American Divisiveness

by William H. Benson

January 14, 2016

     Last month in Newsweek, a columnist named Kurt Eichenwald made a series of startling statements about the bitter divisiveness that separates Democrats and Republicans. He was incensed to learn that each political party tried to twist the blame upon the other for the San Bernardino shooting, when neither were responsible for the random act.

     Eichenwald declared that the terrorist act, “has exposed another terrible reality: the sickness that permeates our national id, a level of inhumanity and callousness that shows America is broken, perhaps irreparably.” “America,” he said, “has become so divided into ignorant tribes, that each party is focused on winning for its political teams.” “A genie of hatred has been let out of the bottle in America.” “We have become a nation of crazy people.”

     I find such statements discomforting. The glaring mistrust may appear bad today and may even get worse tomorrow, but my reading of American history tells me that political divisions were far worse in the past. I would advise Kurt Eichenwald to read more American history. I would ask him:

     Do we see thousands of students marching across college campuses, protesting and demanding an end to a foreign war that they do not want to fight? Do we see a tidal wave of eligible young men fleeing to Canada to avoid the draft into military service, as we did in the 1960’s?

     Do we see race riots on the scale that Tulsa, Oklahoma experienced in 1921? For two days, May 31 and June 1, white people ransacked Greenwood, the wealthiest African-American community in the United States, burning it to the ground.

     Some perpetrators jumped into airplanes and soared overhead to aim their rifles and shoot those fleeing their homes, or to drop firebombs upon their buildings. Dozens of African-Americans were killed. Most were left homeless. If ever “a genie of hatred was let out of the bottle in America,” it was then, not now. “We had become a nation of crazy people.” 

     Are any of the states threatening to leave the Union if voters elect a Republican for president? That was the threat Abraham Lincoln faced late in 1860, after he won the presidency. Eleven states did secede from the Union and did create a new and independent nation, the Confederate States of America. If ever America was “broken, perhaps irreparably,” it was then, not now.

     Has any Congressman in recent days walked onto the Senate floor and caned a Senator across the head and shoulders a dozen times, leaving him an invalid for the next three years? That is what Preston Brooks of South Carolina did to Charles Sumner of Massachusetts on May 22, 1856.

     Have any of the states in the United States “nullified” any of the laws passed by the U.S. Congress and signed by the President? To nullify, a state declares that it will not obey a federal law. In 1832, Congress had passed laws that imposed tariffs upon imported goods, but John C. Calhoun convinced South Carolina’s state government that it had the right to disobey. The state refused to collect the tariff.

     Except for a compromise that Senator Henry Clay steered through Congress, the nullification crisis may have broken America apart.

     Has Congress in recent days passed a Sedition Act, like it did in the summer of 1798, threatening stiff fines and jail sentences to anyone who published or even said any “false, scandalous and malicious” criticism of the government or its top officials?

     Jefferson and Madison declared the Sedition Act “a flagrant violation of the First Amendment’s guarantee of freedom of speech and of the press,” which it was.

     What about the ugly political division in the colonies during the American Revolution? One third of the colonists, the Patriots, wanted independence. Another third refused to take sides. A final third, the Loyalists, remained committed to King George III and to Parliament. Families split over the issue.

     Patriots abused the Loyalists. They were tarred and feathered, forced to ride a fence rail, jailed, or hung. The Patriots so hounded the Loyalists that some 80,000 of them fled in a massive Loyalist exodus to Canada or back to England, and once gone, the Patriots confiscated their properties. Over the issue of independence, America broke apart.

     Self-rule in a republic is, by its very nature, messy, divisive, hostile, and at times vicious. All voices are heard in a free-for-all, and then a vote is taken, and the majority rules. To those who fail to appreciate this process, it appears contorted and unproductive, and yet it ensures the citizens their freedoms. Where tyrants rule, legislation is quick, clean, and efficient, and the people feel oppressed.

     America is not broken. We are not a nation of crazy people. We are not divided into ignorant tribes.

     Last week the editor at The Week said it best, “This is hardly the first time our country has been bitterly divided. The contentious issues that divide us will never be resolved with any finality. May the grand argument go on.”

