Back when I was in high school, wrestling was sort of a guilty pleasure. It ran on NY's Channel 9 on Saturdays after midnight, squeezed in between sleazy car commercials and grade-Z horror movies. Sometimes I'd stagger in from a bout of drinking with my cronies and plop down on the couch in front of the TV, staring through glazed eyes at the cartoonishly-brutal antics of Mighty Igor or Bulldog Brower or Captain Lou Albano (he tied his beard into knots with rubber-bands) or tag-team midgets. It was cheesy, sordid, juvenile, vulgar, and transparently phony, but in spite of all that, or maybe because of it, I got a kick out of all the nonsense. At the time, I had no real idea of who McMahon was, but I often enjoyed him most of all. He'd sometimes do interviews with the most repugnant of the wrestlers, and would convey his disgust in the manner of a hammy silent-film actor----eyes bulging in escalating alarm, mouth twisted in spinsterish distaste, leaning back from the wrestler he was interviewing as if some malignant parasite might jump off the wrestler's sweaty body onto his own freshly-pressed suit. I remember one wrestler getting bashed over the head with a chair and Vince, sounding like Herbert Morrison giving his eye-witness account of the Hindenburg disaster, reporting, "Folks, that's a solid oak chair! THAT'S SOLID OAK!!!" Or when George "the Animal" Steele, who resembled Tor Johnson on a really bad acid trip (I think he ended up actually playing Tor Johnson in the Ed Wood movie), stumbled into the ring and began chewing on the ropes, Vince would invariably intone, "Look at that green tongue! THAT'S A GREEN TONGUE!!" Some die-hard hayseed fans might quibble that he compromised the "sport" of wrestling by introducing the Hollywood-style hype and the Las-Vegas style glitz (and I'm sure Cindy Lauper was his idea too); in short, by emphasizing and capitalizing upon its more sensationally idiotic aspects---but, from the perspective of pure capitalism, it was an act of genius. Certainly, it made people like himself (and a few others like Hulk Hogan, I guess, or Steve Austin) very, very rich. Of course, I lost any minimal affection I might have once had for TV wrestling a long, long time ago, and only the same kind of delusional Kool-Aid drinker who still supports Dubya could have ever believed it wasn't totally bogus from the start, beginning back in the early days of Gorgeous George and continuing right up to the present ones where McMahon gets his dome shaved by Donald "Media Prostitute" Trump. But, say what you will about McMahon...he continues to keep this tawdry, dismal clown act--high-tech entertainment for the low-brows--going year after endless year, and continues raking in the money hand over fist. In America, I guess that's what constitutes a success story and what makes McMahon a hero of some sort.

This man has no shame.

Mcmahon will do just about anything to make a buck, even if it means totally humiliating himself. Granted, the Vince McMahon we see on TV is obviously a character that he's playing, but in some ways it makes him more outrageous. He has plenty of money, and he could easily just sit back and stay out of the public eye, but he just craves attention. He got beat up by Stone Cold repeatedly in the 90s. Then he had this whole "greater power" storyline where the Undertaker basically worshipped him as if he was Satan (I'm not making this up, but I wonder who the story writer was who did.) And then recently, he got his head shaved by Donald Trump, and now he's made himself the ECW Champion.

Nahhh, its just a schtick. This guy's just a businessman in an unusual business.