50 Years Ago Today...

Prague August 21, 1968, Photograph by Josef Koudelka

I'll never forget the look on my father's face the evening of August 20, 1968, as the news of the Soviet invasion of his homeland, Czechoslovakia, started trickling over the radio. What had begun early that year as an experiement in social and economic reform, or as the leader of the country Alexander Dubček referred to it, "Socialism with a human face", ended in late summer as you see above, with Soviet tanks rumbling through the streets of Prague.

Soldiers from the USSR as well as Poland, Hungary, and Bulgaria, entered the Czechoslovak capital the following day, no doubt under the impression that they were on a noble mission to liberate their fellow Warsaw Pact brethren from the evil grips of capitalism whose false promises of  bourgois prosperity had blinded their government into taking a stand against the workers' paradise that the glorious revolution had created.

One can only imagine the soldiers' amazement when ordinary citizens came out in full force onto the streets of Prague to challenge them. Soldiers of course, train to fight other soldiers on the battlefield, not civilians, including old people armed with nothing other than words, their fists, and their rage. In his remarkable series of photographs, one of the few visual documents we have of the event, Josef Koudelka captured not only dramatic moments like the one above of a young man defiantly waiving the Czechoslovak flag while standing on top of a Soviet tank, but also banality as portrayed in the faces of Warsaw Pact troops, most of them just beyond puberty, bewildered by the absurdity of the situation in which they found themselves. A gallery of Josef's photographs on the invasion can be found here.

Absurdity is a central theme of the work of writer and dramatist. Vaclav Havel, whose work became known to much of the Czechoslovak people during the brief period of openness in 1968, popularly referred to as Prague Spring.

After the invasion, Havel at great risk to his safety not to mention his personal freedom, became a dissident who wrote extensively about totalitarianism in Czechoslovakia. Here I've borrowed a couple sections from my tribute to Havel written shortly after his death in 2011. Havel's words are in italics:

The fifties were a difficult time in Czechoslovakia. Havel wrote about the conflicting currents that defined life in those years. The revolution brought with it for some, excitement and hope for the future: 

Building sites were swarming with tens of thousands of young enthusiasts of the new faith singing songs of socialist construction. 

While at the same time: 

In the fifties there were enormous concentration camps in Czechoslovakia filled with tens of thousands of innocent people... There were tortures and executions, dramatic flights across borders.

As bad as all that was, Havel wrote that at the time, there was at least some sort of meaning to all the madness: 

The songs of idealists and fanatics, political criminals on the rampage, the suffering of heroes-these have always been part of history. The fifties were a bad time in Czechoslovakia, but there have been many such times in human history. It still shared something, or at least bore comparison with those other periods; it still resembled history. No one could have said that nothing was happening, or that the age did not have its stories.

After the invasion, life did not exactly return to pre-Spring days. Here is Havel in 1987, contrasting the totalitarianism backed with an ideology of the fifties, with a totalitarianism whose only purpose was self-preservation of the post-Prague Spring:

... the powers that be really did learn a lesson from the Prague Spring. They discovered how far things can go when the door to a plurality of opinions and interests is opened: the totalitarian system itself is jeopardized. Having learned this lesson, political power set itself a single aim: self-preservation. In a process with its own, mindless dynamic, all the mechanisms of direct and indirect manipulation of life began to expand and assume unprecedented forms. Henceforth nothing could be left to chance.

After the invasion of 1968, Czechoslovkia was swept up into a period of inertia (the official term for it was normalization), that lasted until November 28, 1989 when it was discovered the walls holding up the regime were made of glass, with nothing inside left to support them. The fall of the Czwchoslovak Communisr regime was called the Velvet Revolution, as not a drop of blood was spilled, and the Czechoslovak people elected none other than Vaclav Havel to be their new president. 

It would be nice to say that is all behind us and everyone lived happily ever after, but that is simply not the fate of the human condition. Soon after the Velvet Revolution, Czechoslovakia was no more, as Slovakia in the east, split from the Czech Republic in 1993. The Soviet Union is no more either but rumblings coming from Moscow over the past deecade or so seem to indicate that there is considerable nostalgia for the good ol' days of Russian hegemony over the countries who used to be behind what was once ominously referred to as the "Iron Curtain."

Most recently the unthinkable has happened. The current president of the United States has openly declared his admiration for the dictator of Russia. The jury is still out on exactly how much this president likes that dictator, exactly where that admiration comes from, and even more unthinkable, whether or not the dictator of Russia might have some dirt on the President of the United States, enabling him to exert considerable influence over him. Regardless of the verdict, there is a palpable and justifiable fear in Western and Central Eurpoe, especially among the countries formerly under the sphere of influence of the Soviet Union, that the United States no longer has their backs.

On top of all that speculation, what is crystal clear is that the POTUS has openly declared the free press, well at least the part of it who does not show its unfailing loyalty to him, the "enemy of the people."

There is certainly an ominous precedent for that; I don't have to enumerate it in all its ugly iterations. Interestingly enough, it has been stated that perhaps the greatest threat to the Soviet Union posed by the reforms of Prague Spring which led to the invasion, was the relaxation of governmental censorship of the press.

We have no further to look than Josef Koudelka, whose photographs of the people of Prague resisting Soviet tanks, as I said one of the few visual documents we have of the invasion, were not released to the public for several months after the event. Koudelka processed the film and printed the negatives in hiding, and had the finished work smuggled out of the country to be published as the work of P.P. (Prague Photographer). Shortly thereafter he left his country and lived in exile for twenty years. It was only after returning home after the Velvet Revolution that Koudelka claimed responsibility for his pictures.

Here is a film published by Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty in 2008, that tells the story from the viewpoint of individuals who were on both sides of the tanks during the invasion, inside and out. The film describes the importance to both sides of the Prague offices of Czchoslovak Radio, the last "source of uncensored news":




It would do us well on this anniversary, to remember our own country's long and imperfect history of justice, liberty, democracy, and a free press.

We take these things for granted, which is a terrible mistake.

Listening to the words of people like Vaclav Havel and seeing the images of Josef Koudelka can only remind us of how much we have to lose.

Above all, take heed of a memory of the Czech woman in the film, Ivana Dolezalova, whose thoughts on the urgency of protecting the offices of Czechoslovak Radio bear repeating:

Once they get hold of the media, the country (will) pretty much be lost.

Because hard as it may be to conceive, something like this could in fact happen here, if we as a people don't care enough to prevent it.

Silver Linings

Work for something that is good, not just because it stands a chance to succeed. 
- Vaclav Havel

The ongoing narrative you hear incessantly from the folks who support the current president come hell or high water, is that those of us on the other side are so upset that Hillary Clinton lost the 2016 election, that we will not support Donald Trump no matter what he does. Now I certainly can't speak for everyone, but for me that assessment is balderdash.

For starters, despite the fact I still believe Hillary Clinton was unquestionably the most qualified candidate, I pledge no allegiance to her. I love this country and wishing a president to fail, no matter who he is, is tantamount to wishing the country to fail. I have two children whose future is far more important to me than wishing harm on a particular administration. That is of course, unless the administration is up to no good. For me the jury is still out on that one.

