The World Has Become a Slightly Better Place

Because Terry Bollea has died at the age of 81.

He is probably better known by his stage name, Hulk Hogan.

A face (hero) inside the ring, and a heel outside of the ring, who colluded with literal vampire Peter Thiel to destroy Gawker, narked on unionization efforts in pro wrestling to Vince McMahon, and was caught spewing racist rants on video

………

Reports of Bollea's poor health were first circulated by the radio personality Bubba the Love Sponge Clem. Followers of Bollea's post-wrestling career will recall that Clem and Bollea were once good friends and sometimes appeared together on Clem's Tampa-area radio show. In 2012, the two made headlines when Gawker reported that Clem had recorded a clandestine video of his wife, Heather, having sex with Bollea. A separate recording that became public years later captured Bollea making vile and racist remarks while in conversation with Heather.

Can I say here that any scandal involving, "Bubba the Love Sponge Clem," is going to appeal to me

Gawker published short edited clips from the video, and Bollea, backed financially by vampiric futurist freak Peter Thiel, sued Gawker's parent company for $100 million. A hometown Florida jury ruled in Bollea's favor. The fallout of this lawsuit led inexorably to the destruction of Gawker Media, the eventual rise of Jim Spanfeller as a cut-rate villain of the final chapter of the blog era, and, well, the establishment of this very website.

Bollea eventually seated himself, unsurprisingly, as a champion of Donald Trump's MAGA movement. He also managed the neat trick of retaining enough general public goodwill from his early wrestling days that it has rarely been considered particularly controversial or damaging to one's reputation to express ongoing affection for his Hulk Hogan character, despite all that has been learned about the performer. That is not to say that his shtick worked on everyone: At his final WWE appearance, at a Monday Night Raw event back in January, Bollea, in his Hogan character, was booed relentlessly by a Los Angeles crowd. But in a sign of his cultural resilience, and the broad mainstream acceptance of ideas and behaviors that a saner society might otherwise consider grounds for literal exile, he was then invited onto ESPN's most popular show to talk about the experience with the network's most prominent media personality.

Fundamentally, if Hulk Hogan had never existed, someone else would have been the face, and maybe they wouldn't have been Thiel's stooge and wouldn't have betrayed unionization efforts.