Meltz in The New York Times: Welcome to the Age of the Cage Match

Welcome to the Age of the Cage Match These days, powerful men want to beat one another. Literally. The “man in the arena” is no longer just a political cliché.Credit…Gregory Payan/Associated Press   By Joseph Bernstein July 6, 2023   Call it the melee of the middle-aged men. We already know the main event. That would be Elon Musk versus Mark Zuckerberg in Las Vegas, or maybe the Colosseum in Rome. The rival tech billionaires are inching toward a cage match, brokered by Dana White, president of the Ultimate Fighting Championship. And for an undercard, how about a sitting U.S. senator versus a union boss? Markwayne Mullin, an Oklahoma Republican, last week challenged Sean O’Brien, the general president of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, to a mixed martial arts fight after Mr. O’Brien called him a “clown” and a “fraud” on Twitter. In case that’s not enough testosterone, perhaps some feats of strength are in order. Robert Kennedy Jr. might be interested. The Democratic presidential candidate recently took his shirt off in Venice Beach to perform push-ups and incline bench presses — revealing an uncommonly defined upper body for anyone, let alone a 69-year-old. (He has a full decade on Jeff Bezos, who is also musclebound.) So too might Jamaal Bowman. On Thursday, the Democratic representative of New York posted to Twitter a video of himself bench-pressing 405 pounds. For some powerful men, this is a season for peacocking. No longer content to embody the masculine ideals of financial, professional and political achievement — or simply to optimize their fitness, as tech chief executives have long done — suddenly these honchos want us to see the achievements of their bodies....