Story and Myth

by William H. Benson

December 31, 2015

     An article appeared in the New York Times two weeks ago, “Jane Austen’s Guide to Alzheimer’s.” In it, Carol J. Adams described her difficult days caring for her mother, who had lost the battle to Alzheimer’s. For solace, Carol listened to a recorded book, Jane Austen’s “most-perfect novel,” Emma.

     Carol identified with the novel’s main character, Emma Woodhouse, who felt trapped and housebound as she cared for an ailing parent, her father, Henry Woodhouse. “When a slight dusting of snow alarms her father, he asks her, ‘What is to be done, my dear Emma? What is to be done?’”

     Emma learned to redirect her father into more pleasant thoughts and activities, and so too would Carol do the same with her mother. “With Emma’s help,” Carol said, “I could give more and not feel I was losing myself in caregiving, because she [Emma] was always there, in my mind.”

     Jane Austen published Emma on December 23, 1815, two hundred years ago last week.

     By reading and applying the lessons contained in Austen’s literary work, Carol claimed for herself the mental strength and resolve she needed to remain calm and focused during a trying time. She thought, “If Emma could do it, then so can I.”

     Throughout the centuries of human existence men and women have relied upon literature and its corollary, scripture, to guide their lives. Cave dwellers who once sat around campfires swapped their stories and in so doing handed them to the next generation. Then, printed books appeared, and in recent years electronic books. The media may change, but the stories are still human, all too human.

     A story can so overwhelm certain people that they latch on to it, claim it for themselves, and it becomes that person’s life pattern. They hear the story, they perceive its main idea, and they construct their lives to match the story’s. They re-enact the past in the present and that then reflects their future.

     I wonder though: Is it always wise to rely upon a single story to guide our lives?

     If teenagers read Romeo and Juliet too closely, they may decide to fall in love and marry at a young age, and experience the same disastrous results for themselves and their families. Then, each of the world’s tyrants have read from Macbeth and his Lady’s playbook: kill King Duncan, seize power and the government’s reins, and then kill or drive off all who dare to challenge him or her.

     Would anyone want to emulate Hamlet? A student, devoted to philosophy, he cannot bring himself to commit to meaningful action. Instead, he wonders aloud, “To be or not to be, that is the question.” And would anyone want to live like Iago, who tells monstrous lies to Othello, and causes immense damage, to the point that Othello smothers his beloved wife Desdemona?

     If followed to the letter, great literary works can mislead people, but if applied in a wise way, they can expand our lives, prevent overwhelming damage, and foster appropriate decisions and responses.

     Perhaps the story that we follow is too small relative to the giant challenges that we encounter. It is like asking Mozart to play “The Cat Came Back,” a juvenile camp song. Such tunes and lyrics fall short and fail to provide a framework for an effective human decision. The lesson: choose stories wisely.

     In 1988, Bill Moyers, a journalist, interviewed Joseph Campbell, a writer who had investigated hundreds of myths, and published two books, The Hero with a Thousand Faces and The Masks of God.  Campbell explained to Moyers that each culture carries its own set of myths, but when looked at in total, they are similar and universal.

     Human myths convey the obvious: immoral actions destroy those who commit them, but moral actions uplift and strengthen men and women and societies. Also, solitary heroes who dare to stand up for justice and truth will conquer the enemies of lies and deceit, no matter how beaten and crushed.

     Daniel Kahneman, a psychologist, published a bestseller, Thinking Fast and Slow, in 2011, and in a chapter he entitled “Life as a Story,” he writes, “A story is about significant events and memorable moments, not about time passing.” “This is how the remembering self works: it composes stories and keeps them for future reference.” “We think of life as a story and wish it will end well.”

     “Caring for people often takes the form of concern for the quality of their stories, not for their feelings.” “We can be deeply moved by events that change the stories of people.”

     Today the year 2015 ends; tomorrow the year 2016 begins. Today, in the present, we reflect upon our past 365 days and plan for our next 366 days. Throughout 2015, we have accumulated another series of stories, some filled with pain and sorrow, some filled with happiness and pleasure, and some filled with disappointments and dashed hopes. Like Carol Adams, we search for mental strength.

     As Pandora did, let us do our best to keep hope closed inside the jar, for “hope is the only good god remaining among men. The others have left and gone to Mount Olympus.”

