Making sense of a UFC fight at the White House
Nothing should really surprise us anymore from this administration. On top of its absolutely atrocious policies and attacks on civil liberties, it is morphing into an increasingly noisy and unhinged theater of the absurd. The military puts on a puny parade for the president’s birthday, the president roves around on the White House roof, the military is deployed in the streets of DC.
At some point you wonder whether you’re watching CNN or The Onion News.
And yet I still managed to have my eyebrows shoot up when I heard today’s headline: UFC to host first-ever fight event at the White House. Yes, now that you mention it, that’s what’s been missing in our executive branch: fighters in a cage, kicking each other’s kidneys and knees.
The fight is scheduled for July 4, 2026, as a celebration of the 250-year anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence. If you can puzzle out why an MMA fight is a fitting event for that occasion, then honestly I wish you were the one writing this blog post. Because I titled this “Making sense of…” but it’s not making sense.
I’ll try my best.
What would a fitting celebration be for 250 years of this democracy? This experiment in presidents-not-kings, justice for all, and free elections? In a more perfect union, perhaps some extravagant acts of democracy:
Passing legislation to work against discriminatory obstacles to voting
Forming an independent commission to end the partisan gerrymandering that prevents fair representation
Rebalancing our “balance of powers” by limiting presidential pardon power and increasing congressional subpoena power
That would be a cool 250th birthday for the US. But oops! The current administration and its party oppose every one of these initiatives. They actively enable voter suppression, are attempting the largest single gerrymander in history, and constantly seek to expand presidential powers. They are too deeply committed to undemocratic and anti-democratic causes to actually celebrate (let alone do) democracy.
So we get punching and kicking in a cage.
The distraction—the spectacle—is the point. On one level, we could chalk this up to The Great Epstein File Distraction. But even without the Epstein obsession, this is par for the course for US entertainment-as-politics. Loud noises, expensive toys, and absurd sound bites. Don’t look over here at the budget bill that slashes Medicaid so that billionaires can pay even less in taxes.
I’m reminded, somehow, of endtime theology. One hundred years ago, at the height of the church split between fundamentalists and Social Gospel folks, there were very different views about how God’s future utopia would eventually be realized. For the fundamentalists, it could only come by a total act of God. Humans had no role to play in that realization but to wait. Eventually the rapture, or whatever, would happen—and in the apocalypse would come the kingdom. For the progressive side, the process was seen as much more collaborative. We partner with God and each other to bring about the Beloved Community. There is even a thought in some theologies that the kingdom ain’t happening without us. God is not planning to swoop in and deliver bliss, but only inviting us into a process of making things better.
However shocked I may still be by some of our government’s theatrics, I can confidently say this: this administration is not planning to swoop in and make the US better. But I think that now, as ever, God’s invitation stands. We can partner with each other and (by some mystery) with the Divine to help create a better world.
Though the US government recently decided that churches can now endorse political candidates, I would nonetheless like to clarify that the views above are solely my own and do not necessarily reflect Harbor’s in part or in whole.
–Jon
