Checkmate in…uh…the next 13 moves..I think

Aron Nimzowitch, chess theoretician, author and pretty good player, world champion, a Latvian who settled at the end of his life in Copenhagen Denmark, lost a chess game to one Friedrich Sämisch in Baden Baden in 1925. Yes, the same Sämisch who developed the variation that is considered to be the sharpest way of meeting the King’s Indian Defense. Aron it turns out was a sore loser with an aggressive attitude. He swept the chess pieces from the board stood up and shouted, “Why must I lose to this idiot?!”It seems that I understand his tirade more and more every day in almost every way.

An acquaintance of mine whose father was a professor of mathematics at a university says that his old man used to come home after an afternoon of student meetings and fall into a chair. After a quick snort of a palliative spirit he would rise from his funk and explain to his son. “I get so discouraged. I meet with these students year after year and they tell me things. Why don’t they ever tell me something that I don’t know?”

I second that emotion.

Look I am not a particularly bright person. My grades throughout my school career pegged me as an “above average” student. I managed to keep my nose floating above the sea of mediocrity sometimes deep into Grade “B” territory. My grasp of concepts comes with some effort. Some never come at all. I have a pretty good memory. I am moderately okay playing Trivial Pursuit.

I have invented a variant that I like to call Consequential Pursuit in which a card is drawn and some perplexing subject like “Love” , “The Essential Nature of the Cosmos”, “the Number of Pins on the Head of an Angel”, is revealed to the players, who contemplate that deadly selected subject for any number of years and really don’t ever reach any rich conclusion. If we could decide on the color of the box and get some kind of notion from the Ideal, I think it would sell tolerably well.

So here I am. A person of above average intellect. Rising above the ever swelling tide of unintelligible muck that has become the way of American consciousness and the destiny of American learning. There, my friends, is something very wrong here. I should be looking up to giants who can boost me on their shoulders and help to exhilarate me as I ride along the path with them. Last time I looked a whole lot of folks were milling around, counting their toes, not interested enough to even pay attention to the only above-average me. No giants around. I assure you I am not, nor should I be, much as I might wish and desire, a giant. I can’t begin to even pass for one. No matter how tall I might stand in the field of stunted trees.

Yet I find myself losing to the overwhelming idiocy of opinion that is foisted from every corner of the compass in almost every medium possible. I find the number of people who can tell me things that I don’t know dwindling to a precious few. The thing that Nimzowitch had on me was that he could scream. I find myself more and more mute. More and more at the hideous mercy of thought that is stuffed and stated in a way that is supposed to pass for considered and cogent. Radio talk show hosts pass as politically wise. Movie stars are listened to with the rapt attention that was once given to Plato in the Academy. Stylish comic books are the serious source for social commentary. Best selling novelists impersonate spiritual guides.

It seems that we the people cannot not stand to live in the mire of indecision. Makes us uncomfortable not to have a side. So some jingo raker comes along with a glib sideways profile, the gait of perfect knowledge and a patina of equanimity and we fall seduced. The rake laughs at those unable to mold, to make-up their minds into the image of a righteousness. Scorns the sitters on the fences, wish the wash, flip the flop. I urge you to stay in the tension, live in the struggle. I urge you to make a decision. I urge you to make it again. Make it again. Again. I urge you to live. It hurts a little bit.

I need you to soar. Reach down grab me by the very nape of my neck and hike me up. I might flap and make a soul filled noise, but I’ll do my part, honest.


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