Monday Morning Music Ministry

6-13-16

This seems to be the year of celebrity deaths. To those of my generation, we read of people we sometimes did not realize were still alive, TV stars of our childhood. Singers. I will never get over Merle Haggard’s passing. I met him a number of times, but his work would have been a part of my life if I never had.

Celebrities are dying and in predictable cycles, a period of public consternation often is followed by the unsurprising “news” that drugs were the murder weapons, so to speak. I have yet to hear one saddened fan or, say, TV commentator, treat such news of lethal overdoses as anything but a sorry mistake by the decedent.

Some deaths, the visible ones, are under scrutiny because we should pause over the self-infliction of drugs and dangerous lifestyles. As I said, our society does not draw lessons, so these useless suicides (as we may see them; all suicides being horrible), routinely roll forward, festooning every fourth or fifth cover of People.

Some people kill themselves with drugs, some with unsafe sex; many with many assorted and, sadly, time-tested paths of drink, gluttony, greed, and so forth. Then there is the gray area of practices we know are self-destructive if not outright deadly. California just passed a law allowing people to choose suicide if two doctors sign off, and people administer their own poison. California is not the first state, nor is the United States the first country, to legalize suicide.

Then there are the people like Muhammad Ali.

My friend Milt Priggee, the editorial cartoonist from Washington State, drew a brilliant cartoon after Ali died, a switch on the famous photo of Ali in the ring after a knockdown of Sonny Liston, savagely growling over his opponent, almost inhuman. But in the cartoon, Ali was on the mat, and the victorious fighter was the figure of Death, with the label “29,000 head blows induced Parkinson’s.”

Would Ali have quit boxing if he knew Parkinson’s awaited? He grew up among old-time fighters who were “walking dead,” insensate, laughingly called “punch drunk.” The last 30 years, or more, of his life, were wracked by physical and mental debilitation. Junior Seau, whom I met in San Diego and seemed to all the world like an affable and contented retired football hero… shot himself to death, and his autopsy revealed Chronic Brain Damage, a common condition to pro football players. Today, many football players refuse to allow their sons to play football. A major movie, Concussion, is devoted to the sport of personal destruction.

I met Muhammad Ali once. My college invited him to speak in the late 1960s, and I was on the Programming Board so was able to spend a few moments with him. I was caught up in the audience’s frenzy after his bombastic speech – actually, a lot devoted to black self-sufficiency – and I was among those who wanted just to pat his back as he walked past. He was charismatic.

A few years later I was comics editor of a newspaper syndicate in Chicago when a black cartooning aspirant came to my office with an idea for a daily cartoon based on the quotations of Ali. I thought there were commercial possibilities in the concept and went to the law firm Sidley&Austin, which represented the boxer. As I remember the sad incident, his reps were interested but did not like the work of the artist, and were willing to discuss going forward with some other cartoonist… with no compensation to the fellow whose idea this was. I declined to proceed. (I am reasonably certain that the samples never went before Ali, but I do not know. It is interesting to note that a few year later, the future Michelle Obama was an associate on staff of Sidley&Austin; and Barack Obama worked one summer there.)

Not much personal, but it is interesting to note that until the recent canonization, there was legitimate debate about whom among Jack Dempsey or any of a number of heavyweights including Ali, was the best pound-for-pound boxer of all time. In recent eulogies, little was made of his refusal to register for the military draft. When referred to, people now often cite Ali’s courage and convictions. He was, however, sentenced to five years in prison, overturned in a virtual conscientious-objector judgment after he claimed that 10 per cent of his life would be boxing, and 90 per cent to be spent as a Muslim minister.

I come not to criticize Ali but to think of him in perspective. We are hearing of acts of kindness, for example a virtual tug-of-war to give a hitchhiker money for the Bible the man offered in thanks. I hope these stories are true; and they seem to be of a kind with other celebrities performing kindnesses. A Somali woman recently braved retaliation from two groups by calling Ali a great fighter but not a great man, that when he converted from Christianity to Islam “he essentially sold his soul to the same kind of [Muslim] racists who rounded up his African forefathers and sold them into slavery… and are still doing so in the Middle East today.”

That gets close to something that always repelled me when I was young, and since; even as the world found his routines compelling. “I am the greatest.” Of course he meant the greatest boxer, but he didn’t stop there, and neither have his acolytes. The hagiography, fertilized and insulated by the horrible Parkinson’s Disease that plagued him, will continue. He will be a role model whose main achievement was punching people senseless; who refused the uniform of the nation that nurtured him; whose legacy is seen in the illiterate jabber of interviewees in the Louisville neighborhood of his youth. That is to say, black youths, supposedly inspired by The Greatest all these decades, are poorer, more illiterate, and specialize in illegitimacy, in ever-greater numbers. Not the legacy that is ascribed to him.

But what specifically repelled me, and still saddens me, is the choice he made to turn his back on Jesus. Worse, to cast himself as the “Greatest” when humility and a recognition of Jesus’s greatness was there for the taking. And especially as his adopted Islam widely is being associated with barbarity and slaughter. LIKE AT THE HOMOSEXUAL NIGHTCLUB IN ORLANDO.

God “is the great ‘I am’”; and His Son Jesus Christ – not a prophet but the Son of the Living God – is Advocate (1 John 2:1); Almighty (Rev. 1:8; Mt. 28:18); Alpha and Omega (Rev. 1:8; 22:13); Author of Life (Acts 3:15); Author and Perfecter of our Faith (Heb. 12:2); Author of Salvation (Heb. 2:10); Beginning and End (Rev. 22:13); Bread of Life (John 6:35; 6:48); Christ (1 John 2:22); Creator (John 1:3); Faithful Witness (Rev. 1:5); Heir of all things (Heb. 1:2); High Priest (Heb. 2:17); Horn of Salvation (Luke 1:69); Image of God (2 Cor. 4:4); Lamb of God (John 1:29); Lord of All (Acts 10:36); Only Begotten Son of God (John 1:18; 1 John 4:9); Our Righteousness (1 Cor. 1:30); Prince of Peace (Isa. 9:6); Savior (Eph. 5:23; Titus 1:4; 3:6; 2 Pet. 2:20); Truth (John 1:14; 14:6); Wonderful Counselor (Isa. 9:6); The Word (John 1:1).

We can all “float like butterflies.” As with the lowly caterpillars, we can be transformed into beautiful creatures, through Christ Jesus, the one and only Greatest.

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Click: Great Is Thy Faithfulness

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