I finished Sound and Fury: Two Powerful Lives, One Fateful Friendship by Dave Kindred and although he might win a Pulitzer Prize with this book, I don’t consider that such a high honour. No, there’s a Post-Modern literary success ladder that demands a full philosophy course which I will outline for you here. Po-Mo Missionaries live and work and spread their doctrine from a home base in New York City.

Kindred hails from Lexington, Kentucky – where his main subject and not-so-mild idée fixe Muhammad Ali was also born and raised. Kindred wrote for The Washington Post, a talent pool for Pulitzer Prize-winners. The Post, The New York Times and the Paris-based International Herald Tribune are the three most prominent Post-Modern Internationalist papers you’ll find anywhere.

After completing Sound and Fury, I realized how that book certainly qualifies for a thesis in Po-Mo Philosophy 101: "Moral Ambivalence Is Everything!"

We read along as Kindred goes through the very back and forth of Ali’s flaws and considerable talents. That he chose to concentrate on Ali instead of Malcolm X can be explained by a homeboy’s affinity for Lexington’s hometown hero, born Cassius Marcellus Clay, Jr.

Howard Cosell takes up the other side of the Rainbow Dilemma but the interior problem – that is, what happened between Malcolm X and Ali – is what locks the book, forcing the reader to consider the moral ambivalence of the situation. I don’t think Cosell can escape the title of "America’s Great Hot Dogger." Ali ran neck-and-neck with Cosell’s narcissism, but the meat of the book is the moral ambivalence which the author wishes to leave in the minds of his readers about Ali. That he does. You must be aware of Post-Modern Philosophy, at least in its most obvious stages of instruction, to anticipate where Kindred is leading us or perhaps where Ali led him.

Well, these Post-Moderns are logical, so I’m not entirely convinced by the statement. I think he’s bought into moral ambivalence for the sake of career advancement. Kindred wants to be read and judged well by the literati.

Cassius Clay, Jr., thought that Allah told him to become Muhammad Ali – or that "it was written." Today, when asked about 9/11, Ali demurs. He won’t talk about that.

Should this silence on the part of the usually loquacious Ali be viewed as tacit approval of Islamist misdeeds? In the old days, Elijah Muhammad would have advised Ali to respond in just that way. There’s reading between the lines and then there’s being deafened by Ali’s record-shattering "no comment."

Post-Modern Philosophy 102 is listed as: "There Is No True Distinction between Good and Evil." If Ali were merely the Chicago Black Sox, I might go partway with him. Pete Rose was, in the same way, all about money. Chicago Black Sox were all about money. The great theatrical director Sir Tyrone Guthrie once said: "Everyone is permitted a certain amount of polite prostitution."

There is corruption and then there is a two-legged snake, a dancing python, with a venomously forked tongue spitting Messianic proclamations and fangs made out of fists with which to cut, bite and destroy a normal man’s will to fight evil. Merely sitting in the stands, Kindred’s vision of good and evil is blurred. His thrill over the Great Black Hope’s grace and speed cast a spell over him. Power is the only aphrodisiac and Ali had the Viagra, so to speak.

The three other levels of Post-Modern Philosophy are: Society Is the Only God; Death Is the Greatest Remedy; and The Proof Is in the Numbers.

These course titles are hardly euphemisms favoured by the College of Post-Modernism, but they tell you what eugenics really means. Perfectionism and the quest for the human paradigm rule the vision of Post-Modernists. Ali’s doggerel rode over grammar and won the Bob Dylan with Muscles Poetry Prize. Before Parkinson’s Disease brought him down, Ali was a model of the genetic superman envisioned by these same eugenicists.

If names are any indication of genetics, then Cassius Marcellus Clay, Jr. may well have had the bloodlines of an unrecognized hero of the Civil War – the Caucasian Abolitionist (and former slave-owner) Cassius Marcellus Clay. How aware Ali was of his prestigious ancestry is not mentioned in Kindred’s book, but Ali knew he had white blood somewhere in his history. When Ali called his boxing opponents "Stepin Fetchits", they would remind him of just how light-skinned he really was. Under certain conditions, Ali could almost pass for a white man.

Here are the two clear paths which life presented to Cassius Clay, Jr.: 1., carry the remarkable achievements and bravery of his white ancestor Cassius Marcellus Clay to the world as a Keeper of the American Rainbow; or 2., find the venomously racist, homicidal policies of Elijah Muhammad of the House of Islam and enter the ring as an Islamic deity bent on destroying any illusions America might have about its Rainbow Identity.

We are now in the most poisonously anti-American decade ever. I’m sure Kindred is well aware of this fact.