Knuckling Under
A Tuesday Twenty Pictures detour through American bloodsport.
The presidential birthday spectacle on the White House Lawn introduced many folks not too familiar with bloodsport to boxing’s anything-goes cousin, “mixed martial arts,” or MMA. Not long ago, via one of the no less than than four channels dedicated to full-time fight content that are bundled with my Samsung TV, I learned about a version yet more surreal and brutal than that: the Bare Knuckles Fighting Championship. Which is just what it sounds like: per its website, “the first promotion in the U.S. since 1889 to hold legal and regulated bare knuckle events…. The patented BKFC ‘Squared Circle’ contains scratch lines, based on the Broughton Rules which governed bare knuckle fighting in the 19th century, and which requires fighters to ‘Toe the Line’: start every round face to face, and just inches apart.”
One night at the cabin, engrossed in the strange spectacle (there may have been a formerly illegal substance involved), I pulled out my cellphone camera to preserve the moment for posterity. As already hyper-stylized movements on the screen got pixelated through its electronic aperture, a strange visual dreamscape emerged that, to me at least, conveyed a visual texture that somehow said something about life in the Trumpocene. What is that thing? Well, I once stumbled about a memorable little essay (which I now can’t find) about how many stars of the Trumpoverse—people like Matt Gaetz, Marjory Taylor Green, and, before that, Roger Stone—in their hyperbolic presentation of gendered archetypes of power and sexuality (the bronzed skin, the lantern jaws, the puffed-out lip of “mar-a-Lago face”), presented themselves in ways to make themselves pop out from electronic screens as if they were comic book characters come to life.
These guys, too.
Those guys; and these girls, too. For, according to BFKC, their debut in 2018 was also the first time women fought in organized professional bouts with only a bare bit of tape wrapped around their hands—