Can there be anything good we in the opposition can take away from the current administration? Well the economy is good. As the president keeps reminding us, the stock market continues to break all-time records and unemployment is currently at a record low, especially in the African American community. Having said that, how much the good economy at the moment is attributable to Trump is debatable. The American economy has been on the upswing since the Obama administration and what we are seeing today is very much a a continuation of that. The world economy is also thriving, in no small measure due to trade agreements that were forged by previous administrations, the same ones the current president has promised to re-negotiate. More importantly, bull markets do not necessary portend a sustained, healthy economy, as it is the nature of markets to fluctuate. Just as sure as the effects of gravity, markets go up and they go down taking the economy with them. All of us over twenty have seen the devastation of and overvalued market crashing. It happened most recently in 2008. I'm still underwater with my mortgage thanks to that recession.

The Obama administration with the help of Congress placed regulations on Wall Street to help avoid a recurrence of such an event. In its ongoing efforts to eliminate all regulations on business, and the president's insatiable desire to overturn everything his predecessor did, this administration is doing all it can to eliminate those regulations, practically inviting another devastating recession or worse. Could I be wrong about the economy and Trump be right? Well for my sake  and the sake of this country, I certainly hope so, but I have grave doubts.

Other than the good economy at the moment, I can't think of anything else remotely positive involving the current administration. This week my wife discovered the quote at the top of this post from the late playwright/President of the Czech Republic. Not that I needed reminding that Trump is no Vaclav Havel, it just made me yearn for something much better than what we have. Frankly I can't imagine Donald Trump even considering working for the common good, just for its own sake.

His tax cut is a glaring example. Now I'm happy to keep more money in my pocket, but it has been well established that that this tax plan disproportionately favors the wealthy who will continue to enjoy its benefits long after they dry up for the middle class and below. I also know that this tax cut promises to raise the federal debt by trillions of dollars, money that my children and their children and probably their children will be responsible for paying back. I also understand that Republicans in Congress plan on addressing the debt problem by slashing social programs like social security and medicare, while not taking away a penny from defense or immigration control. Not to mention its effects on universal health care coverage will be devastating. That may play well to the president's base, but how that amounts to the common good, I have no idea.

At this writing, Donald Trump is in the middle of delivering his State of the Union address, right now speaking about a horrific murder committed by illegal aliens. He is promising the victims' relatives sitting in the House Chamber that he will insure that such travesties will never happen again, certainly a nice gesture. By that he means he will crack down on immigration, legal and otherwise to accomplish that goal. What he fails to mention is that he is grossly exaggerating the problem of crime committed by illegal aliens, as there is no credible evidence to suggest that undocumented people in this country commit a disproportionate amount of crime compared to say, native born American citizens. Of course no one supports  criminal aliens but as Trump supporters are quick to point out, the Obama administration deported more criminal aliens than any other administration. Which to me begs the question, if Obama was doing such a good job deporting the bad guys, why are you folks so quick to point out what a disaster our immigration policy is? Tpically the answer to that qustion is crickets.

Anyway, as a result of Trump's efforts to stem immigration to this country, hundreds of thousands of innocent people who have called this country home, some for decades, people who have contributed in spades to this nation, will needlessly suffer. Once again, Trump is capitalising on irrational fear in order  to stimulate his base. That may be good for him politically, but how it translates to the common good, I'll never know.

Still these are policy disputes, the kind of things that people of good faith on both sides of the political spectrum have disagreed from time immemorial.

The real damage I believe that this administration is doing to this country, is the undermining of institutions that are the backbone of our democracy. In one short year this president has done his utmost to discredit the judiciary, the free press, the Central Intelligence Agency and most recently the FBI, all in an effort to cover up some shady if not outright illegal actions of his own.

The most egregious of these is his relationship with Russia. I have absolutely no idea to what extent Trump's dealings are with that country with whom we have an adversarial relationship. But charges of collusion with Russia and its hacking into our last presidential election are extremely serious. I can only imagine if I were president and suspected of involvement in an act that was detrimental to this nation at best, treasonous at worst, I would bend over backwards to not interfere with an investigation that meant the difference between clearing my name or sending me up the river. That is of course, if I were innocent. Trump may or may not be guilty of collusion with Putin Russia, but he certainly is acting guilty.

I could go on and on composing a laundry list of things that make me distrust Trump's intentions, but that list would go on for  hundreds of pages so I won't bother.

After Trump's SOTU address, Joe Kennedy, a congressman from Massachusetts, and grandson of Robert F. Kennedy, gave a stirring rebuttal. Speaking passionately about this administration's lack of compassion and humanity, he brought up something I've been thinking about for the past week, the next generations of Americans who may not be burdened with the same stupid fears, biases and prejudices of my own generation. In his speech, Kennedy mentioned a sign carried by a child attending one of the women's marches held last week all over the country. The sign said: "your generation may build the wall, but my generation will tear it down."

That reminded me of my ten year old daughter who is without question, the moral compass of our family. She and I were having a conversation about a family we all know, a member of whom is transgender. I pussyfooted around not knowing how to bring up the subject to my little girl who set me straight by saying "he's transgender isn't he?" She said it as nonchalantly as if she were describing someone who had blond hair and blue eyes. My daughter also has a friend who will be attending another child's "gender coming out party" this weekend.

The time's they are a changin' and  I'm convinced that child's sign is right, it will be my daughter's generation that will tear down that godforsaken wall, if it ever gets built in the first place.

The unescapable fact is that Trump is president and will be until he no longer is. One can only hope that our democratic institutions as proscribed by our constitution, are stronger than he is. As they say, if something doesn't kill you, it will only make you stronger. That may be a silver lining in itself.

On the other hand if the Trump administration does indeed kill us, or at least our democracy, then all bets will be off.

Stay tuned.

2016, The Reaper's Bumper Crop

As I walked into work yesterday morning, I wished a friend a happy new year. He said 2017 had to be better than this year which began with the death of David Bowie and ended with the election of Donald Trump.

It's only natural this time of year to reflect upon the past 365 days. For my family and me, 2016 was actually a pretty good year, my boy and I traveled to New York, and all four of us had a lovely summer vacation which included the cities of Cleveland and Pittsburgh, as well as a memorable visit to Frank Lloyd Wright's magnificent Fallingwater, the home he built on top of a stream for the Kaufmann family in Southwestern Pennsylvania. We even managed to sneak into West Virginia, a first for all four of us.

Both kids have been doing well in school, despite not necessarily liking it one hundred percent of the time, and have been involved in other activities that give them great pleasure and keep them out of trouble. My wife and I both managed to devote time to our artistic endeavors, not an easy thing when combined with the responsibilities of working for a living and raising a family. Knock on wood, while there have been health issues here and there, nothing earth shattering thank God, and a double knock on wood, we didn't lose any loved ones this year.

And yes the Chicago Cubs won the World Series which was great news for everyone except for fans of the Cleveland Indians and the Chicago White Sox, well actually only a handful of disgruntled ones that is.

In short I'd say my family has much to be grateful for at the close of this year.

Yet many people will recall this as a year that particularly sucked.

Another New Years tradition is the reading of the passing year's necrology, the list of notable people who died. Sadly, 2016 proved to be a bumper crop for the Grim Reaper at least as far as famous people were concerned, especially musicians. In some circles, particularly at home, I'm known for my morbid fascination with the obituary pages, but this year even I couldn't keep up.

