The Rising and Setting Sun (Second RP)

[Headmaster Bernard Core]

January 30, 2016- Independence Hall, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

The camera fades in on a large room. The walls are gray from top to bottom. A beautiful glass chandelier hangs from the ceiling with candles in it. Desks are spread out across the room covered in green tablecloths. One big desk sits in the front of the room with a fireplace on either side of it. All of the chairs look the same except for the one behind the big desk. It’s a mahogany chair with a sun at the top of it. Candles, books, papers, and feather pens are displayed on each desk.

Bernard Core and Dean Wolf walk into view.

Bernard Core: Do you recognize this room? If you’re a fan of the WCF, then you probably don’t. You probably don’t get out of the house much at all. You probably spend most of your time doing exactly what you’re doing right now: sitting on your computer, watching videos of accomplished people like me doing great things while you waste your time and your life; but while other videos on the WCF website feature brain dead ogres like Mikey eXtreme giving incomprehensible interviews to hack broadcast journalists like Hank Brown, I have uploaded a video that’s actually educational. You’re actually going to learn something today. There’s no need to thank me. I do this as a service to you, which is fitting because the men that made this room famous were doing a service for you as well.

This room is inside Independence Hall. This room is where two of our founding documents were crafted, debated, and signed, the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. The former document gave us…wait a minute, a bet you can figure this out. Think about it. It’s called the Declaration of INDEPENDENCE.

He stares at the camera like a teacher trying to encourage a student to think of the right answer.

Bernard Core: INDEPENDENCE….come on, I know you can do it. INDEPENDENCE….no, still can’t figure it out? It’s okay, just put your head down and take a rest. For those of you whose brains don’t hurt yet, the Declaration of Independence gave us FREEDOM.

Dean Wolf mockingly puts his hand on his head.

Dean Wolf: Oh, freedom, right!

Bernard Core: I know, that was a real hard one. Yes, that eloquently written document stated plainly and clearly the reasons why we considered ourselves no longer a part of the British Empire.

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.”

He stops and thinks a second about that line.

Bernard Core: Well, I don’t know about that. Thomas Jefferson didn’t see the people that inhabit America today. If there’s one thing I’ve learned going from city to city every week, it’s that all men, women, and children are NOT created equal. In fact, the inequality between people and their intellect and abilities is astounding. It makes you wonder how a country can produce someone like me, whose intellect and ability are without question, and produce someone like…everybody else, including Mikey eXtreme. Intellect? Mikey probably couldn’t even spell “intellect.” Ability? He hardly has any. I think that line about all men being created equal was a nice sentiment by Jefferson- a slaveholder, mind you- but it just simply doesn’t ring true.

Regardless, it’s still a masterpiece of political writing. Never had a colony formally accused its sovereign king of being an outright tyrant. They accused him of unfair taxation, the quartering of soldiers into their private homes, overseeing the slaughter of his trans-Atlantic subjects.

This was high treason by Jefferson and his colleagues in the Continental Congress, but it had to be said and it still needs to be said now. We may no longer be ruled by a king, but tyranny still rears its ugly head in our everyday lives. It’s the tyranny of stupidity. The right for Americans to progress is suppressed on a daily basis by television, video games, apps, unruly children, complicit parents, and indolent teachers and their obstructionist unions.

Core and Wolf walk through the barricade that normally separates tourists from the rest of the room. He points to a desk all the way to the left of the room.

Bernard Core: You see that desk right there? That’s the desk of John Adams, who sat in this room and defended the need for the colonies to declare their independence from Great Britain. He was the one hollering and screaming every day saying “The king is a tyrant! The king is a tyrant!” People were tired of hearing him say the same thing day after day after day. They believed he was obnoxious. He didn’t care. He had a cause that he was fighting for and he wouldn’t stop until that cause succeeded.

I have tried to follow his example when I travel to all of the cities that the WCF visits. The difference is that the men that John Adams spoke to in this room every day were smart men, accomplished men, men who knew the value of listening to someone else’s opinion, even when it got tiring.

It’s 2016 now. You’re not allowed to say what’s on your mind and criticize people anymore. People think that when I come down to the ring every week and I speak the truth about their lives and their states, I’m just being mean. Nothing could be further from the truth! I’m simply offering constructive criticism so that those people can improve their lives; but alas, everybody needs to feel good about themselves. There’s no longer guilt for living a life without virtue or goals. There’s no longer any urgency to be the best you can be anymore. The truth has to be masked and everything has to be inoffensive. If John Adams had tried to argue for independence today, he’d be shouted down, the Twitter universe would ostracize him, and we’d all still be considered Britons. The longer everyone blocks their faults from their own minds, the more and more this country sinks in the quicksand of humanity.

Who is the leader of this tyranny of stupidity, this dictatorship of close mindedness?

Mikey eXtreme, of course! What was that thing he said about math, Dean Wolf?

Dean Wolf pulls his iPhone out of his pocket.

