Plenty of People Go to Libraries, Jerks

Yep, Cole really cares about his job Photo Credit: WWE.com

"Who even goes to the library anymore?" -- Michael Cole. That statement on RAW last night lit a powder keg on Twitter that surprised even me. I didn't know how many people were still library devotees outside of those I follow who happen to be librarians. However, their outrage was right. WWE likes to pump up the fact that they're socially conscious, even though their whole involvement in B.A. Star is hypocritical and ineffective. Part of this community service outreach involves their WrestleMania reading challenge. They love to pump up the fact that they get kids to read, and you know what, that's a noble endeavor. Everyone should be able to read, because knowledge is power.

That's why discounting libraries is so awful. That's the best place to go to get books, even nowadays. I know that the rise of e-readers and stuff you can read on the Internet burgeons large and threatens to make libraries extinct. To someone like me or Cole, yeah, going to a library might seem superfluous because we have the resources to bypass that physical building. There will always be people with the resources to bypass the old stuff who will cling to it though, but even discounting them, there is a whole group of people who still have to rely on the library, whether public or at their schools, to get reading materials.

Poor people don't have the luxury of buying e-readers or tablets. Some of them don't even have access to the Internet, which in this day and age is kinda ludicrous if you ask me, so much so that the United Nations have deemed it as a basic human right. So, in order to learn literacy, curious kids who need books to read pretty much have to go to the library. Hell, even well-to-do high school and college age kids need libraries in this day and age of paywalls and scholarly journals needing subscription fees. It's still way more cost effective for a library to have research materials to offer for free than it is for the individual families to shell out money for these increasingly expensive journals and books.

The last time I checked, super-rich people are called "the one percent" because there really ain't a whole lot of them comparatively speaking. WWE's fanbase probably cuts across all social lines, but statistically speaking, most of their fans probably don't have the disposable income to where they can totally eliminate the need for libraries. That means promoting literacy means promoting libraries. That's why Cole's comment, as much of a throwaway as it seemed at the time, was yet another example of how damaging the commentary has been for WWE in the last few years or so.

While Cole and his cohorts are better at their jobs than, say, Kevin Kelly, Mike Tenay, or Tazz, it doesn't mean they're good at their jobs. Wrestling announcers, as their first job, need to get things over, whether that means wrestlers or company initiatives. Cole oftentimes is too goddamn glib to get anything but the main talking points over. This isn't solely his fault; no company that has the good of its performers in mind would dare give an announcer like Jerry Lawler the talking point of "These guys are boring!" and start a feud over it. Yet, part of the reason why Michael McGillicutty needed a character reboot in the first place was that Lawler's job was to say how uninteresting he and David Otunga were as Tag Champs.

I can tune the announcers out, and I really have gotten good at it. That's why I wasn't as horrified at their sexist commentary towards Summer Rae when it actually happened. However, looking back at it, how the fuck am I supposed to expect WWE to give women agency when all three commentators treated Summer Rae as some combination of sexy cattle and stupid bitch? No one was the voice of dissent to say "Hey, she doesn't deserve this, she's a human being, and she even helped Chris Jericho and The Miz win their match!" That's why I can defend ACW's commentary. No matter how disgusting wrestlers in the booth like JT LaMotta or Evan Gelistico can get, Justin Bissonnette is always there to remind them how goddamn misogynistic they are. WWE has no Justin Bissonnette. Like I said, I can tune the announcers out, but I'm a different kind of wrestling viewer. Most people can't tune them out and escape what pieces of shit Michael Cole, Jerry Lawler, and JBL are.

So, if kids are programmed by the announcers to hate women because they have yucky vaginas, then what happens when they hear Cole say libraries are lameoid, but then see the WrestleMania Reading Challenge, usually just as some stupid commercial recap that no one pays attention to? Yep, that's right. You can say I'm "reading too much into" these things, but the point is WWE makes it a priority to show the world that they "care" about the community. If they really did, these things would be ingrained into their narrative as well as part of their extracurricular oeuvre. And to me, stopping bullying and promoting literacy? Those are two things that are way more important than getting a cheap pop from a transient crowd.