Every year has its Abe Vigodas, and Zsa Zsa Gabors, those celebrities whose death inspires the inevitable remark, "Really? I didn't know he or she was still alive."

But this year seemed to have a disproportionate number of unexpected celebrity deaths. I learned that David Bowie was seriously ill at the beginning of the year. He was not a young man, but coming through his creative spirit there was still an eternal, timeless youth about him and I was blown away at the news of his passing, coming as it did on his birthday, January 8th. Like mostpeople, I was blindsided by the death of Prince. It's disconcerting when I hear of someone who is exactly my age, as Prince was, suddenly dropping dead. I'm not proud to say I breathed a sigh of relief when I learned that his death was attributed to the pain killers he used to alleviate the agony resulting from the many years of unbelievably athletic dance moves he used in his performances. He literally gave his life for his art. Poetic and romantic as it may be, I simply can't relate.

Both men were extraordinarily talented and had they lived, they would have continued to produce remarkable music. But those two only scratched the surface of losses that the world of music suffered in 2016. Here's a woefully incomplete list in no particular order, of musicians we lost in 2016: Ralph Stanley, Buckwheat Zydeco, Pierre Boulez, Paul Kantner, Keith Emerson, Greg Lake. Glenn Frey, Sharon Jones, Neville Marriner, Dan Hicks, Leon Russell, Leonard Cohen, Scotty Moore, Guy Clark, Mose Allison, Vanity, Billy Paul, Nikolaus Harnoncourt, Gato Barbieri, and Merle Haggard.

Although he was less known as a musician than as perhaps the most famous music producer the world has ever known, in 2016 we also lost George Martin.

Indeed, heaven's chorus added greatly to its ranks this year but it will have to wait at least a while longer for Keith Richards who remains at this writing, probably to the surprise of no one more than himself, not only merely, but really and most sincerely alive.

The sports world lost at least four remarkable legends this year: Arnold Palmer, Gordie Howe, Pat Summitt, the winningest coach in NCAA basketball history, and of course, Muhammad Ali.

They say that deaths come in threes but this year proved there is no limit to the number of celebrity deaths that can occur over a short period of time. As I remarked when Vaclav Havel and Kim Jung Il died, one right after the other a few years ago, death makes for strange bedfellows, in that case, two national leaders who were the polar opposites in everything else. The most absurd celebrity death matching I can recall was the quintessentially elegant and proper Katherine Hepburn, and the crude actor/comedian Buddy Hackett who died within a day of each other in 2003. I can only imagine the conversation that took place when the two of them marched up the steps to St. Peter at the Pearly Gates.

Just this week we learned of a trio of deaths with an unusually strong connection. revolving around the passing of the actress Carrie Fisher, best known known for her recurring role as Princess Leia in the Star Wars film series. Much was written a few days ago about that role and her portrayal of it, unique for its time, as being a female hero and role model "in a male-dominated genre."

Well it so happened that real life female hero-role model in a male dominated profession that also dealt with intergalactic space, died this week. Her name was Vera Rubin, and she was the astrophysicist who proved the existence of dark matter.

Of course the other, more tragic connection to Carrie Fisher was her own mother, singer and actress Debbie Reynolds, who passed from this world one day after her daughter.

I could go on and on listing the famous people, the pioneers, politicians, playwrights and poets, the authors, artists, athletes, actors and astronauts, who died this year, but the time remaining in this year is short, so I'll just take the easy way out by linking to the New York Times list of the Notable Deaths of 2016.

Whether we heard of them or not, they all touched our lives and shaped our world in one way or other, some of them in good ways, some of them in splendid ways, some of them in inspirational ways, and some of them, quite the opposite.

But the world would be a much different place without them and tonight at the stroke of midnight, let us all raise a glass to the lives that were lived by the people we lost in 2016.

Happy 2017.

Stay healthy my friends!

Agree to Disagree?

Recently I did something to an old friend that I swore I would not do, I de-friended him on Facebook. My friend has come up before in this space. Writing that I valued a free exchange of opinions, especially ones that differed from my own, I noted how our arguments over social media gave me insight into another point of view and helped shape my own opinions. A slightly less charitable take on him was that his faithful representation of the opinions of ultra-right wing celebrities such as Sean Hannity and Rush Limbaugh meant that I never had to:

watch or listen to those mouthpieces of the (current) administration, (as) both of them give me a bad case of indigestion.

So what changed? Well as best as I can describe it, we were at an impasse because he and I were clearly talking from two alternate universes, consequently each of us refused to accept the stated "facts" of the other universe , not opinions mind you, but facts.

In the past three years I've asked myself time and again what actually constitutes a fact and how are we to know what separates a fact from an opinion. This is what inspired my recent post about people who believe the earth is flat. Going against common sense and literally thousands of years worth of thought, scientific inquiry, and physical evidence, there are people today, granted not a lot of them, who cling to the belief that our world is flat. As I pointed out in that post, questioning our deepest held beliefs and assumptions is actually a good thing because it forces us to do something that a growing number of our fellow travelers on this planet these days are loathe to do, think.

So that's what I did in the post, spent a few hours thinking about how we actually know, not simply believe that the earth is not only a sphere, but also is not the center of the universe as that flat-earthers believe. And I didn't take the easy way out by saying "look at the photographs" as I don't have a good answer to the flat-earther contention that the photographs made from space definitively showing a spherical earth might have been faked.

Anyway, drawing upon three millennia's worth of thought and evidence from several different cultures, I believe that I presented an air-tight argument in defense of the earth being round and circling the sun. Of course none of what I presented was original, inquiring minds just need to do what I did, draw upon their own knowledge of history and science and fill in the gaps by looking the rest up either on-line, or heaven forbid, in books. The evidence is all there plain as day.

Yet the flat-earthers, as other like-minded contrarians who have a penchant for conspiracy theories, claim that what most people take to be common knowledge is merely a theory, an opinion which can be debated. Now I'm all for debate obviously, but the problem with the modus operandi of most conspiracy theorists, is that they gladly accept evidence that supports their beliefs, and simply ignore evidence that does not. It's pretty hard to debate someone who has a very fluid notion of what constitutes a fact.

So how does this relate to my friend and the roughly 63 million Americans who think as he does? I'll give you two examples. Our last exchange was about the impeachment of the current president. He told me, as the president told anybody willing to listen, to "read the transcript" of the call the US president made with the newly elected president of Ukraine. My friend's contention was that those looking to impeach this president were simply making up the charges that he was abusing his power by twisting the arm of a foreign leader to interfere in the upcoming presidential election by conducting an investigation into his chief rival, Joe Biden. . "In the transcript you will find..." said my friend, "...no mention of Biden," He added that all the US president was concerned about was "the rampant corruption in Ukraine."

So I read the transcript (for the second time) which my friend apparently did not. Not only is Biden mentioned by name in the highly redacted version released by the White House,, but neither the phrase "corruption in Ukraine" nor in fact the word "corruption" are mentioned at all. When I pointed this out to my friend, he changed the subject and brought up something about Barack Obama.

But the straw that broke the camel's back for me was my friend's perpetual insistence that like everyone who does not support this president, my unfounded disdain for him stems from the fact that I am simply angry that he beat Hillary Clinton in the last election. This is the view concocted by Hannity, Limbaugh and others which has been a recurrent theme among supporters of this president who claim that opposition to him is unjustified because it is fraught with extreme political bias, and nothing else.

