VARIETY
459
Nat Hentoff
A Columbia University student asks Robert Kennedy: "Would
you pilot a plane and bomb North Vietnam in good. c,onscience?"
The Senator's first answer is: "I would not be in the air if drafted
but on the ground. I would be in the Navy." The banalitiy of evil
again. Later the Senator adds: "I will do anything my country wants
me to do. I would like to go back to the Navy, where I have been
before. But I will go where my country sends me." Poor Eichmann.
You got hung for doing just that. Life is not fair.
Muhammad Ali says in answer, not to a question, but to an order,
that he is not "going ten thousand miles from here to help murder
and kill and bum another poor people." And so he is no longer fit to
be champion since he will not kill for his country. But Freedom
House, which surely "supported" the judgment of the Nuremberg
Tribunal, issues no proclamation of honor for Muhammad Ali.
In–
stead it denounces Martin Luther King who also will not kill.
The men of Freedom House are all honorable men. And they too
have become Eichmanns. But Muhammad Ali has freed himself. Even
in prison he'll be free. Ah, but he is ignorant because he is a Muslim
or he is a Muslim because he is ignorant. But he is innocent of
murder. Of how many other Americans can that be said?
John Hollander
Contemporary American war and domestic peace have driven
nobility and heroism into strange hiding places, and the few deeds
one must admire bec,ome messier and less esthetic. I have little interest
in, and less knowledge of, boxing; now more than ever I miss the
presence of the late
A.
J.
Liebling and his technical expertise and ear
for the publicly meretricious. I am only equipped to consider Muham–
mad Ali's current situation as one more sad and absurd instance of
our continuing attempt to launch significant personal action onto a
sea of bad faith and tasteless paradox.
