{"id":600,"date":"2006-03-06T09:55:21","date_gmt":"2006-03-06T14:55:21","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/riley\/wp\/2006\/03\/classless_and_free\/"},"modified":"2006-03-06T09:55:21","modified_gmt":"2006-03-06T14:55:21","slug":"classless_and_free","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/riley\/2006\/03\/classless_and_free\/","title":{"rendered":"CLASSLESS AND FREE"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><B>GLOBS FOR INDUSTRY!<\/B> <BR><BR><br \/>\nOne of my favorite critics, Gerald Early, has a NYTimes  <a href=\"http:\/\/early.blogs.nytimes.com\/?p=6\" target=\"_blank\">blog<\/A>:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>\nMy daughters do respect [Ali&#8217;s] stance against the draft, but only in the light that Ali was a more honest and sincere draft dodger than Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, Dick Cheney and others. He couldn\u2019t duck into the National Guard and have a good chance of avoiding altogether going over to Vietnam (many state National Guards weren\u2019t even integrated in the 1960\u2019s); couldn\u2019t hide out in college and get student deferments (he was too poorly educated and boxing was not a college scholarship sport); and couldn\u2019t run off to Canada (he loved living in America too much to do that).<br \/>\nAs a noted military historian once told me, the Vietnam War draft was designed to protect from combat the people society most valued. One way of looking at this, as my daughters analyzed it, was that our country thought that Joe Namath, who was classified 4-F because of a bum knee but could still play football every Sunday, was more important than Muhammad Ali. Actor George Hamilton, then dating President Lyndon Johnson\u2019s daughter, was given a hardship deferment to support his socialite mother. <\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p><B>BEST-SELLERS WORTH TRACKING<\/B><br \/>\n<BR><BR><br \/>\n<a href=\"http:\/\/gladwell.typepad.com\/\" target=\"_blank\">Malcolm Gladwell<\/A><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>GLOBS FOR INDUSTRY! One of my favorite critics, Gerald Early, has a NYTimes blog: My daughters do respect [Ali&#8217;s] stance against the draft, but only in the light that Ali was a more honest and sincere draft dodger than Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, Dick Cheney and others. He couldn\u2019t duck into the National Guard [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-600","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-main","7":"entry"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/riley\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/600","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/riley\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/riley\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/riley\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/riley\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=600"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/riley\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/600\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/riley\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=600"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/riley\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=600"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/riley\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=600"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}