Now it's true that I voted for Clinton in the last election because I felt then as I still do, that she was infinitely more qualified for the job than the man who was clearly the most stupefyingly unqualified presidential candidate in this nation's 243 year history. OK that may be my opinion but I have plenty of evidence to back it up.

Yet I have left a paper trail, or more accurately a pixel trail of the fact that I have no love lost for the Clintons, Bill or Hillary. The fact is, (yes fact) that I would have voted for virtually anyone against this president, even if push came to shove, any of his challengers in the incredibly weak field of candidates running against him in the 2016 campaign for the Republican nomination.

That said, after the November, 2016 election, mortified as I was that he won, I was still willing to give him a chance as I figured, as many Americans did at the time, that he couldn't possibly govern this country with as much malice and hatred as he ran his campaign.

Well it turns out he is running his government much worse than his campaign. This is also my opinion but merely mentioning place names such as the US/Mexico border, Charlottesville, Helsinki, and most recently Syria, would indicate that I also have plenty to back up that opinion as well. In fact I believe the actions for which he has been impeached do not rank anywhere near the top of the most grievous acts committed by this president.

So no, I am not basing my opinion of this president on the mere fact that he won the last election.

Yet according to my friend, I am wrong about this. According to him, Sean Hannity, Rush Limbaugh and he all know more "facts" about me than I do.

Now I may not know much, but I do know the sky being blue on sunny days, Chicago usually getting cold in winter, and the earth being round are facts, not opinions. And I also know beyond a reasonable doubt that I know more about myself than Hannity, Limbaugh and my former Facebook friend.

It is this rejection of facts and the willingness to change the narrative at one's convenience that has me the most worried about the future of our democracy. The current narrative coming from this administration and eaten up by its base is that the real enemy of our nation is not our foreign adversaries, not even radical groups bent on our destruction, but the free press and fellow Americans who happen to disagree with their agenda. And it very much appears that the administration and the Republicans currently in Congress who appear to live in constant fear of this president and his base, will let nothing get in their way of defeating this enemy, not facts, nor the law.

A recent article in The Atlantic evoking the ideals of Vaclav Havel as an antidote for the current political morass we find ourselves in, inspired me to dig this tribute to him I wrote back in 2011 out of the mothballs. As I wrote in that piece, the government of Czechoslovakia after the so called Prague Spring of 1968, was held in place largely through the propagation of fear and lies.

Many have made credible comparisons of the rise of the current US administration to that of the totalitarian regime in Germany in the 1930s. One big difference I see is that this administration, at least the man at the top of it, seems to have no vision for this country other than augmenting his own power and personal wealth. Perhaps a more fitting comparison can be made with the totalitarian regime of Czechoslovakia after 1968. That government, still very much under the thumb of Moscow (sound familiar?) until 1989, had one and only one agenda, self preservation. And one of the chief casualties there at that time beyond basic human rights, were facts, especially inconvenient ones. We're not quite there yet, but eight years ago I thought I was writing about the distant past. Little did I know.

I had an epiphany of sorts a few weeks ago. It may sound like my own conspiracy theory, the difference is, if the facts prove me wrong, I'll be deeply grateful to reject it. The theory goes like this:

An indisputable fact that everyone agrees upon is that in about a generation, white people will no longer be in the majority of this country. It is apparent  that the aspect of a majority-minority country is terribly un-appealing to many Americans who feel their hegemony over the government of the US will come to an end.

The election of Barack Obama, this nation's first African American president, his successful re-election, and his (given the circumstances of having to face a completely intransigent Republican led Congress) relatively productive, scandal free eight year administration, was a clarion call to action for many people in this country. This is not to say the Obama administration was perfect, there were many causes to criticize it from both the Left and the Right. But in that sense it was no different from any previous administration, and it is difficult to imagine the drastic swing of the pendulum that resulted with the 2016 election as being a result of merely policy issues or even ideology.

To many white people, oh I’d say about 63 million or so. given the choice between giving up their hegemony, or giving up our democracy and the basic values that are deeply held in this country exemplified in this nation's motto: E pluribus unim (out of many, one), they would give up the latter in a heartbeat.

The idea that they would prefer a thoroughly corrupt white president and a Republican led Congress willing to ignore facts and the law to protect him, over an African American president who by all indications is a man of integrity, is very telling. This is the message that supporters of this president are sending out loud and clear.

That's my conspiracy theory, go ahead, prove me wrong. I hope you can, but I doubt it.

When I told my friend goodbye, he asked me if we couldn't just agree to disagree on our political differences. I told him there are plenty of things rational people can disagree upon, policy issues like the economy, immigration, restrictions or lack thereof on business in terms of emissions, or trade practices, abortion rights or even really important stuff like who's better the Beatles or the Stones. These are all beliefs and opinions that have no definite answer.

But I draw the line at rejecting irrefutable facts, the rule of law, ethics, morality and common decency. No, climate change, is not simply a theory or opinion, any more than evolution, relativity, or a round earth. No, it is NOT legal for a president to attempt to extort a foreign leader to interfere on his or anybody's behalf in our election. No it is NOT ethical for a president to place the interest of his own business above the interests and national security of his country as he clearly did in Syria by abandoning our allies the Kurds in the fight against ISIS at the behest of the dictator of Turkey in return for his favors regarding the president's hotel in Istanbul. No it is NOT right for the president to intentionally divide this country along racial and ethnic lines for the sole purpose of bolstering support of his mostly all white base. And where in hell did anybody get the idea that it was morally acceptable to separate children from their parents at the border, then house them in conditions that no one would stand for had they been dogs or cats?

I'm sorry but these are ethical and moral issues that I can't agree to disagree upon. As someone recently said, this is not an issue between Right and Left, it is an issue between right and wrong.

The term "existential crisis" has been bandied about so much recently that it has become a cliche. Yet I cannot think of a better term to describe the situation we are going through at the current moment. I truly believe that this president and the politicians who support him, are not committed to preserve, protect and defend the US Constitution, at least not the parts of it that get in their way.  This is not something unheard of in the annals of politics. What worries me are the millions of Americans who gleefully support this mob of miscreants.

For that reason I can no longer support them by listening to the lies, abject hatred and disdain for virtually everything I value about this country, that they help propagate.

That's why sadly, I had to say goodbye to my old friend.

Brush with greatness

There were two tables of guests at our wedding rehearsal dinner almost fifteen years ago. At one table sat the parents of the bride and groom and their friends. After dinner, the guests at that table, commenting on the raucous goings from across the room, lamented that they sat at the wrong table. The topic of conversation that caused the commotion at our table was this: personal encounters with celebrities. As you might expect, the most memorable events involving genuine face-to-face contact with well known people came at the beginning of our conversation. The dinner became really fun however once the big names got out of the way and we began to search our memory banks to "top" each other with what turned out to be less and less meaningful encounters with more and more obscure celebrities. Perhaps the highlight, or the nadir depending on your point of view, came when my friend and I discovered that his mother and my maternal uncle, were both high school classmates of the late comedian known as "Lonesome" George Gobel.

