The Longhorn Gambit

I take no pleasure from insisting that IGM Gregor “The Cowboy” Lamar is a fraud, product of an extensive marketing campaign, national celebrity frenzy, and a personal gift that, while quite miraculous in its own right, amounts to cheating in chess. The exact nature of Gregor Lamar’s gift I shall explain in due time, but first I want to set the record straight regarding my motivation in opposing his renown – to collude in this sham mars the purity of chess, and will ultimately lead to its demise. USCF denounced my story as the jealous babbling of an old man, threatened me with lawsuit and revoked my membership, but as you shall see, I do all for the good of the game.

I am Gregor’s grandfather. Since his parents untimely passing, I have raised him on our ranch and developed his love of the game. It was also me who sought out Bobby Fischer in Istanbul and arbitrated 14-year old Gregor’s private victory over the former Grand Master in 2006. Of the many and varied myths of The Cowboy, I can bear personal witness to this event (see my report in Chess Life, “The Match of Madness” pg. 14, June, 2015). In fact, the so-called Longhorn Gambit (24 Nc6?) in the decisive game 4 of that match was my first realization that Gregor’s impeccable tournament success owes much to something other than his talent for chess and my tutelage. But I digress; all I wish to say now is it should be plain that I of all people should enjoy my grandson’s fame, and have toiled to shape it in his nascent years.

But what became of my beloved Gregor was the doing of the scoundrel Bud McFarland. Chess in those days had fallen on hard times. US Chess Federation struggled to promote tournaments; the International circuit was dominated by such as Kramnik and Topalov, who, prodigious though they were, lacked the personality and marketing appeal of Capablanca vs. Lasker, or Fischer vs. Spassky. This desperation in the game at large turned out to be the ticket to riotous riches for McFarland. Himself a mediocre tournament player in the Southwest, McFarland witnessed Gregor’s lightning-round exhibition victory (20:20) against twenty Expert rated opponents at the Austin Convention Center in 2007. That weekend began three months of shameless pursuit to be my grandson’s promoter, to which I lamentably relented. The Cowboy is the construct from Bud McFarland’s hands – Gregor’s innocent joy of the game became The Cowboy’s unbearable arrogance, and of course there’s that ridiculous hat.

The Cowboy’s following grew with his antics, as did the USCF coffer and McFarland’s extravagances. I, on the other hand, became more suspicious of The Cowboy’s method, and in 2016 announced my separation from him, repaying my share in his winning as his manager. The upcoming 2020 FIDE Olympiad features the strongest field of competitors in the history of the game to vie for US$5,000,000 in total prizes. My hope here is to raise awareness and call upon all students of the game to lobby for the disqualification of The Cowboy from that event.

Chief among the crimes of Lamar/McFarland is, of course, the fact that The Cowboy does not in fact win tournaments by playing superior chess. Next, I shall outline proof of my allegation, and how I came to that conclusion.

H. von Gott

Bastrop, Texas

Love thy Niebuhr

Svenn!

I started to reply to your comment but then decided to make a whole new post. For one thing this is gonna be lengthy, plus I really need more content here. Anyway it seems like you and I are the only ones here so what does it matter...

Actually thats not true.

In fact one of the lurkers here -- in the spirit of the previous post, let's call her "J" -- sent me a great question via chat after reading your comment: "Why does Svenn think the church ought to be humble, but the US government should not?" Takes a Canuck, huh? (Oops... ack, this anonymity thing is really hard!)

I was surprised by your summation of Niebuhr, given what I know of him, but then I haven't read The Nature and Destiny of Man so I'm perfectly willing to take your word for it. I am somewhat familiar with this German theologian who sat under Niebuhr at Union Theological for a while: Dietrich Bonhoeffer. Toward the end of his life (awaiting his death sentence for assassination attempt on Hitler), Bonhoeffer explored the notion of Jesus as "God of weakness" which I think touches on our conversation regarding AA's, and also connects to J's question.

For Bonhoeffer and his comrades, Germany in 1923 and the official Protestant Church which was complicit with the Nazi regime required rethinking patriotism and faith. He came up with the idea that "religion" (here used in a negative way in agreement with Kant) is the dominating characteristic of a institution to gather power to itself.  Jesus preached a Kingdom that stood in opposition to all the other "religions" of his time (Raman Empire, Jewish establishment, Hellenic mystic cults etc) not only in ideology, but in its very nature.

OK, once again in English. Roman Empire had the ancient equivalent of a nuclear arsenal at her disposal, Jesus had a ragtag army of beggars and harlots. Caesar was swathed in purple and gold since birth, Jesus graduated from hay-swaddle to a crown of thorns. But in this 1st century death match between the might of the imperial god and the God of weakness, Jesus won. How? By dying-- even dying on his enemy's weapon of terror, the cross.

