Cage Fight In The Capitol

It was the perfect setting for a cage fight. The circular perimeter and dome soaring above were not enclosed with chain-link fencing coated in vinyl. The floor was not covered with a foam mat. No, this cage was made of bone crushing-marble. Padding to absorb brutal takedowns and the onslaught of hammerfists and guillotine chokes was neither necessary nor desirable.

Commensurate to the occasion, the Capitol Rotunda was far bigger than the usual format—three times broader than the thirty-foot diameter of the standard Ultimate Fighting Championship ring. The CEO of the UFC had been at a pre-fight rally the night before at another arena in the imperial capital bragging about the tale of the tape. Her man had scored a staggering victory at the ballot box a few months earlier, winning by “86 points” and bagging the vote of the nationwide audience to boot. Joining the CEO was the celebrity announcer of these Gladiator Games, eager to call the next day’s bout in his newly acquired tuxedo.

Also in the entourage of the man soon to buckle the championship belt around his suddenly slimmer, fighting-weight midsection was the last Village Person. Clad in police riot gear, he gasped his way through their fighter’s psych-up song, “YMCA.” Even though the Champ was far from being the “Young Man” who picks himself up off the ground in the song’s lyrics, he weaved and punched the air to the disco beat, limbering up for the morrow’s mayhem. He’d plastered a crooked grin across his jaw, which many had long claimed, or at least hoped, was made of glass, while others had been sure it was of American iron.

One of the VIPs slated to be present at, and perhaps even participate in, the next day’s fight had long ago claimed that “It takes a village.” This Wild West Village Show featured a Cowboy and Indian, a Leather Man, a Sailor on shore leave, and a lead-singing Cop—not the kind of villagers she’d been thinking of and not the kind she was eager to let into her gated community. But these elements were pouring in whether she liked it or not.

The next day’s stone venue was vast enough not just for a mano-a-mano clash, but for a right and proper team grudge match, a partisan rumpus. A year earlier, the Rotunda had hosted a live-telecast donnybrook that pitted a Spartan band of police (real ones) against a rabid throng of marauders led by a fabulously unhinged barbarian—Bison Man, in his Germanic tribal skins and horned headgear, wielding a bullhorn and waving a flag on a pole that was a gleaming spear.

For the follow-up of January 2025, cries of agony and the sound of dislocating joints and breaking teeth would again echo off the resonant dome above.

The architecture of this two-hundred-year-old indoor arena was based directly on that of Rome’s Pantheon, erected two millennia earlier during the reign of Hadrian, who, not coincidentally, also had a thing for border walls.

When the Scottish surgeon-turned-novelist Tobias Smollett arrived at that required stop on the Grand Tour for the first and only time in 1765, he was, as so often on his continental travels, underwhelmed: “I was much disappointed at the sight of the Pantheon, which, after all that has been said of it, looks like a huge cockpit.” Smollett’s was a prescient description of the opening bout on Monday’s fight card. This was to be a cockfight between two aged roosters. They had clucked and crowed back in June in a trench war of words during which they’d each boasted about the length of their drives and challenged each other to a golf match. Now they could follow words with deeds, opening the brutal festivities with a wheeze and a bang, lurching right into a clinch, then toppling over for some slo-mo ground-and-pound.

The Capitol Cage was the ideal setting to welcome a self-styled Caesar and a still-more ancient Consul soon heading off to claim his spoils in Delaware after this, his last bout. He must remain mindful (if he could remember to be) to tell the cameras on his way to the locker room after a victory certain only to him that he was “going to Disneyland!” Or was it Disney World? Or … what’s the name of that diner I love to eat at in Dover? Or is it in DC? That’s it: “I’m going to Scranton!”

In a more lucid moment, Scrappin’ Scranton Joe had thundered thusly during his own pre-fight hype (in another richly remunerated plug, this one for Gladiator II): “Donnybrook Don, I knew Emperor Marcus Aurelius. You’re no Marcus Aurelius.” Even Joltin’ Joe’s smack-talk had been plagiarized, though he’d been inadvertently honest about his age which was lied about in the fight program: he really was so old that he had known the second-century author of the Meditations, a Stoic also credited with inventing the Peruvian Necktie, defined in the UFC glossary as “a choke hold in which a fighter uses arms and legs, as well as the opponent’s own arm and positioning, to apply pressure to the neck.”

Respectively even redder and paler in their faces than usual after grappling on the ground for a few minutes, these doddering fighters could tag-team tap in their somewhat younger fellow fighters: ex-champs, Bashing Bill and Gorgeous George, or the more youthful contenders, Mark the Murderer and Elon the Electric Eel also nearby. These last two had already hyped their own mega cage fight in the Roman Colosseum, which, to the enduring disappointment of the global masses, had never happened.

With these individual duels raging on, all would stand as one and then lock horns. Only the cameramen wouldn’t enter the fray; at least, they hoped not.

The call to battle came from uniformed legionnaires blowing through long, straight ersatz-Roman trumpets, the blood-curdling strains of their Imperial fanfare amplified and elongated by the rotunda’s cavernous acoustic. I repeat: Give the People what they want!

But the battle never came. Instead, a church service broke out.

The Presidents’ Own Marine Corps Band played light military marches distractingly inoffensive enough to pacify. These jaunty tunes conjured the unbroken succession of American victories that all can take pride in. The armed services choir was vague and calming, the righteous fury of the Battle Hymn of the Republic diluted by their tepid arrangement.

Trump team crooner Chris Macchio tried to inject some heroic grandeur into the ludicrous national anthem. If Macchio is to remain “America’s Tenor,” his presidential patron is going to have to immediately impose 10,000% tariffs on all operatic klaxons, bel canto belt sanders, and refurbished auto-tune Carusos.

Between the numbers of the band’s light parade-ground hit parade and these patriotic anthems, an unseen piano vamped on a medley of Victorian hymns like “For the Beauty for the Earth.” Those congregants on the losing side let their gazes drift towards the dome, painted portal of trumpet-playing angels ushering thoughts still farther up to heaven.

The Champ had just won in a walkover and now it was his time to bluster through a rambling victory sermon of acid boasts and body-blow insults. Unbloodied and sweat-free, the cage fighter turned Prophet of the Angry God, excoriating the Democratic sinner just over his left shoulder, a vacant smile pasted across the face of his defeat.

But what should not be forgotten is that many people sitting piously in church hate each other, having fallen out over reasons as diverse as the morning’s flower arrangements, the furnishing committee’s choice of color for the pew cushions, or that scratch inflicted on the Senior Warden’s Mercedes in the church parking lot and never admitted by the perp.

Instead of fisticuffs, the Capitol Cage seethed with impotent rage. Some sought solace in singing along in their heads as the piano played on:

Notwithstanding the Champ’s fighting words, the peaceful transfer of power was by now well underway.

Across the country and the globe, Jilted Joe’s fans had long since tuned out, bored and beleaguered. Their erstwhile hero and his grin stayed the course.

When a string of monotheistic benedictions threatened to conclude the ritual without a tussle, though much violence was implied by these prayers, the nonplussed Plebes and Plutocrats were still waiting for what they’d been promised: Instead of Christians being fed to the lions, blue donkeys and their fallen riders would be fed to the Christians.

(David Yearsley is a long-time contributor to CounterPunch and the Anderson Valley Advertiser. His latest recording is Handel’s Organ Banquet. He can be reached at dgyearsley@gmail.com.)