Dean Wolf: “I make this country a better place, I give it hope. I give it something to look up to. You give it a stupid way to do math. Math already sucks, and you want to make it worse. I will destroy you just as you have destroyed math.”

Bernard Core: He hates math, which has been used in countless ways to improve humanity, and hates standards that were designed to help children use math in order to think more critically. He sounds like someone who is open to new ideas, right?

This is the type of person that wants to rule over America! Someone who doesn’t appreciate that maybe there is a better way to do something. It’s this mindset, that new ideas and methods are bad, that has permeated our culture, and he is its main perpetrator. He calls his philosophy The Darkness for a reason. He wants to keep Americans in the dark. He doesn’t want Americans to learn and advance. He wants them to be stationary and sedentary. He wants to bring the Dark Ages to America, whereas I’m trying to bring back the Renaissance.

I’m proclaiming a declaration of independence right now! I hold this truth to be self-evident that Mikey eXtreme is destroying America and that the people have been endowed by him with certain handicaps, that among these are ignorance, apathy, and the pursuit of misery.

And just like Jefferson wrote that the men sitting in this room pledged the lives, fortunes, and sacred honor to achieve liberty, I’m making the same pledge to all of you. I pledge MY life, I pledge MY fortune, and I pledge MY sacred honor to beat Mikey eXtreme and ridding the country of his cancer!

He walks over to the center of the room.

Bernard Core: Eleven years after the delegates of the Second Continental Congress took the deep plunge and affixed their names to the Declaration of Independence, another set of men met in this room, this time in secret, to write a new constitution. Our first attempt at government, the Articles of Confederation, didn’t work. It’s main problem was that it gave the states more power than the Congress. Congress was essentially neutered of its power. It couldn’t tax, couldn’t raise an army, couldn’t make an amendment without unanimous consent by all thirteen states, and couldn’t regulate trade. The country was in a tailspin and we were barely off the ground.

It sounds a lot like the problem of our children today. Just like the states had more power than the Congress, today’s children have more power than the adults. If you walk into a school today, you’ll see children mouthing off to teachers, telling them what they will and won’t do. Teachers give directives and students just blow them off like they heard nothing. Try getting them to do any work or just simply open up their notebooks. They resist. If teachers try to get the parents to support them in getting their children to be better students, the parents back the children up, as if the teacher is doing something wrong by telling, nay, asking the student to complete their assignments and not disrupt the classroom.

The solutions I hear for this problem are comical. “We need more money for education.” “We need to fix the inequalities in our schools.” “You have to understand the child and try to make a connection.” These are not solutions. These are new age, liberal Band-Aids that don’t address the real problems of our society: no order, no discipline, no expectations. You know what these people should be saying? “Teachers and principals should be allowed to carry out corporal punishment.” “The parents should be mandating that their children do homework from the time they come home to the time they go to sleep.” “Children should be tried as adults.”

At least the men of 1787 had more sense than the men of 2016 do. When they saw that the insubordinate states were getting out of hand, they took action. They ripped up the Articles of Confederation and started from scratch. They met in this room in the hot summer of that year, shut the door, closed the windows, and for four months ground out a whole new form of government that had never been seen before. Our Constitution was one hell of a solution. It’s a solution that has worked so well that it’s the oldest living written constitution in the entire world. This September will mark 240 years, in fact. I don’t think you need hindsight to say that it succeeded.

Not to belabor the point, but again, what they did in 1787 would not work in 2016. You have to realize that the men that wrote our constitution did not necessarily see the United States as their country. They saw their states as their countries, and furthermore, they saw America as a loose association of those states, united in mutual defense, but separate in all other matters. With that mentality, they had to create a Constitution that was right for all the states, and in order to do that, they had to compromise. They had to make agreements. They had to be willing to give something up to get what they want. Look at our Congress. One house is based on population while the other is based on the principle of equal representation. Look at our Bill of Rights. The Antifederalists wouldn’t ratify the Constitution without the promise of our civil liberties listed in writing. Compromise created the Constitution. Compromise is what worked.

Compromise would not work today. We live in a time that is much more dire than 1787. The country is in more danger of collapse than it was when our first government wasn’t working. Hell, our government’s problem today isn’t that it’s not working, it’s that it’s not even on! What do you do in when events are so calamitous? Do you compromise? Can you even compromise? No. In an unprecedented circumstance like ours, people need a leader who will stand up and take total control of the situation.

Dean Wolf nods his head in the background.

Bernard Core: Mikey and I cannot work out our problems with compromise. It was never at that point and it never will be. He and I have two diametrically different ideas of what America is today. The only thing that will decide whose America lives on is our match tomorrow night at Fifteen. People can’t see compromise. They can see a fight, though. People can get a physical representation of whose America is superior. Will it be the unrefined style that Mikey espouses or will it be the technical mastery that I perfected in college and continue to craft in the ring today, mixed with the new hardcore, barbarous style that I sought within myself?

