An international icon! A celebrity around the world! Selected to light the 1996 Olympic Games torch, representing all that is good and noble in sports. In 1999 the first boxer to ever appear on the cover of a Wheaties box, representing wholesome America. And, best of all, about to be deified in a coming major motion picture.
Of whom do we speak? The one, the only, the greatest - Muhammad Ali! And, dare we ask, what are this great man's accomplishments? Well, he was a champion boxer - he beat people up in the ring. How noble, how sublime! Who needs scientists, artists, or teachers as role models when we have pugilists! It's especially fine that Ali is black, to distract African-American children from all those excessively ponderous, intellectual role models they've been exposed to in the past.
And what a truly fine man he is! Who needs the old codes of sportsmanship when Ali can introduce taunting? Admitting that he was not much better than other top boxers, Ali said the main reason he was famous was his talent for self-promotion. In his own words: "Cassius Clay is a boxer who can throw the jive better than anybody." Forget about silent but great athletes like Gale Sayers - lets focus on a world class poet like Ali - "Floats like a butterfly, stings like a bee" - a few lines like that, and the world is at your feet. Ya baby, Robert Browning got nothing on you.
And when your nation calls - well, the Hell with your nation. After refusing to register for the draft, Ali told the press "I ain't got no quarrel with them Viet Cong", and became a "conscientious objector" to the Vietnam War. A Muslim by this time, he was no longer Cassius Clay, but Muhammad Ali. And while other American men suffered and died in Vietnam, Ali's lawyers made sure that he served neither in Vietnam nor prison. And of course, we know now that Muslims don't really believe in violence - even the ones that throw punches for a living - so we can't fault the greatest for living in splendid luxury while his countrymen ducked bullets in the Mekong Delta.
We interrupt this brilliant Outrage for our own tasteless self-promotion, which will, alas, not be nearly as successful as Ali's tasteless self-promotion.
Read our book - actually, we don't care if you read it - just so long as you buy it. It covers all the good stuff - sex, money, kids, parents, God - y'know, pretty much the whole ball of wax.
I mean, c'mon, at least take a look!
http://www.livingsanely.com
So what did Ali really do - what is the lesson this great man teaches? Taunt your opponents, shuck and jive with the press, bloody some people in the ring. Screw your country. Spend your money recklessly. Marry often - at least 4 times.
Oh, but we almost forgot. We take it all back. Ali, or Clay, or whatever he is called, is black - and if we criticize any black man we're racist, and we certainly don't want that onus. And Ali is Muslim, and we're going out of our way to be nice to Muslims, cause they just killed thousands of innocent Americans, and we want to make sure they realize we don't hold that against them. And, because he was punched in the head so many times, he has Parkinson's Syndrome, so we're supposed to feel sorry for the great man.
Of course, we don't remember the hundreds of thousands of Americans who risked their lives to answer the call of duty in Vietnam, we don't care about the millions of Black Americans who do honest, often low paying work, and we don't give a damn that lots of people suffer silently with Parkinson's Syndrome. But let's have a hand for the greatest self-promoter of all time, cause, well, this is America, and we may not care about virtue, but we're certainly smart enough to understand that the genius of self promotion is the only sort of genius that really matters.
