I thought you guys used logical arguement and stuff.
My experience is that the guy with the most expensive lawyer wins.
The games themselves are art at a level that exists only a few times in our history. The fact is that we won’t ever know what might have been. It will never be, and if Bobby Fisher started playing chess tomorrow morning, he would never be who he would have been defending his championship every other year or so against all comers.
Sorry Lib, but if I might be less willing to forgive Bobby Fisher his crime against his country’s laws, I am also less willing to forgive him the harm he did to his own art. We don’t have those games because Bobby Fisher never played them. Mental illness is just the road he was on, not the reason he didn’t play chess.
Whatever the reason, it was more important to him than the art you miss so much. He cared more about money, his self-image, and his perception of the world than he cared about the talent he had in such unfathomable abundance. However much it matters to you that people understand the profound agility of his chess strategies, your anger is as misdirected as is Bobby Fisher’s own. He didn’t care. The art did not matter to him, and evidently it still does not.
I have little interest in Bobby Fisher, the international legal defendant, nor Bobby Fisher the demonstrator for freedom of expression for artists. I once had an overwhelming interest in Bobby Fisher the Grandmaster Chess Champion. But he and I both lost interest in that, a long time ago.
I do wonder, though among the rest of the thread participants, if you might have ever known and loved, or admired a bigot. Have you never been a friend of damned fool radical? Do you not even know and trust a single gun totin’ red neck asshole? Does everyone have to be like me, and love what I love for me to be able to appreciate the wax job they put on that Mustang?
How sad, if life must have only one flavor.
Tris
Yeah, survival of the fittest, I reckon. Law ought not to control every frigging aspect of life. “No man has a natural right to commit aggression on the equal rights of another, and this is all from which the laws ought to restrain him.” — Thomas Jefferson.
If your hallowed laws indeed are constantly in flux and in need of daily maintenance and repair over the course of hundreds of years, then that is what they call a “clue”. I don’t begrudge men who love the practice of law. If I had it all to do over again, I would like to be a defense attorney. But if you are constantly changing the law in practice, stop calling me crazy merely for wanting to do the same thing, only in a different way. If you’re going to demand respect, you must be willing to give it in return.
Due respect — and I mean that with all the power of the word — that’s not how it went down. He came to play. He came with assurances from his governing body, the US Chess Federation, that pre-negotiations had been positive, that he would have their full backing, and that the Soviet dominance over FIDE was at an end. But when he arrived, he was submarined. His defenders were falling like bowling pins. The Soviets had FIDE under their thumbs. And when he walked out of the meeting, he walked out alone as USCF representatives sat still, afraid to challenge the Soviets for fear of losing FIDE status and therefore their shares of FIDE revenue. He did not abandon chess. Chess had already been abandoned by those in charge of overseeing it. What he abandoned was politics, not chess. That’s why Doyle agreed to send the letter, and why he eventually conceded to offer the apology. He knew they had done wrong. If you don’t believe me, ask Kasparov.
There is a huge difference between making slight adjustments to improve a good but flawed system, and throwing that same system in its entirety into the wastebin.
And so?