doing than anyone will ever tell you or you'll ever know.  Defending yourself is probably the least of them.  But the thing is, even if you can defend yourself, if you do it with a conspicuous lack of agility and grace, you'd probably be better off slipping out the back door, and disappearing for awhile.  Resurface when it's safe again, or just take up a new identity and start over.

If you must defend yourself, and I don't envy you if you do, remember that throwing a punch is as much a science as throwing a pitch.  And what's worse than "dude: you throw like a girl"?  "Dude, you hit like a girl."  Also: it's easier to get hurt than you think.  And harder than you think to hurt someone else.  These are the strange physics of fistfights.  Violence is a kind of magic. 

Of course, it is also the lyric of the mob, to abuse Baudelaire's expression — he said "sex was the lyric of the mob" — but it's violence under which even sex is subsumed.  It's violence that's the universal language of the dispossessed.  It's violence that everyone understands, while sex is still a mystery.  The reality of violence is more immediate and easier to affirm than the reality of love, that's for sure.

And violence duly fascinates those who don't live with the daily reality of it.  Boxing has always been a sport of the dispossessed.  And part of what is appealing about it is the clarity with which it views an elemental aspect of the human condition: how to beat the shit out of other humans. 

Calm down.  It's not as brutal as it once was.  Theseus, legendary King of Athens, was said to have invented a form of boxing where two fellows sat face to face and beat each other with their fists until one of them was dead.  Which is one way to avoid feeling too ridiculous.  Modern professional boxing — especially Heavyweight boxing — has gone so far in the opposite direction it might as well be pillow fighting.  When they start slow-dancing and nibbling on each other's ears it's time to leave the ring and get a room.

Enter Mixed Martial Arts (MMA): the ultimate, no holds barred, horniest spectator sport in the world.  Better than boxing.  Better, even, than the Democratic Primaries.  The guys are scrappy with ethnic names and killer abs and they're not afraid to look ridiculous.  

It starts out as more or less bare-fisted boxing...


...and ends up as sheer bloody bedlam.


Mercy. 

I'd have run.  That's why they've got that chain link fence, I guess.  Not to say I haven't been in my share of tussles in which I didn't turn tail.  I mean, what you see in the pictures above was pretty much summer vacation around the Mennonno house — just add weapons.  We couldn't really afford to go anywhere, and in those days there was no cable TV and you can only play so much Pong, so me and my brothers and some of the neighborhood punks were forced to invent our own amusements.  See, kids, that's what life was like before internet porn!

If you look at MMA as mere brutality — which you'd have to admit would be pretty superficial — you miss out on the appeal of the spectacle, and why UFC has so totally eclipsed campy sideshows like Smackdown!  What UFC, with its chain-link fences, lean-muscled fighters, and stripped down street-fighting style offers its audience is what old-school boxing used to: a stiff shot of reality. 

Boxing, which Joyce Carol Oates has called "America's tragic theater", has always been about class (and race, inasmuch as race and class are intimately entwined).  It has always been a brief on the brutality of capitalism, which finally seems to have consumed it.  Jack Newfield, who's been writing about boxing for over forty years, calls it "a ballet with blood."  But "at its frequent worst," he says, "it is fakery, burlesque, cruelty, injustice, exploitation and death."  In short: life.

MMA hearkens back to that mano-a-mano (and mano-a-footo and footo-a-heado), after a long period in which our mass spectacles of bloody man-on-man violence had become more rococo than the Court antics of Louis XV.  It was really only a matter of time before the resurgence of meat and potatoes realism.  UFC is obviously blowback from the froofy theatrics of the last several years.

Just like big budget porn got worse and worse over the course of the late eighties and nineties, the more money they poured into production and the more pumped-up the porn stars and plots got, professional boxing got too big for its britches, with multi-million dollar bouts lasting less than a minute, and WWF became a spectacle of extraordinarily elaborate white-trash pretensions.  Cartoon violence to match cartoon religion and cartoon politics.

It may just be coincidence — the convergence of many separate movements at a single moment in time — but I think it's interesting, to say the least, that the craze for reality TV came during the Bush years, when America's real "tragic theater" crossed over, as it does at intervals, to farce, but then just kept going and going and going... (I posted the question "what's beyond farce?" on Yahoo! Answers, by the way, and got: "farced.")

But just as it's true you can't go home again, the craving for reality TV is not a craving for reality itself.  Because, truth is, reality just isn't as much fun as HDTV.  Getting kneed in the crotch isn't anywhere near as funny as watching someone else get kneed in the crotch. 

It's all more or less porn.  Which brings us to the question of the day. Which is better: MMA or gay porn?  Hmmm. That's a tough one.  Let's see...


Boy, that was confusing.  Good thing we don't have to choose, eh?