Blame It on Kane

By J.W. McCormack

Why is the mayor of Knox County a professional wrestler? Baffler literary editor and hometown boy J.W. McCormack returns to his old stomping grounds to learn more about the vanity politician Glenn Jacobs, a.k.a. “Kane.”

LET’S NIP THIS IN THE BUD: I hate it here. The greater area of Knoxville, Tennessee, exists to curdle my hard-won equilibrium, from the hillbilly-themed minigolf courses of Gatlinburg to the disco ball folly of the dilapidated Sunsphere, that copulatory 1982 World’s Fair eyesore that mars the skyline and impugns my genitalia. Oh, how I rued returning last winter to the all-clogging revues of the outdoor stages in Market Square and the hideous full-body Big Orange jumpsuits that blight one as an enthusiast of the Vols’ varsity scrimmage. I rubbed my eyes and wondered if I’d ever really awakened from the nightmare of Baptist churches that double as city-states, reeducation centers, and mini-malls, vending every variety of Christ-branded merch whose secular equivalents can be procured among the godless camo-print bargain hunters of West Town Mall; there, I stared at a glass cabinet of miniature rubber ducks in MAGA hats, and somebody in a tie-dye hoodie called me a faggot. (“I’d like to meet your tailor,” I shouted back.) So much for Southern hospitality.

Loathing the dead-end thoroughfares of youth is a national pastime, of course, but I don’t recall seeing you on MTV News after protesting your high school’s disinvitation of the Indigo Girls once the principal belatedly discovered their brand of confrontational sapphism. (Hastily rerouted to a local pub, they were probably wondering how they’d managed to attract the goth crowd.) No street preachers crashed your senior prom to call the homecoming queen the Whore of Babylon. Nor did your protest poem “Jesus Christ Was the Fifth Beatle” run afoul of the censors when you edited the school literary magazine (not totally sorry to see that one go, actually). I have always known Tennessee to be the backwater vanguard of regressive, faith-based politics, from the Scopes Monkey Trial to Governor Bill Lee’s legal justifications for refusing interfaith, interracial, or same-sex marriages. Knoxville in particular is the test market for cheerily oppressive right-wing mayhem waged at the expense of a neutralized electorate—that and Mountain Dew as a whiskey mixer. To wit, Knoxville is the county seat of Knox County, population 500,669, a bastion of misrule that twice elected as mayor the vanity politician Glenn Jacobs, who once wrestled in vermilion spandex for the World Wrestling Federation as the hellacious Kane. (Mayor Jacobs, by the way, declined to be interviewed for this story. I don’t see what Alex Jones has that I don’t.)

It doesn’t coax a ton of hope from the area’s frail liberal bulwark that the county mayor’s only applicable job experience is his membership in the Brothers of Destruction. Hell, maybe they should run The Noid as secretary of public safety. He’s red too. American decline knows no voting bloc and is just as observable in Scarsdale, but my exile among the yanks was always bound to be impermanent anyway—where would I be without Dollywood’s bountiful bosoms and inanimatronic singing rocks? Where else could I browse the University of Tennessee’s body farm for spare parts or procure that game with the pegs they have at Cracker Barrel?—and the political preference for mediocrity that contaminates the very limestone of East Tennessee’s methified landscape is a fact willfully ignored at our national peril. With celebrity-as-political-party as the national zeitgeist, I have the sinking feeling that, to paraphrase Milton Friedman, we are all Big Orange now.

“Knoxville in particular is the test market for cheerily oppressive right-wing mayhem waged at the expense of a neutralized electorate.”

Before he inhabited the mayor’s office on Main, across from the riverside Calhoun’s steakhouse where I used to feed my Adderall to a morass of catfish, Glenn Thomas Jacobs was raised on a beetle-sized farm in a dung-sized town in northeastern Missouri. Jacobs abandoned an early dream of playing for the Chicago Bears after a knee injury kept him benched from college football, instead putting his seven-foot, 320-pound frame in the service of the scufflesome arts, wrestling for Jerry “the King” Lawler as the festive Christmas Creature (like a big mean elf that is also a luchador). Lawler’s name recognition outside the ring probably owes a lot to his mastery of the wrestlers’ solemn vow of secret fakery known as kayfabe—that is, staying in character even if you’ve got a baseball bat wreathed in barbed wire stuck to your hamstrings—in his feud with Andy Kaufman, in that most of America believed that this churlish Southern man really wanted to murder the guy from Taxi. By the early nineties, Lawler was the star attraction of the Memphis-based United States Wrestling Association (USWA), one of the few holdouts from Vince McMahon’s liquidation of regional territories under the WWF consortium.

In 1995, the circuit brought Jacobs to Knoxville, where he wrestled as Unabomb for Smokey Mountain Wrestling and “felt like a star” for the first time at the Knoxville Civic Coliseum. (That’s great and all, but this is the same show-going public that heckled R.E.M. and Dave Chappelle off the stage and even managed to piss off The Artist Formerly Known as Fucking Prince.) This is where Jacobs met his wife Crystal, relocated, and would eventually settle down with an insurance business when he wasn’t, say, acting as auxiliary bear-wrestler for a Japanese promotion. Soon after, he found himself folded into McMahon’s expansive roster of gimmicky strongos as an angry dentist called Isaac Yankem before finally scoring a decent character in Kane, who debuted to fireworks on pay-per-view in October 1997 as the archenemy of his canonical brother, the funereal cowboy Undertaker.

Continue reading “Blame It on Kane,” an essay by J.W. McCormack, on our site.

Subscribe

You received this email because you signed up for The Baffler’s newsletter mailing list, have a Baffler subscription, donated to our foundation, or contributed to the magazine. Want to change how you receive these emails? Update your preferences, or unsubscribe from this list. For questions about your subscription, contact Customer Care.

To ensure our email updates reach your inbox, please add newsletter@thebaffler.com to your email Address Book.