This morning's Hartford Courant used the word intellectual in a truly disturbing manner. Apparently the WWE (which I believe stands for Watching Women Exploited) has been scrubbing websites that continue to include the more raw and "dated" footage of women being abused FOR ENTERTAINMENT PURPOSES. I guess that means that eventually this abuse FOR ENTERTAINMENT PURPOSES will have never happened. (I somehow think it was easier to erase memories when they didn't exist on video, but what the hell, it's only politics.)
But I object to the use of intellectual.
When I was a child in the 50's I watched professional wrestling. To me it was boxing with fun. I admit to becoming emotionally involved in the spectacle, and despite what people told me about its being fake, looking forward to revenge matches where the good guys would dispatch the bad guys by ramming their heads into the turnbuckle and throwing them out of the ring, only to have the bad guys rally their demonic forces and storm back to victory—the only method to insure my return to the screen the following Thursday night. It was violent and it was fun, but I never considered it intellectual. Now I know that intellectual property covers a wide spectrum of creative endeavors, and I know it's supposed to protect the creator. But if the WWE wants to sanitize its current business model (i.e., morph Ms. McMahon from a rapacious entrepreneur to a nice old lady), it's going to have to stop calling attention to itself by making farcical references to intellectual property. Seriously, we don't have to be intellectuals to know what those two words mean.
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