My wife-to-be remained silent during most of the dinner. I knew why she kept to herself; it would have ground the entire conversation to a screeching halt as her story of meeting a famous celebrity was head and shoulders above all the rest. As the dinner was coming to an end and our friends and family members couldn't scrape the bottom of the barrel any farther than poor old Lonesome George, I asked my bride to recount the tale of her most memorable celebrity encounter. Grudgingly she told of how one day she and her friend who at the time were working at an upscale Chicago restaurant, were invited to spend the evening with Jack Nicholson. With typical modesty, my wife claims that it was her friend that the movie star was interested in but I'm sure he was quite happy to spend the evening with not one, but two lovely young women. Before your imagination runs wild, the evening my wife assures me, was spent watching the French Open, and discussing philosophy and New Wave Cinema. In the end I'm happy to report, Mr. Nicholson was the perfect gentleman as he bid a fond adieu to the ladies sans shenanigans, when they told him it was time to leave.

Anyway that's my wife's story, she's sticking to it and I'm perfectly content to believe it.

It's no secret that our fascination with celebrities comes from the fact that all of us at one time or other, dreams of one day becoming famous, to have the world as they say, at our feet. Like any typical American boy, I once dreamed of being a great athlete. That dream was brought down to earth one day as I was riding my bike up Michigan Avenue and saw a large group of people gathered on the sidewalk and spilling out into the street. I had to see what was going on and it turned out the crowd was gazing intently into the window of a closed shoe store. Inside the store was Michael Jordan, presumably buying shoes. It dawned on me that living in a fish bowl as he did, was not all that it was cracked up to be. The guy couldn't even buy a pair of shoes without extreme measures taken to insure his safety and privacy. From that moment on, I no longer wanted to "be like Mike."

When I was a teenager, I set my sights upon being an artist. My other uncle, the brother of my father, was my inspiration. I first met my Uncle Jenda when he came to this country after emigrating from Czechoslovakia in early 1968. Jenda and my other relatives could not have been more different.  He had traveled extensively, and was uncompromisingly independent. He lived life exactly as he saw fit. In his case that meant residing in a cell-like one room apartment, with the bathroom down the hall. Like any artist, he wanted his work to be shown, but he refused to create work to please other people. He could not care less what others thought of him. As an adolescent, Jenda was hands down the coolest person I knew.

All these memories came flooding into my head these past few weeks as I just had my own brush with greatness, the honor and privilege of working with Czech artist Josef Koudelka. In all my years of working in the Department of Photography at the Art Institute of Chicago, I have met many great photographers, some of them personal heroes of mine. Koudelka is both those things to be sure, yet on a very personal level, much much more.

Koudelka has had a long, illustrious career producing works that combine a strong personal vision with a powerful sense of humanity. Unlike the cool reserve and distance of most contemporary street photography, Koudleka's photographs of people, just like the photographer, are filled with passion; they are intimate works that could only be made by a man who spent a great deal of time, and in some cases, even lived with his subjects.

Koudelka's first monumental work was a series of photographs made in the early sixties of Gypsies living in Romania and the former Czechoslovakia. The original prints from his first exhibition of that work in Prague, have been assembled together for the first time in forty years and are currently on display in Koudelka's first American retrospective exhibition currently on view at the Art Institute. The sub-title of the exhibition, Nationality Doubtful, refers to the period after the creation of the original Gypsy pictures.

It was a twist of fate that made Josef Koudelka for a very brief period a photojournalist, and for a very long time, a man without a country. Koudelka arrived in Prague on August 19th, 1968, after a trip photographing in Romania. As it so happened, on the very next day, the brief period of the experiment of "Socialism with a human face" known as the Prague Spring, came to an abrupt end as Czechoslovakia was invaded by troops of the Warsaw Pact nations under the leadership of the Soviet Union. Armed with a 35mm Exacta still camera and hundreds of feet of bulk-loaded East German movie film, Josef documented the invasion from the streets of Prague, as citizens of that city confronted Russian tanks with nothing more than their fists and their rage. His photographs, for all intents and purposes the only visual documentation we have of that tragic event, (which from a distance, I can still remember almost as if it happened yesterday), show the emboldened public demonstratively expressing their outrage, as well as the perplexed faces of the soldiers, few of them over twenty, who were told by their superiors that they would be welcomed into the city as liberating heroes. Placing himself in harm's way, Koudelka was as much a part of the citizen's revolt as a documenter of it. Not only did he shoot pictures of unarmed individuals on top of Russian tanks, but at times he too was on top of those tanks as some of his pictures testify.

Koudelka spent the weeks after the invasion processing his film and printing the negatives. The prints were smuggled out of the country and fell into the hands of the Magnum photo agency. They were published shortly thereafter, first in the London Sunday Times magazine, then all over the world under the credit line of "P.P." (Prague Photographer). Koudelka high-tailed it out of Czechoslovakia in 1970 by seeking a three month work visa, then applying for political asylum in England. He would not return to his home country until the Velvet Revolution, some twenty years later, when he would finally claim authorship of the invasion photographs.

During his years in exile and continuing to this day, Koudelka has traveled the world making pictures. For much of his career, his was a hand-to-mouth existence, relying on grants and the kindness of strangers (and friends) to keep him going. He once said:

For 17 years I never paid any rent. Even the Gypsies were sorry for me because they thought I was poorer than them. At night they were in their caravans and I was the guy who was sleeping outside beneath the sky.

It has been a peripatetic existence as well. Koudelka by his own admission never stays in one place very long:

I never stay in one country more than three months. Why? Because I was interested in seeing, and if I stay longer I become blind.

Perhaps Koudelka's most evocative and poetic work was produced between 1968 and 1987, culminating in a book appropriately titled Exiles. The book opens with the photographer's most iconic image, a view up a deserted Wenseslaus Square (Vaclavske Namesti) in Prague moments before the invasion. A watch on a borrowed wrist in the foreground marks for eternity the time, (12:22PM) of the impending doom.

The late playwright Vaclav Havel described the period in Czechoslovakia between the invasion and the Velvet Revolution and his own ascendance to the presidency of his country, as a time of great inertia. It was as if the wristwatch in Koudelka's picture stopped functioning at that very moment, and time had stood still.

Unlike his native country, Joseph Koudelka was just getting started in 1968. The pictures from his wandering years found in Exiles are drastically different from his earlier work. No longer were his images exclusively of people. Instead, found objects, discarded little fragments of things that once meant something to someone began to populate his pictures. One picture is of an impromptu meal of Josef's, spread over a copy of the International Herald Tribune. When he did photograph people, rather confronting his subjects head on as in the Gypsy photographs, Koudelka began photographing people from the side or behind. One memorable picture is of a man from behind, as he looks toward a massive hovercraft in the background. Another, an ambiguous photo of several older men in a bunker-like structure, also seen from behind, suggests that these are pictures of wanderers who like himself were in search of something. Perhaps that something is profound. Or perhaps they're just looking for a place to take a pee; life is funny that way.

Death is a recurring theme in Koudelka's work. In one picture, a dead raven is strung up on a clothesline. In a heartbreaking image, a young woman is laid to rest as the lid is placed over her coffin while her grieving mother and family wail in the background. In a most peculiar picture, one that did not make the cut in our exhibit, we are in a room which appears to be a preparation room for a mortuary. An elderly man with sunken eyes reclines on a gurney, looking over at a bier with flowers strewn upon it. In the photo the man appears to be awaiting his turn on the bier.

