Power

Here's what power looks like

I got to shake Muhammed Ali’s hand when I was a kid, and I met George Bush a five years ago, and you’d think the two events wouldn’t have much to do with each other.

Thanks to some weird connections and that fact that the Champ has family in the suburbs, one evening my dad piled us into the Ford and drove us all up to the old Chicago Amphitheater.

Or someplace that looked just that big and bustlingly urban to a suburban and pre-teen driftglass. Maybe the Blackstone. Maybe the Shriner’s. Hey, what the Hell did I know: Chicago was Gotham City.

Anyway, there were a billion or so people there, and we were all Very Excited because even the little gaggle of us, threadbare and geeky as we were, knew who Ali was. My Dad – my Catholic, Nixon-Republican Dad – was a huge fan.

We were an alien suburban transplant crop, painfully white and rural...and liberal, except Dad. We watched Batman and Bozo’s Circus and Ray Raynor & Friends. Family Classics on Sunday and “It’s The Great Pumpkin, Charley Brown” every Halloween, even when the year the TV blew out and we had borrow one. We who knew dick about the Cubs or the Bulls or the Bears, but were allowed to stay up late to watch moon shots...we nonetheless always watched Ali box when we could, and caught him whenever he showed up on TV.

This was probably early 70’s, when people believed that Ali was past his prime, and that if he ever got into the ring with a real Godzilla, all the dance and quicksilver moves in the world wouldn't save him. Zaire was still ahead. This was before he decided to grow that Bad 70’s Moustache, before he fought nobodies on their way up or down. Before the brain damage and the Parkenson’s. He was Pure Ali, as big as a building, casually radiating enough energy to light up the Handcock Building.

And then I got to shake his hand, which was nothing so much like having a deflated football alight and swallow my hand up to the wrist and then float away.

It was just a moment and then it was over, but it has stayed with me all these years for a simple reason: at that moment I got my first clear lesson in how a strong man wields power.

This was the very man, and using the very same hand with which he would soon drop Foreman like 210 lbs of sledge-hammered beef in October of 1974, effectively ending his career. And even in that little exchange, I could dimly understand a little about how careful a powerful man has to be in the world. Knowing the difference between being in the ring and shaking a child’s hand. When to unload and when to proceed gingerly.

It gave him grace. It’s one of the things that made him great. Foreman was the prohibitive favorite to win in Zaire, and he was a helluva terrifying monster to behold. If you only know George Foreman as the cherubic vendor of reasonably priced meat patty immolators ...think Mike Tyson.

Strong? Insanely so, but who ever wanted Mike Tyson to win? When was Tyson ever the sentimental favorite? Like deranged, ear-ripping, batshit crazy Mike Tyson, as strong as he was – as undoubtedly gifted as he was – people rooted for him to fail.

It’s notoriously easy to hate powerful men and women, but the decisive factor will always be character, and since power can do what it will, the test of power is always restraint. How and when you don’t use it. That is the difference between a powerful man, and a weak man with power.

A weak man with power, wields it like a club, casually beating anyone that stands in his way to a pulp, full of a coward’s confidence that his weapon will keep him safe forever from the consequences of his stupidity.

He is overweeningly arrogant, not confident. He is brutal, just because he can get away with brutality, not merciful, even though he could blast your skull to atoms if he chose to.

The weak man with power is like a drunk with a shotgun and raging paranoia.

Like Bogie sez in The Big Sleep: “My, my, my. Such a lot of guns around town and so few brains. You know, you’re the second guy I’ve met today that seems to think a gat in the hand means the world by the tail.”

The President of the United States, George Walker Bush, is a weak man. A weak, mean, spoiled man who has spent his much of his life dumb as a sack of lugnuts, careless, detached, knee-walking drunk into one pile of shit after another only to have Daddy and Daddy’s friends winch him out, hose him down, fill his pockets back up with cash and send him toddling along his way.

At some point this drunk-to-fuckup-to-bailout-to-drunk-again cycle apparently got to be de rigueur enough that GW started thinking, hey...
...Maybe it was a Miracle!
Maybe he was Special!
Maybe he was Infallible!

Easy enough to swagger along like the fake cowboy that he is and brag about “Goin’ with mah gut” when there’s a whole troop-train of stooges and press flacks, spinners and paddle-feet marching along behind with blank check books and Texas-sized pooper scoopers to clean up the mess. And any who might suggests that, just maybe, the Boy Emperor might be a wee bit nekkid kept miles and miles and miles away.

Ali will be remembered always for the punch he didn’t throw in Zaire, because it would have been...ungentlemanly. He had beaten Foreman, and there was no reason to land another one on the big man as he fell. I used to think, if the aliens came, I’d like to introduce them to Ali and a few others and tell them, “This is us. This is what we can be.”

Now, if they come, all I’ll be able to say tell them is at least 49% of us in this country thought that maybe giving a weak, stupid, vicious, arrogant bullying man-child the power to destroy the planet was not the best idea our species ever had.