Why Do we fight?

Leave it to Trump to celebrate his 80th birthday with the gift of a UFC fight to Americans- as long as they have a paid subscription to Paramount+. That's not how gifts work amongst normal people. I'm a reasonably normal person and I quit the Paramount last month, but I still have access to it until something like the 17th of June. So, just checking to see if I still had it, I switched from a ballgame and watched two minutes of a birthday boy cage match. It was boring! I've seen better fights on the street. I've been in better fights myself and I'm putting on no pretenses of me being a skilled brawler. It's just that sometimes in a boy or man's life, you have to fight. Same for girls and women. Sad, but true. 

The thing about a street fight is that most of the time, there is a reason for the people to be fighting. They don't like each other. Maybe they are fighting over a girl. Or they are just drunk and stupid. Drunk and stupid is a lot of fights. People are going to make a lot of bad decisions when they are inebriated. One night a bunch of us were at a dive bar we frequented, when some locals started fussing with each other. We were in the bar/restaurant business and in our own way were acting like we owned the place. Led by our crazy boss, we ushered the miscreants outside.  One young guy was put out the back door and pounded his fists bloody on the locked door in an attempt to get back inside so he could be thrown out the front door like all his drunk buddies had been! That's what he said. Mind you, all the miscreants were outside at that point and all he had to do was walk a few yards over and he could be reunited with his fellow knuckleheads. Instead, he busted his knuckles on the door. Just a dumb choice. But he was drunk and stupid and it made sense to him at the time. 

Most people want to go through life with as little violence as possible. They avoid confrontations, which is often remarkably easy to do by simply walking away. Why let some idiot ruin your day by fighting with them when you can give them the victory by walking away? I'm talking about drunks and street people who, given their condition or circumstances, have nothing to lose. They don't fear jail any more than they do an ass-whuppin'. Jail is free food and lodging to a street person demanding respect. It's much more of an inconvenience to you, a normal person, just trying to go from Point A to Point B. They probably know that. 

Most people don't really want to fight. They want you to throw the first punch so that, whatever happens, in their addled minds, you started it. That's their story and they are going to stick to it. How dumb is that? These people are usually drunk, but like the combative street person, they are demanding respect and maybe kind of hoping that you give it to them by walking away so they can declare victory and cuss you out like they believe a champion should. That happened a lot when I was tending bar. A customer might get disgruntled and think he should call you out and settle his dispute with fists. Well, we weren't allowed to do that. It's bad business to be brawling with customers. Our job was to take care of the 99.9% of the gruntled customers who didn't think they were old west gunmen. I'd point this out to them, wave my hand at the three feet of bar between us, and say something like, "I'm not going anywhere...I'm right here". They would know where to find me if they wanted to do something stupid. And we wouldn't serve them again after that because we had to believe they weren't going to get better with more alcohol. 

So, all sorts of stupid reasons to fight, but the stupidest to me is for entertainment. Pro boxing or the now fashionable UFC cage fighting has never appealed to me. The fights are supposedly fair, between two equally skilled fighters, but what's the point? Nobody slept with somebody's wife or insulted the other guy's mother and they are presumably sober; so, where's the impetus to fight? Money. That's it? It's a job? That's Entertainment??!! Not for me. Muscled, scantily clad men (and women too) squaring off in a ring just doesn't do it for me. It seems rather gay and pornographic to me. Not that there's anything wrong with being gay, mind you, but it's pretty weird if you think about it. Why are they nearly naked? The ancient Greeks used to wrestle naked in the Olympics. I can guess that the nudity was to show that neither contestant was armed and thus, it was a fair fight, but come on now, that's weird. It's even weird this deep into the Trump regime where almost anything goes, that Trump has not Executive Ordered the fighters to perform nude. Well, it's Monday. That could change this week if the ratings come in low. 

It really could change like that. It probably won't though as evangelicals might balk at the homosexual ramifications of that spectacle- for public consumption at least. I think that what is more likely on the horizon is good, old fashioned gladiator fights, to the death. Why not? This fuckin' guy's crazy. People only exist to him to praise him. Combover Caligula wants to be entertained. When the Roman Empire was on its last legs, the powers that be came up with "Bread & Circuses" to entertain the citizenry and (I think) satiate whatever bloodlust they had for poor leadership, in the direction of watching other people kill each other for sport. I joke about how he could flood the National's stadium to reenact ancient sea battles using real bows, arrows, spears and swords, but that shit really went down in old Rome. The Stephen Millers of the day pondered how Christians might fare against hungry lions and made it so. People seemed to like that. Might they like to see liberals versus lions? I think they would. 

You might not think we're heading down that path, but I can see it on the horizon. Though Trump is wildly unpopular around the country and the world, he is in charge. In theory, the midterms should end his regime as democrats gain control of both houses and impeachments become the order of the day. Trump and his handlers know this. They know they can't win a fair election and that a loss in this one can't be countered with protests of "RIGGED!!" like the others. They can't risk fair elections, or the party is over while there are still trillions of dollars on the table. They didn't come this far to put their dreams to a vote. So, why do we fight? Well, because sometimes it's the only choice we have. Sometimes the bums give you no choice.