Would it surprise you if WWE’s Vince McMahon moderated the general election debates? Given the tone of this year’s highly unusual contest, it would sort of make sense to get all the key combatants into the ring where they could go after each other in a highly-scripted fight. Why? Because politics has become like professional wrestling. As Jeremy Gordon explains in the NYT Magazine, pretty much everything has become big time wrestling: “With each passing year, more and more facets of popular culture become something like wrestling: a stage-managed ‘reality’ in which scripted stories bleed freely into real events, with the blurry line between truth and untruth seeming to heighten, not lessen, the audience’s addiction to the melodrama.” The one key difference is that in pro wrestling, the outcome is predetermined, while in American politics, we like to hold on to the possibility of being surprised on the downside.

+ Does the analogy seem like too much of a stretch? Then I offer for your consideration this piece of video evidence.