It's 8 p.m. Saturday and I'm sitting at the very last row of Anaheim's Honda Center next to pop culture guru and Weekly staffer Luke "LYT" Thompson. With our backs against the stadium wall, we've got quite a view of the glowstick-clutching crowd that's turned out to welcome the wrestling demigods of WWE's RAW. Far below, the ring looks like the miniature version one might pick up at Toys 'R' Us - something I'm guessing more than half the attendees have at home, since the place is crawling with kids under 12.

Luke and I are watching sweaty, muscular men in little shorts throwing each other around and all I can think of is Roland Barthes, the French philosopher who used wrestling to discuss semiotics - the study of signs and symbols; how meaning is constructed and understood.

RAW leans heavily on the visual symbols society has incorporated into its language of imagery. The "bad guys" are oftentimes obese and unpleasing to the fan's eye, (case in point: Umaga, the tattooed, wide-assed "Samoan Bulldozer") while the heroes are dripping with positive energy (i.e. all-American Jeff Hardy in his rainbow dreds). Incidentally, both these guys will be fighting tonight. See their photos here.

What was interesting for Luke and me was how RAW played the race card in almost every