Muhammad Ali Et Al

Muhammad Ali

Everybody now is paying tribute to Muhammad Ali and I would like to add my own. Boxing is not a sport I particularly like but Ali seemed somehow to take the brutality out of it. At a time when heavyweight boxers were generally stationary behemoths, slugging it out in more or less the same place until one fell over, he really did “flit like a butterfly”. It seemed at the time a totally new approach to heavywieght boxing,

Ali also endowed all of us with a battery of brilliant quotes. My all-time favourite is when he entered a restaurant in the Amercian south, Alabama I believe, and was told “we don't serve niggers here”. To which he apparently replied: “That's OK, I don't eat them”. I also love his quote: “Live every day as though you think it is going to be your last because one day you will be right”.

Apart from being supreme in his sport he was a great showman but one who never sold out. Changing his name from Cassius Clay to Muhammad Ali, whatever you think of that, was never going to win him more friends or sponsorship in the USA. He did it because he believed in doing it, whatever the consequences for him personally.

Alice In Wonderland

I've decided that the UK EU referendum has to be classified as an Alice in Wonderland happening, or maybe a part of cloud cuckoo land, but it is not alone. Donald Trump's election campaign in the USA strikes me as another. The thought of the most powerful nation on Earth being run by Trump appals me. They couldn't, could they? Above all not at a time when Russia's Putin is wandering the globe like a malevolent delinquent, spoiling for a fight. I can find solace only in the fact that the same thought also appals all my Amercian friends; I just hope that there are enough of their ilk to stop that happening. Not that the UK is short of its own clowns seeking power rather than a circus ring in which to perform, Farage and Johnson being names that come immediately to mind. Where now are the statesmen of stature that we once used to have, the Bevans, the Churchills, even the Macmillans and the Wilsons? It is definitely becoming an Alice in Wonderland world. “Chop off their heads!”; they were never connected to any brains anyway.

Life After Death

A stray thought that cropped up out of conversation with Daniel over dinner this evening (and something of an Alice in Wonderland one): if anyone could definitively prove that there was no life after death they might just be doing the greatest service to man. Think about it. No more martyrs; what would be the point? No more twenty virgins; even then, it can't take that long to devirginise 20 of them and then what are you going to do for the rest of eternity? No more accepting suffering in this world with the prospect of being rewarded in the next; alleviate it. Religions could still have their gods to worship, just no eternal life; sorry about that.  What would you do differently?

Well you might, just might, get on with making life in this world more pleasant, not for future reward, but simply because life more pleasant is better than life less pleasant, collectively. That's not hard to agree with. And as for reasons for helping others, that already gives a lot of satisfaction to many people, so why not? And as for the real bastards of this world, well we've got them anyway so that wouldn't change but they could be seen simply not as sinners (who will pay for it hereafter) but as making life less pleasant for the rest of us; so maybe we'd do something more about them. Just a thought, an Alice in Wonderland thought.

(Can't think of a theorem at the moment but I'm working on it.)