Vincent Kennedy McMahon Tears The Wings From An Angel

Weep, gentle reader, for Lillian Garcia. In the past seven years, we have witnessed her tragic metamorphosis from a golden-voiced emotional cypher and lackluster ring announcer to a fumbling and awkward sexpot. And lackluster ring announcer. Lillian once provided wrestling viewers an oasis of corpselike dignity in our roiling sea of barbarism, seeming profoundly disconnected from the sport that paid her wage. This disconnect provided comfort to the viewer. We, like Lillian, were apart from wrestling, even as we participated in it. Now that Lillian is sucking face with Viscera and reacting with mute horror (well, mute disinterest) to Charlie Haas's lewd comments, we find ourselves hurled headfirst into the moral vacuum that is the Sports Entertainment Era. We can no longer console ourselves with sidelong glances at Lillian. Like us, she has gazed too long at the abyss.

Ms. Garcia's awkwardness has always been her most attractive quality (a lucky break, considering that she is, by most estimates, freakishly awkward). In the early years of her career she seemed lost in the world of wrestling, smiling wanly and furrowing her brow as she belted the National Anthem at arenas full of depraved halfwits. Even her initial steps toward Diva status were endearingly tentative, almost as though she were blissfully unaware of how underclothed she was. She seemed sublime, aloof, and retarded.

Then came Viscera.

Oh, to be sure, there had been cracks in Lillian's poise before. The Howard Finkle match. The Christy Hemme kiss. But the Viscera Romance Storyline made Lillian a direct participant, where before she had seemed an astonished (well, dimly perturbed) victim. If this storyline is to function, we must imagine Lillian Garcia engaging in sexual relations with BOTH Viscera and Charlie Haas. This, dear reader, I am manifestly unwilling to do. Such imaginings can only taint everyone involved.

Yes, Lillian retains the calm, distant demeanor of a Percocet Addict. Yes, she still serenades Our Nation's Troops in a voice that makes the angels weep. And yes, she still maintains the mannish, horsefaced beauty that made her a true WWE diva. More's the pity, because Vince McMahon has squandered a rare opportunity. Where Lillian once served as an incarnation of the viewer's own alienation, McMahon is now working to market her as a generic sex object, a role for which she is frankly ill-suited (no offence, horseface). The wrestling viewers, robbed of their existential anchor, are cast adrift in an ocean of metafictional nausea.

Oh, and Viscera's a homo.