18 January 2008

Look Away


Bobby Fischer at the End

It is barely above freezing, but the wet white sludge lingers on the parking lot at Big Pink, and the moisture makes the chill penetrate that much more effectively.

I was researching the primary race in South Carolina based on the latest polls to see how John McCain was doing, and looking toward Dixie made me think of the warmth. Big John is tied with the Reverend Huckabee, and it seems that some of the slanders spread by Carl Rove eight years ago have finally been forgotten.

Of course, they hang on to Old Times down there in the Palmetto State, where they will remind you that South Carolina was the only state to secede from the Union twice.

We probably should have let them go the first time. The voters there believed Carl's push-poll phone calls asking the question “Would you think less of John McCain if you knew he had fathered a black child?”

It was despicable. McCain's adopted daughter is from Bangladesh, and the question was followed by the suggestion that the hero had sold out his fellow POWs in Hanoi, and had a screw loose.

It was the original Swift Boat campaign, and the whole sordid thing just made you want to look away.

Which is what the snow makes me want to do today.

Schools are starting late across much of the region, but if you expect me to start whining about the snow and it's savage impact on the travel grid, let's just give it a pass, shall we? Suffice it to say that there were meetings in Fairfax and Chantilly yesterday in which I had to appear in the flesh, and the implications were miserable and completely predictable.

I mean, it is cold in Iceland, and they don't write endless pathetic tomes of what it is like when great rooster-tails of salt and sand arc up and coat the windshield, do they? Bobby Fischer certainly did not complain about that, and whether it snowed or didn't, he did not mention it.

He is dead this morning, in Reykjavik the only big city on the island. He was 64, and had become a sort of bushy Howard Hughes character. The hermit chess master was one of the Cold War's great minor characters. You remember that he gained international fame in 1972 with his victory over Boris Spassky, the icy Soviet with the cold Putin-eyes.

Everyone knew Fischer was an odd duck back then, but we wrote his antics off to a calculated PSYOPS campaign against Spassky. He showed up in Iceland two days late for his matched, bellowed his dissatisfaction about the lighting and the reflections on the playing table, and generally made himself a pain in the ass.

When he won, he became a hero. America loves its winners, after all, but Bobby had his quirks. He abandond the world title in 1975, and over time his periodic anti-Semitic rants became a piercing embarrassment, particularly in light of the fact that his mother was Jewish.

His decision to play in a re-match against Spassky in 1992 tore things wide open.

He made over $3 million for the contest, but the venue was a problem. Uncle Sam, or rather, his busy-body nephews declared that his presence and the victory purse constituted a violation of the UN sanctions against the disintegrating Yugoslavia.

The rest of it was ugly. Bobby ultimately renounced his citizenship and proclaimed that 9/11 was wholly deserved. He traveled on an Icelandic passport in 2005 after he was detained in Japan for almost a year, and lived out the end of his days in the little country to which he had brought such renown.

It is still cold up there, though not as cold as one would imagine, what with the Gulf Stream embracing it and the hot springs on the land. Bobby might have been mad at the end, or he may just have lived in his own land, far from the one the rest of us do.

Towards the end, he observed that the real enemy was his former country.

"The United States is evil.” He said. “There's this axis of evil. What about the allies of evil…England, Japan, Australia? These are the evildoers."

He was talking about the millions that Uncle Sam wanted to confiscate from him, since he was intensely self-focused. But I suppose if the IRS wanted to take all my money away I would sputter a bit, too, and at least pointedly look away.

The end of heroes is not always pleasant. Rest in Peace, Bobby. You earned it.

Now as to South Carolina, we will see what they do with the hero John McCain on Saturday.

Copyright 2008 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com

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