The idea of Elon (the great white hope) Musk and Mark (frat boy) Zuckerberg getting down and dirty in a cage with some glorious cut-and-thrust grappling, well-aimed elbow strikes to the nose or even a surreptitious knee to the nuts is inspiring. I'd pay good money to see that.
I suppose that was what Elon imagined when he pitched it to Marky Mark on his beleaguered social media site by way of an ancient artefact called a tweet. He clearly needs income — cash flow; a steady source of greenbacks — and this is an idea that's worth something.
Let’s face it, he's thrown everything else at Twitter — all those old corporate raider moves: decimating the staff, wiping out the expensive real estate, not paying pesky suppliers and, including but not limited to, the proverbial and actual kitchen sink. But he's still coming up with few actual advertising dollars, which is what this sh*t show is ostensibly about.
Twitter is the high temple of trash talk. The bastion of the sort of elevated banter you get before a fight in the “mine’s bigger than yours” realm of so-called free speech.
How do you even begin to define harm? And where precisely that harm might be landing when you're striking your opponent with your bare knuckles or twisting their arm into a spectacular hold that could result in multiple fractures.
Boxing has a few rules — no strikes to the back of the head, nothing below the belt — but MMA is practically a no-holds-barred zone. Twitter is like that — the home of the baying populace massed around the ring in a feeding frenzy, hungry for victims, shouting for blood and, if possible, a side order of head on a spear. There are no illusions of civility — it's a brutal place, dedicated to our least happy impulses. And that's where Mark’s frat boy and Elon's psyches have chosen to play.
It's ornery stuff and, sadly, predictable. Imagine what they could do if they had a playground like Ukraine on which to inflict a brutal masculinity-bolstering one-upmanship, like that other billionaire, the bare-chested, diminutive dictator Putin. That little chap has got a lot to prove this week after his sudden-onset coup. So as one does, he's bombing civilians to “show dem” and threatening wholesale nuclear destruction. I can’t even!
But back to the Colosseum, the one in Rome (the site Elon has proposed for the showdown).
Some silly British personal trainer thought he would carve his initials into the ancient stones last week in a bid for proximate immortality. The trainer now faces a couple of years in a Roman jail.
Commodus didn't even meet a dishonourable demise in unequal combat in the ring, but was killed by Narcissus, in his bath.
This posturing in the markets is tiresome. Is anyone really going to send a “thread”? Who knows, maybe they will now their “Tweets” are capped.
The last emperor to lose his threads in the name of martial splendour as a gladiator on this blood-soaked ground was Commodus, the son of Marcus Aurelius the Stoic. But there was no such long-term philosophical luck with Commodus. He was a problematic megalomaniac (the film, Gladiator, starring Russell Crowe wasn't wrong about that). Commodus didn't even meet a dishonourable demise in unequal combat in the ring (the film embellished that part), but was killed by Narcissus, his gladiatorial nemesis, in his bath.
I'm not wishing that on either of these latter-day emperors. No, instead they should get into a boxing ring. And I’m with Muhammad Ali on the trash talk. Just as he promised to do when he defeated Sonny Liston, after the fight I’m gonna build myself a pretty home and use them as a bearskin rug.
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