The Meaning of Bobby

Every few aeons, the giant magnet of the earth reverses itself. North changes to South, and topsy metamorphoses into turvy. In a sense, that is what happened in Reykjavik when Bobby Fischer last week took the world chess title from Boris Spassky. Russia, chess master to the world for a generation, has been abruptly undone by an upstart. The U.S.S.R. has long instructed its citizens that in chess (as in all things) their strength was the strength of ten because their hearts were pure, their Lenin clean. Americans, by contrast, scoffed at the game as one for myopic children and old men on park benches.

Spassky's defeat was no national disaster for Russia; after all, chess is a game, not warfare. Still, it is fascinating to speculate about the geopolitical implications. If pure hearts no longer prevail, what then is the future of the Soviet communal ideal? Perhaps the senses should now be allowed to soar in Russia, personal competitiveness be exalted, and the model of the disciplined intellect be scrapped in favor of the search for self-comfort in cars, cuisine and water beds. And if a brainy kid from Brooklyn becomes the all-American hero, should not the U.S. close its bars, shutter its stadiums, and encourage its citizens to march off to libraries to explore the storehouses of knowledge? What good are pleasure and profits when true joy seems to reside in the cerebral mastery of a checkered board?

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