Date Line January 18, 2008
Being ancient is not all it is cracked up to be.
I was born at the dawn of time. I have traveled the evolutionary pathways and seen that which was to be seen. My ancestry is ancient and – though it has made few marks which the texts recount, yet all texts recount its passage – important in the annals of history.
My ego though as great as the universe which tries to contain it, is as small as, smaller than, the most insignificant microbe.
I have seen the passage of people who have crossed my path.
Today the news tells of one who I met more than forty years ago. He was but approaching twenty-two, I only about twenty. He was known, and I – as now – unknown on the edge of knowing. He had been taught, I had learned, as I have throughout the ages, by watching.
Though we spent our high school years a few blocks apart, he attended Erasmus Hall High School, I attended Brooklyn Tech. He dropped out at 16, I graduated at 17 – given that reality, the mere nineteen months which marked our separate entry into this historic age was enough to ensure we would not have met anywhere but across a chessboard.
We finally met at Lisa Lane’s “Queens Pawn” where, while Lisa traveled Chess Tour circuit and I attended NYU, I served as manager of her Chess Emporium – playing notable regulars and the occasional visitor such as he.
He was a true chauvinist and a Master above Masters on the sixty-four squares. We played several games – and none would doubt I lost them all quickly and decisively. But, at least, I can say I played him one-on-one in an environment which offered no showmanship excuse, no exhibition, no purpose other than to play the game and occasionally talk.
At the height of the Cold War, he defeated the Soviet Union's Boris Spassky to become America's first and only world chess champion. To that day, and since, the Soviets, the Russians, held the game to be their national pass time, their source of international pride, and the world championship was their personal property – this young man took it from them, without breaking a sweat.
He was a national treasure which our national leaders scorned and sent into exile. In retaliation, he denounced the nation and, interviewed on a Philippine radio station, praised the al-Qaeda strike on the World Trade Center while expressing his desire to see America "wiped out."
As we now know, the sitting president took this call to heart and has since been doing all he can to destroy the nation over which he rules. We watch as Bush bankrupts America, going deeply into debt to Communist China, and allowing China to use our children as dumping grounds for toxic waste they would never consider sending to Europe.
He was, this master, a boy from Brooklyn who, a true intellectual and genius who, it is said, had a "running battle with the rest of the human race." I can and do relate to that idea.
Robert James Fischer, International Grand Master, born March 9, 1943 in Chicago, Illinois to Jewish parents (or certainly a German Jewish mother who had escaped the Holocaust); died January 17, 2008 in, and as a citizen of, Reykjavik, Iceland. An American Jew driven to become both anti-American and anti-Semitic in an age when both groups are being attacked from within by the national leadership and its supporters.
It was time for him to exit leaving a seven year old Filipina daughter, Jinky Ong Fischer. Having produced her, he then connected with a Japanese. Fame and a lack of fame, how much paths do seem to cross or resonate. Sigh ... a new age is approaching. Are you ready?
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