WELTMEISTER RIDES THE BUS

The tragic story of how America wasted the fragile genius of Bobby Fischer provides an illustration to the earlier commentary on the nature of heroes and the lack of their appreciation in American society.

Being a chess player myself, I can knowledgeably attest to the fact that Fischer was much better loved and valued among the Soviet chess-playing public (which characteristically encompassed practically the whole of society) than in America, despite the fact that he single-handedly (helped mostly by his own prodigious talent, nurtured by Soviet chess literature, which he was reading in Russian) demolished Russia’s international chess monopoly.

Here is some instructive paradox. By the standards of normal littleness, Fischer was supposed to be Russia’s enemy, a cartoonish villain in the employ of the forces of evil… But such was never the case. On the contrary, he was exalted by the nation he defeated, while the nation on whose behalf and in whose behalf he delivered the great cold war victory, brought him down.

Fischer was a genius, in Russia’s eyes, and, therefore, a genuine hero, with all the trappings of heroism, that included his rebellious, controverted nature. In America he was initially hailed as a political cold-war hero who succeeded in defeating the Russkies, but as soon as that predictable, politically correct mold broke up, to reveal the unpredictability of a genius, it was only his propagandistic legend, that was allowed to march on, while his reality soon turned into the nightmare of a complete and extreme incompatibility.

Fischer was financially drained of every penny he could generate, by a crowd of unscrupulous callous users, gathered around him, like some ugly greedy leeches; and by the end of his life in America, he was left with nothing for himself, reportedly forced to ride the bus in Los Angeles (literally here, whereas the title of my entry is figurative), and making his living by ‘throwing pearls before the swine,’ that is, by selling his game to wealthy, but otherwise unworthy amateurs.

The great Nietzsche, in one of his superlative observations, said that one of the greatest responsibilities of any great society is to take good care of its geniuses who always have a problem with fitting in. And, by the same token, the measuring stick for the greatness of all societies is the way how they treat their geniuses. In Bobby Fischer’s case, the American society has not passed the test of greatness, but failed most miserably. “Free society” in general understands freedom too stereotypically, and thus hypocritically, “protecting” generic categories of officially recognized “endangered species,” yet carelessly letting unlabeled exceptions fall through the cracks.

…Weltmeister Bobby Fischer died on January 17, 2008 at the age of sixty-four in Reykjavik, Iceland, formally a naturalized citizen of Iceland, but effectively homeless.