Getting back to J's question then. If your reading of Niebuhr is right, we can agree with him that choosing the way of Jesus as the basis of foreign policy would doom US to failure from the very start. On the other hand, failure is precisely how the Kingdom of God triumphed. Where is Caesar now? Stalin? Caiphas? Hitler? Irrelevance at best, ignominy at worst beneath the sands of time.

How am I doing so far?

Heat/Sin/Water/Skin*

Wanted to continue a couple of conversations I have had recently regarding the recovery culture.

Alcoholics Anonymous is a people full of contradictions (but really, who isn't?) Anonymity proves to be elusive, especially for celebrity 12-steppers. The 12 Traditions declares AA ought never be organized except locally, but a quick glance at the website shows plainly it is now an international behemoth.  Despite wanting to have no opinions on outside issues, AA exerts heavy influence on the penal system and medical research. Because of AA's religious DNA, it also draws comparison and criticism from the Christian church.

I spent 4 years in the 12-step community, and continue to recommend it even though it has been over a decade since I last attended meetings regularly. It just seems obvious to me that the Christian church is generally inhospitable to recovering addicts, except perhaps at advanced stages of sobriety. If you have seen otherwise, please let me know. 

There are of course 12-step off-springs that specifically claim the name of Christ, but those remain in the shadows of church basements. It is as if addicts somehow embarrass us, blemish the pomp of our rites, or worst: addictive behaviors might be contagious.

Leprosy happens to be one of the major metaphor for sin in the Bible. If we could somehow recover (!) the fundamental doctrine of Original Sin and embrace all of its implications, we might have a chance at breaking bread openly as fellow addicts. Here are some of the benefits of recognizing the connections between addictions, sin, and disease:

1) We are first and foremost victims of sin. Whatever evils we can and have inflicted on others, our responsibility to repentance comes after the relief of acknowledging our helplessness. Get this order wrong and we are forever addressing the symptoms of the illness rather than its causes.

2) Most Christian traditions recognize that sin is not the things we do, but something we inherit from the Fall. When we forget this (and we do often) we minimize sin to the trivial infractions we see in our lives, and create a gulf between us and the addicts who exhibit this nature in much more obvious ways.

3) Consequently we would also have a new category to measure contrition. Without this deep understanding of the baffling and insidious nature of sin, we can only hold up as examples people who are far removed from external signs of sins, as opposed to folks locked in mortal combat with lust and envy. Abstinence is good, but even AA understands there's more growth that must happen beyond being a dry drunk. Key to this growth is the posture of weakness/victimhood mentioned above.

*Title of this post stolen from Betty Soo, without permission but ample admiration.

Making Love and War(craft)

Non-gamers: hang in there with me I have homework for you at the end of this post...

Svenn and Inno: you guys dropping by made me wonder just how many military people play World of Warcraft. There seems to be a whole lotta ya around; I know Nimira and Priestholmes have a guild that's comprised entirely of marines. According to The Daedalus Project, about 13% of the WoW population have had military experience.

Unfortunately Daedalus is dated (Death Knights aren't even in the survey!) and no one seems to be making similar efforts these days. The people who know the most is of course Blizzard but they aren't about to let their marketing secrets out. So here's a mosaic portrait of the WoW player composed from what little research available and my impression (numbers and % when included are from Daedalus research):

You are a dude. But if you aren't (16%) WoW is probably your first computer gaming experience, and you play with your boyfriend or husband (68%).

As infantile as trade chat can be, you are actually as likely to be over 35 as you are in your teens (12-17). In your defense tho, you are more civil in game than, say, while you're driving down the highway. Apparently anonymity brings out the best in us as well. Maybe this is because 37% of us feel more comfortable communicating in typed chats than live interactions.

Somehow you hold down a job, go to school or make home full time (male 87%, female 74%), have young children (20% male/28% female), while spending an average of 21 hours a week raiding or grinding achievements.

In my three years on WoW, you have chatted with me from practically every time zone on this globe, and I haven't even been on the European  or the Pacific servers yet.

If you aren't currently in school, you have had higher level education (78%). This has not translated to a higher income for you (slightly lower than US median of $35,000 as of 2005).

Now for the non-gamers: go watch The Guild. It's an award winning web-series about on-line gamers roughly based on the World of Warcraft, each episode is only a few minutes long so it's a small time investment for lots of laughs. When you have seen at least a couple episodes, take this quiz:

1) Although The Guild ruthlessly characterize WoW players as neurotic losers, it is universally adored by that population. Why? If you have seen Little Miss Sunshine, you might have the answer already.

2) Can you see Codex, Vork, and Zaboo outside the gaming context? do you know such a person in your life? Do you have her/him on your calendar this week? Last year? Where are they on your speed dial?

3) How are the supporting characters (Clara's husband, Codex's therapist, Zaboo's mom etc.) perceived by the main characters? Name three different ways the supporting cast relate to the gamers' addiction.

Extra Credit: Seasons 3 and 4 explore friendship and romance. Compare those with how you understand relationships. (Hint: try to suspend your judgment and idealism. If you still have trouble, think back to your high school years.)