For the past few decades, Koudelka has almost entirely excluded people form his pictures. Instead, photographing with a panoramic format camera, he has been documenting the hand of man on the landscape. Barriers and borders abound in these pictures. One project represented in book form in the exhibition, depicts the wall in Jerusalem that was built to separate the Palestinian and Jewish communities in that divided city. From his last words in the Art Institute produced video below shot by my friend Bill Foster, you can tell exactly where his sentiments lie.




His most recent work centers around the ruins of ancient civilizations scattered throughout Europe and the Middle East.

Had he only made the invasion photographs, Josef Koudelka's place in history would be secure. As the one piece of visual evidence of that event, the photographs served to bring the acts of a brutal, morally bankrupt regime to the attention of the world. It may not be an overstatement to say that the invasion and Josef's document of it, freezing the moment forever in time, helped contribute to the eventual downfall of the Soviet Union.

But in a career that has spanned well over fifty years, Koudelka has produced many distinct bodies of work, all of which hold up to the highest scrutiny. He is the consummate perfectionist, never satisfied with resting upon his laurels, constantly striving to get better and better with each new project. My guess is that if you asked him what his favorite picture is, he would reply, "the next one."

As such he is a constant source of frustration for anyone who has to work with him.

"Who has the bigger ego, the artist or the curator?" he is fond of asking whenever he is in a museum setting. The fact that he feels compelled to ask such a question should give us the answer.

Those of us who struggled for several months putting together his show at the Art Institute were not slightly taken aback when we met with Koudelka and our colleagues from the Getty Museum, the next venue for the show. Josef said: "We will make the next show even better than this one." Sensing that he had stepped on a few toes, Josef added that we all must strive to get better in everything we do, never stay the same.

If you were a film producer casting the role of the quintessential eccentric, difficult artist, Koudleka would fit as the model; it's as if he walked directly out of central casting.

The day his show opened, there was a public event featuring Koudelka, Matt Witkovsky, the curator of the exhibition, and Amanda Maddox from the Getty. Josef got the rock star treatment as the museum's Fullerton Hall was filled to the rafters, SRO with people lining the aisles and sitting on the stairs. He had the crowd eating out of his hands with his typical charm mixed with occasional irascibility. Never one to pull any punches, Josef said exactly what was on his mind, even as it often came at the expense of the two curators sitting beside him.

Had I had known of Josef Koudelka while I was in art school in the late seventies, I certainly would have liked to model my life after his. To this day part of me longs to live the life of an uncompromising artist, completely devoted to his work at the expense of everything else.

Yet as with being like Mike, that's all a fantasy. Koudelka's work consumes him; he eats, sleeps and drinks photography. Fixer flows through his veins; bus, train and plane schedules are his pacemaker. The man brags that he owns only two shirts and continues at 76 years of age to be restless at being in the same place for any period of time. More than twenty years my senior, he can run circles around me.

My life by contrast is consumed by many diverse passions. I have lived in the same city all my life and for the last 13 years, (not coincidentally, the age of my eldest child), have seldom strayed more than couple hundred miles from home. I don't exactly live in the lap of luxury but I live like a millionaire compared to Josef. Contrary to what he says about himself in the Art Institute film, I don't have a trace of his courage either. Meeting Josef Koudelka for the first time, no matter who you are, you are treated as if you have been lifetime friends. The consummate man about town, Josef can converse in several languages. I witnessed him in one conversation with people of at least four different nationalities, speak without any hesitation to each person in his or her own language.

But it was when he spoke Czech to my friend Milan from Prague, that part of my life's history flashed before my eyes. It brought back the long lost conversations of my father and his brother in a language that I cannot speak, yet still remains very much a part of me. Except for Koudelka's great fame and success, he and my late uncle are almost like two peas in a pod.

Koudelka and my friend Milan. They had just met
but you'd think they were bosom buddies.

Koudelka has certainly earned enough money to slow down in his "golden years", but that just doesn't seem to be in the cards. His daughter who lives in Paris (one of three Koudelka children scattered across the globe) joined him on this trip to the States. My colleague asked her what is was like to be Josef's daughter. "He was always working" was her terse response. After he introduced me to his daughter he added: "Imagine having an asshole like me for a father."

During our two weeks together Josef expressed a great deal of genuine interest in my own children whose pictures are prominently displayed above my desk. For a brief moment I had the feeling that my conventional life was as intriguing to him as his spartan, globetrotting, earth-shattering existence was to me.

At the end of his visit, we parted with a great bear hug, exchanging thanks and our mutual respect. Josef left for Prague or Paris or London or wherever his muse would lead him. I left to watch my son play baseball.

That last day as I left for home, it occurred to me that both of us were headed exactly where we belonged.

---

The Exhibition Josef Koudelka: Nationality Doubtful, will run until September 14th in the Modern Wing of the Art Institute of Chicago.

After that it will travel to the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles where it will be on display from Novermber 11, 2014 until March 22, 2015.

Ali, Round Two

Why should they ask me to put on a uniform and go 10,000 miles from home and drop bombs and bullets on Brown people in Vietnam while so-called Negro people in Louisville are treated like dogs and denied simple human rights? No I’m not going 10,000 miles from home to help murder and burn another poor nation simply to continue the domination of white slave masters of the darker people the world over. This is the day when such evils must come to an end. I have been warned that to take such a stand would cost me millions of dollars. But I have said it once and I will say it again. The real enemy of my people is here. I will not disgrace my religion, my people or myself by becoming a tool to enslave those who are fighting for their own justice, freedom and equality. If I thought the war was going to bring freedom and equality to 22 million of my people they wouldn’t have to draft me, I’d join tomorrow. I have nothing to lose by standing up for my beliefs. So I’ll go to jail, so what? We’ve been in jail for 400 years.

-Muhammad Ali 

Like the iconic Neil Lifer photograph of Muhammad Ali standing above Sonny Liston after the infamous phantom punch that knocked down the former champ, (seen in my previous post), there's more to Ali than meets the eye.

News of his death this month caused a world wide outpouring of love and adulation for Ali who in all likelihood, was the most recognized person in the world. Appreciations of the man came from people of all races, creeds and political affiliations, not a little amazing given how polarizing and controversial he was during the first half of his life.

Yet even in death, Ali remains controversial. "I never liked Muhammad Ali" said a friend of mine, whose response I admittedly goaded out of him.  "He was a clown with a big mouth, arrogant and disrespectful to his opponents and to his many wives. He broke the law when he resisted the draft, never went to jail for it like he should have, and they forgave him as if nothing happened. Then he got to fight again, became the champion and everybody thought he was the greatest thing in the world." My friend then went on to list all the fighters he thought were better.

Unlike most of the country, my friend never got past the hard feelings many Americans had toward Ali in the sixties. Between the incessant show-boating, his association with the Nation of Islam, and his highly visible role in the Black Power movement, Ali was already a tremendously unpopular personality by 1966 among a significant number of Americans, not all of them white. The last straw for Ali detractors was his refusal to serve the country after being drafted.

Muhammad Ali knew that had he chosen to comply with the United States government and gone into the army when Uncle Sam called, as heavyweight champion of the world and a celebrity of the first magnitude around the world, he would have served miles and miles away from the front line, far out of harm's way. Had he gone into the army and accepted his cushy assignment, he would not have been stripped of his title, denied of his livelihood, prohibited from traveling abroad, arrested, convicted, threatened with imprisonment, and drawn the ire of the vast majority of Americans. Had he complied with the government, he would have been able to return to boxing when his stint in the army was over, barely missing a step, still in the prime of his career. Had Muhammad Ali gone into the army when he was drafted, no one would have thought the lesser of him.