Love Story

by William H. Benson

December 17, 2015

     “What can you say about a twenty-five-year-old girl who died? That she was beautiful. And brilliant. That she loved Mozart and Bach. And the Beatles. And me.” So begins Oliver Barrett IV in Erich Segal’s novel, Love Story.

     Oliver is a rich, white, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant, pre-law student at Harvard who plays ice hockey for the Crimson. Jennifer Cavilleri is an Italian-American Radcliffe student, who plays music. She is from Cranston, Rhode Island, where her father, makes pastries. She works in Radcliffe’s library, where she and Oliver first meet. She calls him “Preppy,” and teases him, but he is so in love he wants to marry her. Against Oliver Barrett III’s wishes, the IV and Jennifer marry.

     In the late 1960’s, all of Hollywood’s studios rejected Erich Segal’s semi-autobiographical script. No one saw the script’s potential until Paramount’s head, Robert Evans, read it, liked it, bought it, and cast Ali McGraw to play Jenny. A New York City model who wore a wide headband, Ali looked the part of a flower child, and, he thought, a near-perfect Jenny.

     Finding Oliver was tougher. In Evans’s biography, The Kid Stays in the Picture, he says, “Michael Douglas, Michael York, Michael Sarrazin, Jon Voight, Beau Bridges, Jeff Bridges, Peter Fonda, and Keith Carradine all turned it down.” He finally tested Ryan O’Neal, who had appeared for five seasons on television’s soap opera, Peyton Place, and cast him as Oliver.

     In the summer of 1969, Robert Evans fell in love with Ali McGraw. He so loved her crooked-tooth smile that he married her on October 24, 1969, his third marriage, her second.

     Evans contacted Erich Segal and told him to transform his movie script into a book. “Erich,” Evans said, “everyone thinks it’s fluff. Write a novel. I’ll get it published. It shouldn’t take you longer than a week.” It took him a month. Segal’s novel appeared in bookstores on Valentine’s Day 1970, made the best-seller list in May that year, and stayed there until Valentine’s Day 1971.

     Ryan O’Neal and Ali McGraw became Oliver Barrett IV and Jennifer Cavilleri on Harvard’s campus in the cold snowy winter of 1969-1970, when filming began. 

     One scene stands out. As newlyweds do, Oliver and Jenny have an argument, and he storms out. She tries to follow him, but she locks the door behind her and leaves her key inside. In the cold on the porch, she cries, but can only wait for him. He returns, sees her sitting there, and begins to apologize. She stops him and says, “Love never means having to say you’re sorry.”

     The director insisted that Ali get it right. “Ali,” he said. “don’t rush it. Be a little more halting. Take two.” Robert Evans was there that day, watching Ali, his wife, capture that scene. “She did it again, then again,” Evans said, “Take after take. Every time the tears were real. Every time she was more convincing.” The director shouted, “Cut! That’s it. We’ve got it. Wonderful, Ali. You had me in tears.”   

     Nearly a year passed. In November 1970, Evans received word from Paramount’s owners, a New York City oil and gas company Gulf + Western, that the company’s board of directors wanted to shut down Paramount Pictures. The studio was costing them too much money. One director said, “It’s girls, parties, premieres, movies; that’s the business they think we’re in.”

     Evans flew to New York and begged the board to let him finish two movies, Love Story and Godfather. He said, “One thing I promise you. Christmas of 1970 will be very special throughout the world. Paramount’s gift, Love Story, will make it that. It’s what life and love and Christmas is all about.” With much reluctance, the board agreed.

     Evans wrote, “On December 16, 1970, Love Story had its world premiere in New York, opening nine days later on Christmas Day to spread love to every city in America.” In the theater, at the premiere, Evans said, “All I could see was white. Kleenex! By the time the end credits began to roll the entire theater was one white flag of surrender.”

     After the film concluded, Ali grabbed her husband’s arm, and said, “I’m starting to hemorrhage, Evans,” but she was only seven months pregnant. “A night of triumph had turned into a night of terror.” Doctors stopped Ali’s labor, but a month later, on January 16, after Christmas, she gave birth to her first and only child, a boy she and Robert named Joshua Evans.

     People loved Robert Evans’s movie. “Love Story,” he said, “didn’t open. It exploded.” That single movie saved Paramount from the auction block, and Robert Evans from unemployment. It was nominated for seven academy awards and won one.

