Weak Punches

How well does actor Will Smith portray Muhammad Ali? Michael Mann's Ali has been out for more than two weeks -- the film opened Dec. 25 -- and in the time since, the single overriding concern of reviewers has been how well the actor does or does not capture the essence of The Champ. How did Smith do? Well, not well, horribly, fantastically ... Take your pick. Frankly, we've heard that question far too often.

A more serious question the movie raises has hardly been asked at all, namely: How well does the current moment emulate the Ali years?

Earl Ofari Hutchinson, in a column for the Black World Today he recalls the Ali era this way: "In those years, Ali's greatest foe was not Joe Frazier, George Foreman, or Sonny Liston, it was the US government." In 1971, Hutchinson reports, he and other Black students invited Muhammad Ali to speak on their campus. The speaker arrived "followed by a small nest of FBI agents," he says.

"During his short speech in the campus free speech area, they took notes, and snapped pictures of those in the crowd. Wherever he went, FBI agents tracked his every move. Ali became a prime target of the government the moment he publicly announced he had joined the Nation of Islam in 1962, and was pals with Malcolm X. For decades, the Nation had been the target of the FBI's super-secret and illegal, domestic spy program that targeted liberal, left, and especially black groups and leaders."

Ali was, aside from the world's best boxer, an articulate, popular, anti-establishment hero who was persecuted by a racist, war-mongering, anti-free speech FBI.

Mann's Ali lays out the basics of the story: Ali was put under round-the-clock surveillance, wiretapped even as he whispered sweet nothings into his (various) loved-ones' ears. Indicted for political reasons, he was threatened with imprisonment, fined and denied the right to travel (his passport was seized.)

It's a measure of how carefully "art" and "entertainment" is sectioned off from politics and analysis in contemporary U.S. media, that a standard Internet search turns up no articles that compare the Ali era to the current one.

How does the Bush/Ashcroft War Against Terrorism period compare? A year into the second Bush administration, we're in another war, and another race- and religion-panicked climate. Again, the nation is divided, with African Americans notably less impressed with the presidential performance (25 percent less, according to one Gallup poll), and less won over to a foreign war. Today is different for sure -- for one thing, the "differences" in the land are ubiquitously denied; dissent is simply silenced and covered up.

Some similarities remain: today's Attorney General came to office despite a known record of racism and race-baiting. His Justice Department is pursuing a race-driven surveillance and detention program, targeting men by race, nation of origin and creed.

Today, thanks to the USA PATRIOT Act, most of the FBI's wiretapping power is Congressionally-given, which is to say legal, but the distinction is hardly a comforting one.

In 1971, a unanimous Supreme Court tossed out Muhammad Ali's conviction for resisting induction and held his exemption from the draft was sincere, based on legitimate religious beliefs. It's hard to imagine an American Muslim receiving Supreme Court support today for refusing to fight in Bush's religiously-charged campaign. (And it's worth noting that if formal conscientious objections have been raised recently, they've certainly failed to fascinate the press.)

And lest we forget, today's chief justice, William Rehnquist, has a history going back three decades and carrying through to December 2000 of active participation in the suppression of the Black vote. (Rehnquist was only an associate justice in '71).