My Beef With Dustin Kidd

The Notorious B.I.G. said it best: "What's beef? Beef is when you need two gats to go to sleep. Beef is when you roll no less than 30 deep. Beef is when I see you, guaranteed to be in I.C.U."

My beef with Dustin Kidd does not go that deep. There will be no East Coast-West Coast feud here. I will not take the roll of Tupac to Kidd's Biggie Smalls. As they say in the rap game, I'll keep this on wax.

That said, I do take issue with his article. The crux of his argument, based around Emile Durkheim's theories on the usefulness of crime, posits that there are five ways (creating norms, maintaining boundaries, developing rituals, producing innovation, and producing social change) in which to judge the validity of pop culture. The example that Kidd uses is the Harry Potter series.

After spending his time defending Harry Potter, Kidd takes a shot at reality television and pro wrestling by saying on pages 86-87 that those two "may really be the cause of some social ills in the twenty-first century."

I stated in class that I am an unabashed fan of pro wrestling. In fact, I have been for over 25 years. My first experience was when my Dad took me to Copps Coliseum to see Hulk Hogan take on Roddy Piper in 1986. From that day forth, I was hooked. I make no apologies for my fandom. I am not ashamed to admit that I watch Monday Night Raw and Friday Night Smackdown every week, or that I attended SummerSlam at the Air Canada Centre in 2004, or that I count being at the SkyDome in 2002 for WrestleMania X-8 to witness The Rock take on Hulk Hogan as one of my life's greatest moments. I am proud to be a fan of professional wrestling.

My problem does not lie with Kidd not liking pro wrestling. That is his decision to make, after all. My problem lies with him categorizing pop culture institutions into the spheres of defensible and indefensible. As we saw with Elona's post, you can find a way to defend nearly anything.

And that, in the end, is my problem. Kidd has created a checklist for us to measure our interests against. It is almost as if Kidd's need to justify his choices to someone who questioned him means he believes that we all must do the same. At the end of the day, we like what we like. So Kidd can read his copy of Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets while I to pop in my DVD copy of WrestleMania X-8 and relive the epic encounter between The Rock and Hulk Hogan, with neither of us having a checklist by our side when we do so.