     Evans’s movie succeeded, but his marriage failed. Robert and Ali divorced in 1973. She married Steve McQueen for a short while, but that marriage also ended in divorce in 1978. Since 1994, she has lived in Santa Fe, New Mexico, and has never remarried. She is seventy-six, a grown-up flower child.

     Robert Evans still lives in Beverly Hills, and he too remarried, four times more, but those marriages also failed. He is now eighty-five years old, a grown-up studio executive.

     A love story at Christmas 1970. “Love means never having to say you are sorry.”

Lebanon’s Civil War

by William H. Benson

December 3, 2015

     In the book, The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable, the book’s author Nassim Nicholas Taleb describes the people in Lebanon, his native country. It was, he writes, “an example of coexistence,” “a mosaic of cultures and religions,” a place where “people learned to be tolerant” of others, and where “the terms balance and equilibrium were often used.”

     The Lebanese people believed themselves blessed. Their climate was Mediterranean, of course, and their citizens were sophisticated, refined, educated, peace-loving, and “acted as if they were in an old James Bond movie.” Among the people there was a rich diversity of cultures and religions, all who lived beside each other at the Mediterranean Sea’s eastern shore.

     There were the several forms of Christians: “Maronites, Armenians, Greco-Syrian Byzantine Orthodox, and Byzantine Catholic, plus a few Roman Catholics left over from the Crusades; Moslems, both Shiite and Sunni; Druzes; and a few Jews.”

     Taleb says, “We thus managed to live in peace for more than a millennium, almost devoid of bloodshed; our last true problem was the later troublemaking crusaders, not the Moslem Arabs.”

     The “balance and equilibrium” in this “Lebanese paradise suddenly evaporated” on April 13, 1975, when fighting between Christians and Moslems erupted. Taleb writes, “After close to thirteen centuries of remarkable ethnic coexistence, a Black Swan, coming out of nowhere, transformed the place from heaven to hell.”

     A Black Swan is Taleb’s metaphor for a highly unpredictable event, one that no one can foresee, such as a tsunami, a comet striking Earth, or an unexpected war. When all we have ever seen are white swans, the appearance of a black swan causes us to revise our former beliefs.

     The Lebanese Civil War was a vicious war, fought in residential areas in Beirut and other cities. Schools, hotels, parks, homes, and office buildings were the battlegrounds, and car bombs were omnipresent. Retribution was the one constant.

     Like a vacuum, this war pulled in others. There were the 100,000 Palestinian refugees who had fled Israel in 1948, and now lived in temporary settlements in southern Lebanon. Led by Yasser Arafat’s PLO, the Palestinians sided with the Moslems. Hafez al-Assad, Syria’s ruler, sent in his army to occupy portions of eastern Lebanon, and in early June of 1982, Ariel Sharon, the commander of Israel’s army invaded southern Lebanon in “Operation Peace for the Galilee.”

     The Americans sent in the Marines, and the Soviets sided with the Syrians. It was convoluted.

     In 1975, most Lebanese believed that their civil war was temporary, that it would end in a few days, but not until October 13, 1990, after 15 ½ years of bloodshed, did it end. In fact, Syria did not withdraw its military from Lebanon until April 30, 2005, thirty years later. No one predicted a long war.

     After a truck bomb blew up a U.S. Marine barracks on Sunday morning, October 23, 1983, in Beirut, and killed 241 American men, Ronald Reagan ordered the U.S. troops to withdraw.

     From Taleb’s observation of this civil war in his homeland, he makes some sweeping generalizations. “History is opaque,” he says. “You can see what comes out, but you cannot read the script that produces the events, the generator of history.” He then writes, “Humanity is a great machine for looking backward, because we can only assess matters after the fact.”

     Then, he says, “Information is of dubious value.” Although everyone studied the newspapers, no one person knew much. The news of yesterday could not forecast what would happen tomorrow.

     From that, Taleb then brings up a major philosophical problem: “How can we logically go from specific instances to reach general conclusions?” In other words, “How do we know anything?” This is called the Problem of Inductive Knowledge.

     Taleb mentions the philosopher Bertrand Russell, who wrote, “Domestic animals expect food when they see the person who feeds them. The man who has fed the chicken every day throughout its life at last wrings its neck.” Chickens and turkeys believe that men will provide them food forever. Russell writes, “The mere fact that something has happened a certain number of times causes animals and men to expect that it will happen again.” For the turkey, that assumption proved itself false last week.

