The Son of Jan Brewer

The latest HARPER'S has an interesting article on professional wrestling in Mexico. I suppose that few of us follow the carefully staged morality plays of professional wrestling today, but I did for a while back when television was new. The dramas were mostly between a wrestler who was an outrageous cheating villainous person of doubtful culture and race and a wrestler who was noble and kindly. The one with with most box office appeal would win. 

Of course, 60 years ago our notion of a villain was backward. Gorgeous George was a bad guy because he had long golden ringlets and pranced around the ring; today we'd be cheering for him. Baron Leone was bad because he was Italian, I guess. Anyway, you can probably guess who gets to be the villain (a good living) in Mexico. He's a large American who has taken the stage name R. J. Brewer. He claims falsely to be from Phoenix, Arizona. He also claims to be the son of Governor Jan Brewer. His specialty is inciting paying crowds of Latinos (who understand he's fake) into screams of rage by saying, "I never had to scale a fence to get what I wanted" and so forth. Then he starts to wrestle, cheating in every way possible, hitting the referee with a chair, and on the most glorious days, at the last minute his darker skinned opponent rises up and smites him to the canvas! (I once thought I understood ethnic stereotyping.)