Icon of the dissidents
America’s attempt to use Muhammad Ali to sell its policies to Muslim countries will not work
The Guardian, 4 February 2002
When Hollywood bosses were asked by the Bush administration to do their bit in the “war on terrorism”, they readily signed up for the new crusade. In particular, they promised to “stress efforts to enhance the perception of America around the world”. In the end they came up with the notion of getting much-loved former heavyweight champion Muhammad Ali to sell US policy abroad, especially in Muslim countries. According to the New York Times, studio executives are convinced that “Mr Ali will have special credibility with an audience believed to be deeply suspicious of the United States.”
This won’t be the first time Ali has acted as an overseas representative of the US government. In 1980, at Jimmy Carter’s behest, he toured Africa in a doomed attempt to drum up support for the US boycott of the Moscow Olympics, a protest against the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. Then, as now, Ali’s totemic value for the US establishment lay precisely in the widely known fact that for some years he had spectacularly defied that establishment, risking jail in the process.
Until the early 1970s, Ali was far more popular outside the US than within. Here was an American celebrity who had explicitly rejected his national identity in favour of a global one. By refusing to “go 10,000 miles from home and drop bombs and bullets on brown people”, he had put his money, and much more, where his mouth was. It was an act of solidarity that secured for Ali a uniquely international following, as well as vilification and state persecution.
Ali was long ago reappropriated to the American fold, a depoliticised icon of personal courage. The makers of Ali, the $105m biopic starring Will Smith, promised to restore the controversial edge to their hero. The film was in the can well before September 11, and one can imagine the growing discomfort of studio bosses as they contemplated marketing this celebratory tale of a black American who converts to Islam and then refuses to serve his country in time of war.
Despite a strong opening on Christmas Day, the long-gestated epic soon foundered at the domestic box office, pushed aside by blockbusters and comedies, and easily overtaken by Black Hawk Down: “It’s the biggest Martin Luther King opening weekend ever,” gushed Sony Pictures’ marketing president, referring to the latter’s big takings over the national holiday named for the apostle of non-violence (and scorching critic of US foreign policy). The customary absence of any hint of irony in the corporate cheerleading, as much as the success of Black Hawk Down itself, says a great deal about the current mood in the US, and the manner in which an amnesiac culture is being exploited to generate popular enthusiasm for overseas military action.
Commercial ill-timing is not the only problem facing Ali. The film meticulously recreates major episodes in the fighter’s career, but little context is supplied, and viewers not familiar with the period may wonder what the fuss is all about. Although the champ’s refusal to fight in Vietnam is portrayed as heroic, there’s a reluctance to scrutinise the politics of the war or the movement against it.
Although Ali is largely faithful to facts, it performs a telling sleight of hand when it comes to the detail of Malcolm X’s break with the Nation of Islam. In the film, Malcolm says that Elijah Muhammad has suspended him because of his desire to support the civil rights movement in the wake of the murder of four black children at a church in Alabama. In fact, Malcolm was suspended because he chose to place the traumatic assassination of John F Kennedy in the context of American intervention in the Congo and Vietnam – and described it, to the shock of nearly everyone in the country at the time, as a case of “the chickens coming home to roost”. Well before September 11, it seems, even the more liberal voices within the American mainstream found it difficult to confront certain features of recent US history.
Once upon a time, Muhammad Ali toured the world as a defiantly unofficial ambassador for a dissident America. He spoke for a nation-within-a-nation reaching out to others in foreign lands. But, as in 1980, he is likely to have little impact as an official ambassador, and presumably apologist, for the White House, the state department and the Pentagon. The American voices that have crossed borders and touched large global constituencies have been the passionately unofficial ones – singers, demotic writers, political prophets or fast-talking heavyweight boxers. Muffle them in the stars and stripes, and the rest of the world soon turns off.
That the managers of the US propaganda effort don’t seem to be aware of this reality (their 50s forebears fighting the cold war by cultural proxy were more sophisticated), is yet another troubling symptom of the narcisism of today’s US elite – and of the national self-image they are currently selling, with such apparent success, to their fellow Americans.