     The Lebanese people expected that the Christians and Moslems would live side-by-side in peace, as they had for centuries, but then a black swan appeared out of nowhere, people were forced to revise their beliefs, and they grabbed their guns and bombs and went to work killing each other.

     Consider another black swan, the Syrian Civil War, that appeared in the spring of 2011, now in its fifth year. Over 200,000 people are now dead because of that war. May it end sooner than later.

     The Christmas season approaches, and the angels’ words still proclaim the good news, “Peace on earth and goodwill to all men.” May it be so.

China’s One-Child Policy

by William H. Benson

November 5, 2015

     The Chinese people felt an immediate sense of relief last Thursday when their government stated that it will permit married couples now to have two children. The government’s one-child policy has created “a demographic nightmare,” and its leaders now must address the glaring side-effects of that policy: a diminished work force, an aging population, and a shortage of marriageable women. 

     It was on September 25, 1980, thirty-five years ago, that China’s leaders tried to rein in China’s galloping population of one billion people by a social engineering project, and that was to deny couples more than one child. A government sign read, “All citizens must observe the law; a single child is glorious.” Although enforced more in the city than in the country, officials expected all to obey.

     Mao Tse-Tung, the Chinese Communist Party’s leader, had encouraged families to produce children, as many as four per family, but because of his failed-economic plan, called the Great Leap Forward, there was a famine in 1959-1961, that caused an estimated thirty million Chinese to starve to death.

      The Chinese government remembers that worst of human catastrophes, and ever since its leaders have worried about how they will feed its massive population, which stands now at 1.4 billion people.

     The one-child policy has resulted in carnage, slaughter, massacre, and suffering. Because the Chinese people prefer sons over daughters, pregnant mothers request an ultra-sound, and if the procedure determines the fetus is a girl, the mothers will abort. Those women who conceive a second child are then subjected to forced abortions, and those women who already have their allotted single child must undergo sterilization.

     The husbands are not exempt from ill-treatment. Officials will beat, jail, fine, and even terminate the employment of men who disobey the policy and produce a second child.

     The single child suffers also. He or she grows up alone, without siblings, without playmates, surrounded by his or her parents and two sets of grandparents who dote upon him or her. The boys are pampered, spoiled, and nicknamed “Little Emperors.”

     Of course, many couples will produce a second or even a third child, more so in the country than the city, but the parents keep the child’s identity secret. Over the past thirty-five years, an estimated 6.5 million Chinese boys and girls have grown up hiding in their rooms, without residence permits, without citizenship documents, unable to attend school, and without any potential to find meaningful employment, living as a cast-off in political and social isolation.

     Out of fear of job loss, financial ruin, and social exclusion, some couples will end a second baby’s life after it is delivered, especially if it is a girl. Infanticide is the most horrific consequence of the one-child policy, a program reminiscent of Herod the Great. Some mothers will abandon their second child, give him or her to an orphanage, or place them in an adoption agency. In the late 1980’s and early 1990’s, adoption agencies placed thousands of Chinese girls in homes across the United States.  

     Because China’s birthrate stands at almost 120 boys for every 100 girls, millions of young men will never marry because of the short supply of young women. The Chinese call these solitary young men “guanggun” or “bare branches,” because they will never bear fruit. By 2020, China will have an estimated 30 million bachelors, frustrated and angry, ready to rebel, poised to march in the streets.

     The Chinese government observes their disappointment and is wary of their potential for social and political unrest, but the “bare branches” have few options? They could drive off, or even murder, another man and take his wife, or they could migrate alone to another country.

     In recent days, an economics professor at Zhejiang University named Xie Zuoshi suggested polyandry, or “one wife, many husbands.” In other words, a wife would receive permission to marry two husbands. It is incredible to think that such a social experiment would ever work. “Much of the response to the professor’s suggestion has been outrage,” and is most deserved. For a wife to have one husband at a time in this life is sufficient.

     Xie Zuoshi responded to the outcry. The thing to remember, he said, is that “behind the imbalanced sex ratio of 30 million bachelors lie 30 million baby girls who died due to sex discrimination. But somehow everyone is still crying that some men cannot find a wife.”