The fact that he defied the government in such a public manner, openly declaring his preference for jail over violating his moral principles, made him a counter-culture hero.

His actions were a watershed moment in the anti-war movement. Shortly after Ali's indictment, massive public demonstrations of the burning of draft cards took place. Ali 's defying the draft and accepting prison if legal efforts failed, sent shock waves through the government who understood that while they could prosecute one man for refusing the draft, there was no way to prosecute tens of thousands of potential draft resisters.

In no time the mood of the nation soured on the Vietnam War when the very symbol of mainstream white America, Walter Cronkite declared to the world on February 27th, 1968:

...it is increasingly clear to this reporter that the only rational way out then will be to negotiate, not as victors, but as an honorable people who lived up to their pledge to defend democracy, and did the best they could.

In other words, let's cut our losses and get the hell out of Vietnam as quickly as possible, "the most respected man in America" told us.

Shortly after that, President Johnson, knowing if he lost Walter Cronkite, he lost the American people as well, announced he would not seek a second full term in office. 

Then, a little over one month after Cronkite's assessment of the war, Martin Luther King was assassinated in Memphis. 

And with that, Muhammad Ali's words found at the top of this post, eloquent as they are powerful, became prophetic. His words and actions transformed him from being merely Ali the sports hero, to Ali the instrument of social change, and ultimately, Ali the social hero.

My friend is not alone in his dissent.

In his critique of the insipid 2001 bio-pic Ali (which starred Will Smith in the title role) Michael Shelden writes:

The transformation of Ali from a great fighter to a celebrated man of conscience and social purpose has succeeded so well because the actual history of his career has been altered to reflect the kinder, gentler man of today. Unpleasant remarks or facts from the past have been swept away or excused. … 

Shelden's article was published in the January, 2002 issue of The Telegraph and is titled:  Let's not Pretend Ali was Gandhi, The writer is especially critical of Ali's association in the 1960s with Nation of Islam and its leader Elijah Muhammad whom he claims put all sorts of nasty thoughts into the boxer's head.

A more historically accurate appraisal of Ali would conclude that he was far from heroic outside the ring and was pitifully misused by his masters in the Nation of Islam. For his purposes, Elijah hijacked the impressionable young man's career and filled his head with racist nonsense. 

Under the influence of Elijah Mohammad — who preached that blacks should refuse to integrate with "white devils" — Ali made a point of dating only black women and lashed out at men and women who engaged in interracial sex. In an interview with Playboy, he declared: "A black man should be killed if he's messing with a white woman." When the interviewer asked about black women crossing the colour barrier, Ali responded: "Then she dies. Kill her, too." 

He continues:

It's unlikely that a white athlete who made such remarks would receive the praise that (Director of the film "Ali") Michael Mann heaps on Ali. He says that the fighter "personified racial pride and self-knowledge". The Playboy journalist, who interviewed the boxer, was closer to the mark when he observed of his subject: "You're beginning to sound like a carbon copy of a white racist." …

Shelden also blames the Black Muslim organization for using Ali to the point that:

By the time he finally broke free of the old Nation of Islam, in the 1970s, his career was in its last stages. He continued to fight long past his prime, in part to recover the money and time he had lost in his misadventures with the Black Muslims.

You can read into that Sheden's belief that the Black Muslims were directly responsible for Ali's descent into Parkinson's Disease, likely caused by too many blows to the head, especially in his later fights.

Shelden is right in saying that today, most of us have all but forgotten the messy details of Muhammad Ali's life. Years of sympathy toward his battle with Parkinson's and the heroic way he unabashedly displayed the toll it took on his body, have turned us soft on the man.

What Shelden fails to take into account is that the public's opinion of Ali had already taken a 180 degree turn way back in the 1970s, when every controversial detail of his life was common public knowledge. Unlike George Foreman, Ali didn't have to reinvent himself to pull off that change, it was America who changed, not Ali.

Here is an excerpt from a 1968 interview with William F. Buckley on his program Firing Line. This clip comes at the end of the show where Ali takes questions from the audience:




Buckley would later admit being moved by Ali's very persuasive argument for his efforts in support of freedom, justice and equality for his people, (if not his adherence to the teachings of Elijah Muhammad). If the arch-conservative William F. Buckley could be so moved, it's not surprising that much of America could be as well. It was a different time than the one in which we live today; a time when public discourse mattered, and free, open and honest debate respecting all points of view was not only encouraged, but considered essential to a healthy society.

Michael Shelden's 2002 deconstruction of Muhammad Ali, speaks volumes about the writer and his times, but little about Ali and his. His piece is a perfect example of the way we demand the press today scrutinize every detail of a celebrity's life to find tidbits of evidence proving they are not worthy. Fortunately for all of us, Ali came of age in a time when the public was not willing and eager to tear down a public figure's character at the slightest hint of an inconvenient thought, word or deed.

As a result, America, torn in pieces in the sixties, perhaps even more than it is today, was able to heal the wounds caused by the racial divide and the Vietnam War, at least for a while. And it was Muhammad Ali whose strong, articulate and persuasive voice, along with the power of his huge personality that helped lead the charge.

After his battles with the government were settled, (the U.S. Supreme Court overturned all charges against him in 1971). it was that larger than life persona, the charm along with the bravado, that attracted the public to Ali. When he finally got a shot to regain his title against the great Joe Frazier in 1971, that fight would be appropriately dubbed, The Fight of the Century. Public sentiment was split between the champ Frazier, and the challenger Ali, although it's likely that more whites supported Frazier, and more blacks supported Ali. As was his nature, Ali stirred the pot to boiling over when he called Frazier, who was also black, "the white people's champion."  Naturally much of the hyperbole out of his mouth was intended to promote interest in the fight as well as to trap his opponent into a tempest of fury which would ultimately destroy him in the ring as it did Sonny Liston. Unlike Liston, Ali found his match in Frazier. The fight lived up to all the hype, fifteen rounds of back and forth, Frazier's intensity versus Ali's athleticism. In the end it was Frazier's devastating left hook that settled the bout, giving Ali his first professional loss, but putting him back at the center of his profession, and back in the public's eye, where he would remain for the rest of his life. Ali would later fight Joe Frazier two more times, winning both contests, one by decision, the other by a technical knockout.

Recalling those days, I'd say Muhammad Ali truly became the people's champion in 1974 when he regained the championship in Kinshasa, Zaire, (today's Democratic Republic of Congo) by beating George Foreman in the fight that bore the name, "the Rumble in the Jungle". The spontaneous love and support shown by the people of that country toward Ali was infectious. One of the most enduring images of Muhammad Ali is being mobbed everywhere he went in that central African nation by people chanting "Ali bumaye" (Ali kill him).

