Inevitably the beginning of a new semester means the beginning of my insomniatic cycle. Up at 4 a.m. today, I resisted the urge to click "open" on my work e-mail--I've been putting out fires for days now. Instead, I settled into the chair, prepared to write a pithy post on Bobby Fischer. Only, I didn't really know anything about Bobby Fischer. My chess skills basically suck and I get my ass kicked every time Lingual Y and I play. He's doing research for the new novel, which in part will address chess, and so he's been talking about chess and chess history. The other night at dinner he announced that Bobby Fischer was being held in Japan for the crime of violating U.S. sanctions against the former USSR when he played Spassky in 1992 in Budva, Yugoslavia.
So, I rather thought I'd spend the morning reading a few articles on the Fischer crisis and then offer my damning criticism of antiquated U.S. policies. Here's the problem: the only thing I knew about Bobby Fischer until this morning was that he is a chess player and that I really liked the Jodi Foster classic, Searching for Bobby Fischer. His name invoked some romantic notion of evenings spent by the fireside relaxing over a well-executed game of chess.
So, I spent the hours before dawn this morning reading up on Bobby Fischer. Instead of my vitriolic post raging against the idiocy and irrationality of U.S. policies (we can sanction Cuba, but we just love China! Choose the "transparency" level of your foreign policy leveled against random Communist country X, please), however, I discovered a more challenging task. You probably already know this, so add it to the "duh" column: Bobby Fischer is a bit cracked. He's anti-Semitic, raging, unbalanced and well, just a little bit odd. He is, of course, a hell of a great chess player. For more on Fischer, check out Wikipedia.
So as the sun began to rise, I didn't really want to write about Fischer anymore. I was unsettled--at the same time I'm a proponent of free speech--and didn't want to spend my morning defending him.
My day has been bookended by crisis politics. Tonight's WW epi (you knew it was coming, right?) featured Jed and Leo in secret negotiations with Fidel Castro. As the product of a public American educational system, I'm sorry to say that I didn't even know that Cuba existed until I was in college. It simply didn't appear in our history or world geography books. If it did, we certainly didn't discuss it. A lie of omission?
In my adult life, however, I have come to know the world of Cuban exiles intimately. So tonight's WW epi pushed all of the buttons it should have. As Leo, Jed, and various other officials debated the plight of Cuba, the same old arguments came out. WW didn't have much light to shed on the situation. And, the epi ended with a romantic address by Jed to the U.S. nation about changing relations with Cuba. Now, normally, I would celebrate Jed's decision to eschew election year politics and take a stand. However, the epi rang shallow. For once, it felt like WW had strayed much too far from reality.
At the end of the day, Fischer is a genius, but a narrow-minded brilliance that apparently shines in directed places; he simply isn't brilliant when he lashes out.
At the end of the day, U.S. policies against Cuba, and against the former USSR, aren't rational. They instead measure the affective--that intangible measure of American sentiment. How many Americans have been to Cuba? Have studied Cuba? Know anything about Cuba? So, how can U.S. policy be based on anything other than an irrational fear of the "other" ? How is a U.S. policy that continues to persecute Fischer anything other than a reaction to salt in an old wound? And how is Fischer himself a physical manifestation of the deep racial and ethnic divides in the U.S.?
I feel immersed in irrationality--a day bookended by other people's fear and loathing.
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