Headline, October 15 2021/ HONOURS : ''' '' MUHAMMAD ALI MONUMENT '' '''

HONOURS : 

''' '' MUHAMMAD ALI

MONUMENT '' '''

 

ON THE WORLD STUDENTS SOCIETY : It is the greatest of honor and privilege, bestowed on me by the Global Founder Framers to name one Master Module to the memory of Muhammad Ali.

Hereby, the main ''defiance module'' of The World Students Society will henceforth be referred to as ''Muhamamd Ali Module'' to the delight of the eternity to come. To this, I set forth my hand.

Welcome, all, to The World Students Society, the exclusive and eternal ownership of every student in the world.

WHY THE WORLD JUST CAN'T QUIT MUHAMMAD ALI : Mohammad Ali is our very, very favourite 'combatant -saint.'

THERE ARE GREATER SAINTS IN AMERICAN HISTORY - whether Abraham Lincoln or Martin Luther King Jr.' but few have generated quite as many books, films, documentaries and dorm room posters.

I reread ''Reflections'' recently after watching Ken Burn's new eight-hour documentaries on Muhammed Ali. For three generations of Americans, Ali has symbolized righteous defiance, charm and courageous conviction.

We in America prefer the combatant saints who fought injustice over the kindly ones who humbly served the less fortunate. Ali is an exemplar of all that. 

Every part of his life has been examined in depth, repurposed and then repurposed again.

There's the childhood incident when his bike was stolen, which, in turn, introduced him to his first boxing gym; the syndicate of white Louisville businessmen who controlled his early career; the relationship with Malcolm X; the ''What's my name?'' fight with Ernie Terrell; the -

The ''I ain't got no quarrel with them Viet Cong'' quote; the three-and-a-half year exile; the symbiotic and often times parasitic relationship with Howard Cosell; the triumph against George Foreman in Zaire; the near death attrition of Thrilla in manila; the tragedy of the Larry Holmes fight; and the onset of the Parkinson's that would ultimately silence him.

All these are canon. With a few notable exceptions - Mark Kram's book ''Ghosts of Manila,'' in particular, which examines Ali's brutal treatment of Joe Frazier before their third fight in Manila-Aliology does not follow Prwell's rule about saints. The story may shift slightly, but the biographic fame does not.

The entire Ali canon is in Mr. Burns's ''Muhammed Ali'' along with a lively cast of talking heads that stray a little beyond the Aliologists who show up in every Ali documentary.

[The former boxer Michael Bentt is quietly the star of the film.] Mr. Burns is a master cataloger of consensus, especially across a broad sweep of history and so it would make sense that his film would follow those conventions.

So, let's get the plaudits out of the way : '' Muhammad Ali'' is the most thorugh Ali documentary to date and certainly worth the nearly eight-hour runtime.

The best Ali film will always be ''When We Were Kings,'' which glows with a wealth of archival footage, and provides an unusually intimate look at Ali in the weeks before the Rumble in the Jungle with Foreman.

Mr. Burns, as he did with ''Baseball,'' ''Jazz'' and ''Country Music,'' has much broader ambitions. I admire Mr. Burns work, especially ''The Vietnam War'' which I see as his masterpiece, but at his core, he approaches filmmaking in the same way that Encyclopedia Britannica once approached the world of knowledge :

The goal isn't necessarily to make the most provocative or artistic film, but rather to make a heavy object that collects, and then dutifully reports the consensus at the time.

That said, this is not a dull film. Mr. Burns, despite the length of his films, has a sense of what matters and what doesn't, which makes ''Muhammad Ali'' immensely watachable.

There have long been three questions in particular that get tossed whenever the sainthood starts to feel a bit too orthodox or oppressive, and Mr. Burns to his credit examines them all.

Ali was ever an athlete with a loyal following of famous writers, whether Norman Mailer, Hunter S Thompson or Gay Talese, who asked the reader to believe that his speed, grace and bravdo inside the also somehow political, which, I suppose they were, but not in any prescriptive way.

The odd thing about American sainthood is that we seem to prefer those who, like Ali and Jackie Robinson, did not engage directly in the dirty world of politics, but rather stood as trail blazers or icons in sports in Hollywood.

But perhaps that shouldn't be so surprising. Sainthood has always been about repeating images, whether on candles, stained glass or gilded icons.

As an amateur Aliologist myself, I've come to the conclusion that the man and his ideas matter much less than the accumulation of his image in photographs and video.

There are already too many Ali films, but I imagine there will be dozen more because Aliology is, in the end, a visual medium - beautiful, defiant and ultimately battered.

His face and his voice in those clips you've seen over and over again are, in many ways, the country's collective coping mechanism for the shame of Jim Crow and the Vietnam War.

Ali is the beautiful alternative.

The Honor and Serving of the Latest Global Operational Research on Saints, and Icons to the world. continues. The World Students Society thanks author Jay Caspian Kang.

With most respectful dedication to the great living and live memory of Muhammad Ali, and then Students, Professors and Teachers of the world. See Ya all prepare and register for Great Global Elections on The World Students Society : wssciw.blogspot.com and Twitter - !E-WOW! - The Ecosystem 2011 :

Good Night and God Bless

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