 Like the first Liston fight ten years before, Ali was a huge underdog to the intimidating Foreman who had absolutely destroyed Joe Frazier in 1973 to become champ. Unlike Liston, Foreman didn't give away any size advantage to Ali, he was actually one inch taller,  had a 3" reach advantage. and was seven years Ali's junior. Once again people thought Ali wouldn't last more than a few rounds with the champ but Ali still had a few tricks up his sleeve. Not able to dance his way out of trouble anymore, Ali early on engaged Foreman in the center of the ring. Knowing he could never outlast the champ in a slugfest, Ali retreated to the ropes where he absorbed all of Foreman's fury while letting the ropes, which had been loosened exactly for that purpose, absorb some of the beating. When he wasn't protecting himself in that fashion, he was grabbing Foreman by the neck (an infraction the referee let him get away with), forcing Foreman to expend energy pushing away to free himself. After letting Foreman tire himself out in this pushing and punching frenzy for several rounds, the still relatively fresh Ali went on the offensive, knocking Foreman out in the eighth round. In doing so Ali became the first heavyweight boxer to regain the championship.

In his prime during a period known as the greatest era in boxing's heavyweight division, Ali beat all of the best boxers of that era, Sonny Liston twice, Joe Frazier twice, and George Foreman once. All three of those men make practically every list of top ten heavyweights of all time. Not surprisingly, Muhammad Ali's name is at the top of those lists.

The score had finally been settled. All the talk, all the bombast, all the preening and bragging had been fulfilled. The great pitcher Dizzy Dean was famous for saying, "It ain't braggin' if you can back it up."  In beating George Foreman, Ali could finally back up everything he said about himself.

But it came at a tremendous cost. One of the saddest things in the world of sports is watching a great champion who does not know when to quit. Ali beat Foreman because of his tremendous ability to take a punch. By using his patented "rope-a-dope" style, the abuse he willingly took from Foreman, from Frazier especially in the classic "Thrilla in Manilla" and perhaps most emphatically from Larry Holmes in 1980, no doubt contributed to the Parkinson's Disease that ravaged his body and would ultimately take his life. He could have and probably should have quit after each of those fights, but didn't. Holmes, Ali's former sparring partner, claimed to have held back in his fight with Ali. Nevertheless, the beating he inflicted upon his hero caused that world champion to break down in tears after the fight that should never have taken place. Medical records released much later revealed that Ali was already in the early stages of Parkinson's at the time of the fight. What's more, Ali had one more fight before he hung up the gloves for good, against Canadian Boxer Trevor Berbick which ended for him in defeat by unanimous decision. That made Ali's final professional record, 56 wins, 37 of them by knockout, and 5 losses.

By the time he retired, Ali exhibited very obvious slurring of the speech and other, less obvious physical symptoms. Public appearances diminished but he never entirely disappeared from the public eye even as his condition worsened, lending his support to numerous causes around the world and sent on diplomatic missions on behalf of the US government, some of which resulted in the release of hostages.

Photograph by Vince Caligiuri

Ali's most famous public appearance in his post-boxing life took place in Atlanta, 1996 during the opening ceremony of the Summer Olympic Games. Great secrecy surrounded the name of the person who would be given the honor of lighting the Olympic Torch, and Ali brought down the house when he stepped onto the stage to do the deed. There was hardly a dry eye around the world among those watching the ceremony on TV when they saw the former champ, well into the throes of Parkinson's bravely hold the torch up high despite the severe trembling of his arm. Of all the heroic performances in the great man's life, this certainly has to rate among the best of them.

As we've seen, great champions are judged by the quality of their adversaries. In boxing. Muhammad Ali faced some of the greatest champions in history. Equal in adversarial quality to Sonny Liston, Joe Frazier and George Foreman all put together was the United States government who attempted to crush the man for doing what he believed was right. His resounding victory in that battle ultimately gave him the respect and credibility to transcend the sporting world which originally brought him to our attention. The scourge of racism was another adversary that he battled first through the influence of Elijah Muhammad and the Nation of Islam, before he discovered he could do it all on his own simply by telling people about his experiences being the champion of the world yet still occasionally barred from using a public bathroom in his own country.  The greatest adversary of all proved to be the illness that consumed him for the last half of his life. Despite that, Muhammad Ali made the most out of the years given to him and the limitations his physical condition placed upon him. He could have easily retreated out of the limelight, leaving  people with the memories of the young, handsome, articulate champion, rather than a victim of a debilitating disease. By allowing himself to be seen in his compromised state, he made it perfectly clear that living with diminished capabilities did not mean living a diminished life.

Finally, the latest controversy to the best of my knowledge, surfaced for the first time after Ali's death. Many tributes made the claim that Muhammad Ali "transcended both race and religion." I have to plead ignorance on this one as frankly I don't know what it means to "transcend race or religion." Sportscaster Chris Myers cast some light on that phrase this way in a tweet:

When you saw #Ali you didn't see color you didn't see religion you saw a gentle man who was a strong fighter, a Champion you could believe in.

Having lived through the sixties and seventies and knowing a thing or two about Ali, the thing that strikes me about that comment is that the writer is either too young to remember him, wasn't paying attention, or has a severe case of historical amnesia. In his day, Muhammad Ali was the very embodiment of the African American Muslim. It's true that he mellowed as he got older, and expanded his sphere of concerns, but race and religion never took a back seat. The headline of an article by Kara Brown for the online magazine Jezebel tells it like it is: "If You Don't See Blackness, You Didn't See Muhammad Ali."

If by chance you are too young, weren't paying attention, or are suffering from amnesia, and you still believe that Ali transcended race and religion, by all means watch the Buckley/Ali interview. in its entirety.

Here is how Kara Brown concludes her article:

There is no deep and true respect for Muhammad Ali that does not also come with a deep and true respect for his blackness. And to love Muhammad Ali, you must also love his love for his people. Those who attempt to draw attention away from Ali’s blackness—whether deliberately, carelessly, or by delicate omission—do so because they either cannot or choose not to love black people. They can’t understand that Ali’s blackness was integral to what made him great. A white Ali would not have been possible, nor would he have meant nearly as much to the world.

With that I agree ninety nine percent. However playing the devil's advocate, I'm not convinced that all the white folks who claim Ali transcended race do not love him for his blackness, or understand that his blackness is what made him great. Brown herself brings up the African American poet Maya Angelou who in 2001 wrote that Muhammad Ali "belonged to everyone." She says:

...his impact recognizes no continent, no language, no colour, no ocean. It belongs to us all just as Muhammad Ali belongs to us all.

Muhammad Ali is, or at least should be loved and respected by anyone who values equality, justice, and the dignity of all human beings. The same can be said of people such as Lech Wałęsa, Mother Theresa or Aung San Suu Kyi. On the other hand, I've never heard anyone say Wałęsa transcended his race, Mother Theresa her religion, or Aung San Suu Kyi her gender.

Clearly, saying that Muhammad Ali transcended race and religion, is a poor choice of words. What can be said of him is that he is a beloved hero who fought many valiant battles in the name of justice. Through his magnetic personality, his biting sense of humor, his unrelenting self-confidence, his unmatched courage in fighting all the battles he encountered, his dedication to telling the truth, and perhaps above all, his blackness, his religion and the love of his people, Muhammad Ali brought people all over the world together like no one else could.

If I had to sum up the man in a limited number of words, tweet style, I'd use the words I used to sum up the life of another great hero of mine, Vaclav Havel, who was never accused of transcending the Czech blood that ran through his veins.

Like Havel, Ali was not a saint by a long shot, nonetheless he is a man for all seasons.


Click here to return to Round One.