Dean Wolf makes a little laugh in the background while he rubs his hand together deviously.

Bernard Core: By whatever means necessary, I will get Mikey to the ground. I will lock him in every hold known to man on God’s green earth. If he tries to get back up, I will throw him back to the ground. And when I am allowed to, I will take my All American weapon of choice, my steel pole American flag and smash him over the head with it, bash it across his back, cut off his air, shatter his legs.

Dean Wolf: Yes, Headmaster, that’s right!

Bernard Core: Mikey thinks he’s put me at a disadvantage by challenging me to this match. It’s not surprising that Mikey didn’t have the forethought to see that what he did was awaken a side of me that I had never seen before but had always been there. It’s the side of me that’s enraged. Every man has rage inside of him. What’s the source of my rage?

Core starts to grit his teeth.

Bernard Core: It’s constantly seeing this country flush itself down the toilet with complacency, having people tell me that my solutions are wrong, that I don’t know what I’m talking about, inferior people who haven’t done half of what I’ve done in this life telling me that I am ignorant and short sighted. You people hurling insults at me while I try to help you by addressing the issues that affect your life. That’s what brings out the rage inside me, all of these slights, these slights that have been building up in me as long as I can remember. That’s what you illuminated for me, Mikey, when you challenged me to this match, and by God, you will regret it. My anger is going to come forth live and in living color. I don’t want you to be able to get to your feet when this match is done. I don’t want you to be able to walk down the aisle after I defeat you. I don’t even want you walking the streets in that disgusting hipster hellhole known as Brooklyn. I want you to be crawling on your stomach like a common rodent because that’s all you are: an insignificant creature who feeds off of the waste of life. You don’t deserve to walk in my America, and that is an uncompromisable principle.

He relaxes his face and takes a few breaths to calm down.

Bernard Core: The flag that represents my America will be the one standing tall in the air after I use it to bring down Mikey’s America, and all people, all Americans everywhere, will stand up and willingly join me in reciting the Core Institute Pledge of Allegiance.

He looks behind him and sees the mahogany chair with the sun at the top of it. He walks the two steps up to the desk and stands beside the chair.

Bernard Core: You see this chair? The man who sat in this chair was the greatest American living during his time. He was an honorable man. He was a wise man. He was stoic. He was a leader in every sense of the word and he was truly the father of our country.

That man was George Washington. He sat in this chair during the summer of 1787 presiding over the Constitutional Convention as its president. He supervised the creation of our government. He rarely took part in debates. Rather, in his dignified, quiet manner, he made sure that debates were orderly and productive. He didn’t want to preside over the meeting at first. He was content to live on his farm, Mount Vernon, after he had led this country through the toil of the American Revolution but his sense of duty bound him to come to Philadelphia after America’s best people begged him to lead this crucial gathering.

If you look at the top of this chair, you’ll see the image of a sun. Towards the end of the Constitutional Convention, one of the delegates, the wise, old sage Benjamin Franklin, said that he had often looked at this sun and wondered if it was rising or setting.
I think about that question and it reminds me of the contrast between Mikey and myself.

Mikey is a setting sun. Look at what’s happened to him over the past four weeks. He lost a match to me and only got to hold on to the title because two incompetent referees couldn’t agree that I had won. The week after that, Dean Wolf and I beat him within an inch of his life and was only saved because the Rebellution stuck their noses where they didn’t belong. Seven days later, he lost a match to Vengeance, a man who I will unquestionably defeat if he becomes the number one contender to my Championship of the United States. And just six days ago, Dean Wolf and myself showed Mikey the dominance of the America that we stand for. Again, he wasn’t able to save himself. It took the masked gorilla and that cretinous wench Vidalia to spare him the doom I was to unleash. Mikey’s sun has been setting little by little each week and tomorrow night, it will set completely. The Darkness that he talks about all the time will be a reality, but only for him.

I am a rising sun. Since debuting in the WCF on November 22, I have not lost a match outright. I have never been pinned. I have never submitted. Any man who has tried to bring me down has tried and failed. Greybeard tried and failed. La Gama Blanca tried and failed. The seven men that I faced in the torneo cibernetico, including “Mr. Father of the Year” Andre Holmes, tried and failed. YOU tried and failed. I’m starting my own private school, a school that will be an incubator for the best and brightest that this country has to offer. I have gained the allegiance of the most ruthless, vicious wrestler that I have ever seen in my life.

When the Constitution was realized, Benjamin Franklin remarked that the sun on this chair clearly was a rising sun. That realization will be apparent to everyone tomorrow night when my sun finally reaches its zenith and I am officially crowned the Champion of the United States; and in becoming the Champion of the United States…

He sits down in Washington’s chair. Dean Wolf walks up to the desk and stands behind the chair.

Bernard Core:…I will become the Father of MY Country.

The camera zooms in on Core’s stern face and then fades to black.