Chess. Golf. How to waste your time.

………At Wikipedia, it says “In the 19th century, chess was occasionally criticized as a waste of time”. Yes, and that is because in the 19th century a few people still had some sense. But no one in the 20th or 21st centuries has thought chess is a waste of time? Really? Well, let me be the first. Some of my friends used to call me NC, for “Nineteenth Century”. I embraced that, and I embrace it more full everyday. This is just one more reason why.

I never got very far in chess, but I came up against the question more strongly in golf, which I had pretty much mastered by the time I was sixteen. I was a tournament golfer like my father, and there was some early talk of playing in college and maybe someday playing professionally. But already by sixteen I had exhausted my patience with the game. I just didn’t care if I was better than the next guy, and the thought of playing golf all day every day bored me stiff. It was great a couple of times a week in the summer, but devoting a lifetime to it smacked of idiocy. I had more important things to do with my life.

Plus, if you play golf for a living you have to hang out everyday with a bunch of upper-class country club nitwits, most of them Republicans. Life is enough of a torture without that.

I know that some will say that art is also a waste of time. The business world considers art a pastime for blue-haired old ladies and those in therapy, and if it weren’t an investment for the rich guys it would be useless to history. But those who say this are obviously very limited persons, probably without a shred of creativity and certainly without a shred of taste or depth. What they think or say has never concerned me. For those who would lump art in with sport as a meaningless leisure activity, a footnote in the game of life, I simply ask them to name an important sportsman before the 20th century. Most people won’t be able to come up with a single one before, say, Babe Ruth. But even the most ignorant can name dozens of famous artists. Do we have any museums of ancient or classical sport? No, but every city has a museum of art, and the big cities have many. That is to say, the importance and power of art is generally recognized.

For that matter, can you name any famous businessmen before 1900, famous for business alone? You may be able to name a few rich guys, famous just for being rich, but most of them were born rich and the others were robber barons, with a totally negative influence on the world. Which is why there are no business museums devoted to showcasing the great work of businessmen. There is nothing tangible to put in such museums, for a start, and if you did have to come up with something you could only dig

up all the dead bodies these guys were responsible for in wars and manufactured depressions. The museum would only house a pile of bones.

You will tell me they were responsible for building all the great cities of the world. No they weren’t. Those cities were built by architects and artists and stone carvers and real workers. The rich guys only provided the money, which they stole from other workers the world over. Do you think Louis XIV built or even designed Versailles? No, he simply hired it out. He gets zero creative credit. Most of the value of Versailles is in the interior decorations, which were created by. . . artists. To see this in even brighter light, look at the wealthiest businessmen now, who are the wealthiest people in the history of the world. Look at the houses and cities these guys are building: some the most atrocious montrosities since the dawn of time. And they can’t even hire artists or artisans to decorate them beautifully, since they destroyed art and architecture on purpose many decades ago. All the real artists joined the pile of bones long ago.

But back to sport. I am not saying sports or exercise should be avoided as a complete waste of energy. I am involved in many to this day, including golf, volleyball, yoga, and others. I don’t regret the time spent. But sports and games as professions are perverse. Even more perverse is the selling of these professional sports and games as something laudable and important, with top figures promoted as heroes and geniuses. Nothing could be more absurd. Setting these people up as heroes is simply the inversion of sense, and the burying of real achievement by fake achievement.

For example, notice that Fischer’s Wikipedia page is nearly endless, with 672 endnotes. Compare that to Isaac Newton’s or Leonardo’s pages, which are about a fifth the length. Leonardo did something with his genius besides play chess, remember?

If you still don’t believe me, let us return to Fischer, to drive the point home with a real person. There have been at least six major flims about Fischer, though he never did anything important in his life. The most famous of these flims is probably Searching for Bobby Fischer, which came out in 1982. It is based on the life as a child of Joshua Waitzkin, Jewish of course, and it tries to make heroes out of both Waitzkin and Fischer. Another flim is the documentary Bobby Fischer against the World, which you can judge from its exclamatory title and not lose anything.

There Fischer is sold as some great warrior of freedom against the evil Soviets, despite the fact that Fischer was of Russian Jewish extraction and later was listed as a terrorist by the US. You may assume that whole thing was another charade, Fischer’s late assignment, but I will not hit that here. Another flim is the 2014 Pawn Sacrifice starring Tobey Maguire. This flim turns up the volume on the propaganda, flashing back to Fischer’s childhood and trying to sell you Socialism as a real movement instead of the CIA project it was. However, we do get one clue, since they remind you of all the absurd demands Fischer made when playing Spassky in 1972. You should now read those demands in terms of the hoax being pulled. Neither Fischer nor Spassky wanted the hoax to be penetrated, so they needed to create this diversion with Fischer’s paranoia. Notice that they moved to a back room away from the cameras. In this flim we also see Spassky rising to applaud Fischer after losing game six to him—something that would never happen in real life but that now makes sense.

First published December 21, 2017

http://mileswmathis.com/fischer.pdf