Eat This Comic!

Matt recently asked me a question about Watchmen (please, for the love of Alan Moore, don't click that link until you have read the graphic novel) which induced a 4-colored flashback of my misspent youth.

Watchmen exerts its influence beyond the 9-panel pages, some consider it one of the best English novels in the last century. So much could be and has been said about its literary value, artistic integrity, and impact on the industry, but for the purpose of this space I want to talk about its voice.

We should not assume Watchmen has a message (here's an attempt by David Itzkoff of NY Times). Moore and Gibbons would say that they began with a few ideas in mind to make a really good comic, then let the story tell itself. Comics excel in exaggerations which makes it the perfect medium for parodies, subversion and political commentaries, but I am convinced none of these are the intent of the author. Each of the major characters in Watchmen had dramatically different perspectives and convictions, each of them were alloted their turn for the reader's ear, and in the end all of them earned our sympathy. If anything then, Moore's caricature is of you and me, blowing our biases, tendencies, and pathologies into cosmic proportions, and leaving us to reconcile ourselves.

I'm gonna resist the temptation to defend the above analysis. If you are interested we can go into the characters in more detail in another post. Meanwhile, go read Watchmen.

Un-Fiction, From Blair Witch to Catfish

Reality as we know it (as in secondlife.com; reality TV; virtual-reality) has acquired a mystical quality of late. The last century has shown that history, geography, even physics cannot and should not be absolutized. We take for granted now, most everything can be deconstructed and variously interpreted. Peeling away the layers of reality, we find an unknowable core.

OK that was a pretty grand introduction to what amounts to be a movie preview. The "reality thriller" Catfish tells a stranger-than-fiction story of a photographer's interaction with a Facebook fan. Whether or how much this story is contrived is not as important to us as what it tells us about the world we live in.

You could watch Catfish as a cautionary tale against the dangers of internet; critique it for how much spin can go into a supposed "documentary"; or get more evidence for how messed up people can be. For my money, I intend on enjoying the movie as the latest entry into the genre of un-fiction, telling a story neither for its factual value nor to transport the audience to an altogether alien world, but engaging the viewer by being both fiction and non-fiction.

The Name of the Rose

Observation: We no longer have the luxury of living within any specific culture, economy, or location.

Examples: Most of the things you have touched in the last 30 minutes are made in China.

You apologized last week for not having seen Slumdog Millionaire; on the same afternoon, I declared myself a bollywood fan, even though I'm not sure what it is.

You can check any one of 3 boxes on forms that ask for your "racial background". Your kids have even more options.

This Thanksgiving you will drive over 300 miles in one day, and you consider yourself lucky to have relatives so close.

Question: Who are we?

Truth is soft (so soft it bleeds when you push too hard)

Thanks to my friends in Reynosa, I just finished David Dark's book The Sacredness of Questioning Everything which talks about a characteristic of the softcore world: the need/desire to distill truth out of many sources. (Seminarians can skip down to the bottom of this post where I will geek-out a bit in our language.)

Dark's background required him to struggle against assumptions that come from being a particular brand of Christian, but his approach in overcoming those assumptions will resonate with anyone who lives in the softcore world. For Dark, the lyrics of Arcade Fire or Wilco, and episodes from The Office all offer insights into Christian truth, insights that are particularly important because they stand outside the traditions that had locked him (and others like him) into bad understandings of God and the Bible.

If you have been wondering why certain movies or bands are "just so good", look up The Sacredness of Questioning Everything.

Seminary Geeks: Dark essentially restates Grant Osborne's "hermeneutic of suspicion", the notion that any interpreter's approach to reading scripture is necessarily flawed. Although this position echoes as far back as Schleiermacher, Dark's contribution lies in his contextualizing this method in the 21st century.

Im gonna call it softcore

15-20 years ago we wondered what the internet will mean: some hoped it'd go away, some sampled and thought it might be good, others drank deeply and never considered looking back.

We now have a whole generation breast-fed by the internet. If you have managed to remain unplugged, my hat's off to you (the same hat I take off for the Amish, so the gesture probably conveys both admiration and condolence.) The rest of us now work, play, meet and think in a brave new world -- this blog is my attempt, with your help, to wrap my mind around this world.

So that we would have a shorthand --shorthands are one of the signatures of this new world, IMHO--I am going to describe our new world as "softcore":

1. As a sign of respect to both Bill Gates and Steve Jobs (Microsoft + Apple; sorry to spoil your fun with explanation)

2. As a reminder of the dangers of porn addiction, although that topic is amply discussed elsewhere so let's try to abstain from boring each other with it

3, In opposition to the "hardcore world" which for better or worst is dying in its wake, the world of the printed media, face-to-face meetings, Palmer's Method, etc.

Really, anything can contribute to our discussion: personal anecdotes, links to other thoughts, criticisms both constructive and otherwise-- in fact, flaming/trolling seems to be a great way to increase blog hits. So pontificate away: my soapbox is now yours.