     Famine, starvation, infanticide, revolts, polygamy, and even polyandry have at times appeared in China’s vast history. Read Pearl Buck’s The Good Earth. It is “unsparing in its depiction of the oppression of women and the horrors of peasant life.” A flood and then a famine forces a family—Wang Lung and his wife O-lan and their children—to flee their home and live in the city. One character says it best, “Hunger makes a thief of any man.”   

     Governments make plans, but Mother Nature has other ideas.

Bobby Fischer and Steve Jobs

by William H. Benson

October 22, 2015

     Hollywood just released two biographical movies. The first was on Bobby Fischer entitled Pawn Sacrifice, and the other was on Steve Jobs, entitled Steve Jobs. Bobby’s passion was chess, but Steve’s was computers and marketing. Chess experts now consider Bobby one of the three greatest chess players ever, and Steve revolutionized the personal computer industry.

     A certain level of mystery surrounds both Bobby and Steve’s birth.

      Bobby was the older, born in March 1943 in Chicago. His mother, Regina Fischer, was separated from her husband, Hans-Gerhardt Fischer, at the time she gave birth to Bobby. Since then, it is speculated that Paul Nemenyi, a Hungarian-Jewish physicist then living in the United States, was Bobby’s father, but Regina never confirmed that, and Paul was not involved in the family. Thus, Regina raised Bobby and his older sister, Joan, as a single parent, who worked as a nurse in New York City. 

     Steve was born in February 1955, in San Francisco. His biological father was Abdulfattah Jandali, a native of Homs, Syria, who had studied economics and political science at the University of Wisconsin. It was there that he met Joanne Schieble, daughter of a Wisconsin farmer.

     After Joanne became pregnant in 1954, she fled Syria and moved to California where she gave birth to a boy and placed him up for adoption there. Paul and Clara Jobs adopted Joanne’s boy and raised him in and around Cupertino, a San Francisco suburb.

     Bobby grew up in New York City, on the east coast, and Steve in San Francisco, on the west coast.

     At sixteen Bobby dropped out of Erasmus Hall High School, saying, “You don’t learn anything in school.” Steve’s GPA at Homestead High School in Cupertino, California was 2.65, meaning he received B’s and C’s. For a year, he attended Reed College in Portland, Oregon, but dropped out because his parents could not afford it. Instead, he travelled around India for seven months.

     Formal education failed to interest either Bobby or Steve.              

     Bobby found his passion when just a child. In March of 1949, when he was six, he and Joan bought a chess set at the candy store, and Bobby taught himself the game by reading books on chess. He then began playing in New York City’s chess clubs, where the best players recognized his talent.

     On October 17, 1956, Bobby won the “brilliancy prize” for his innovative play against Donald Byrne, in what Hans Kmoch of the Chess Review called “The Game of the Century.” On move number seventeen, Bobby dared to sacrifice his queen, but went on to defeat Byrne by a crushing offense.

     Kmoch said, “The following game, a stunning masterpiece of combination play performed by a boy of thirteen against a formidable opponent, matches the finest on record among chess prodigies.” A year later, when still fourteen, he won the U.S. Championship.

    After Steve returned from India, he teamed up with an electronics geek named Steve Wozniak to market Wozniak’s computer projects. Whereas Wozniak was interested in design and technology, Jobs promoted and marketed the company that the two created. It was wildly successful, and Steve Jobs became a multi-millionaire at twenty-five.A California dreamer converted himself into a businessman.

     Throughout his playing career, Bobby wanted to take his chess skills to the next higher level, and so he never stopped reading. He taught himself Russian and other European languages in order to read the chess periodicals. A Latvian player once asked Bobby, “What do you think of the playing style of Larissa Volpert?” He replied, “She’s too cautious. But you have another girl, Dmitrieva. Her games do appeal to me.” Bobby had learned to read Latvian, evidence of his deep commitment to winning chess.     

     In 1972, in Reykjavik, Iceland, Bobby Fischer won the World Chess Championship when he defeated the Russian chess champion, Boris Spassky. Bobby turned down all endorsement offers which would have made him rich, but instead, he surprised everyone and retired from competitive chess playing for the next twenty years. He flitted about the world, a fugitive from America.

     In 2006, Bobby said that the openings in chess are crucial and that players “today have so many examples of what to do from this position, and that is why I don’t like chess any more. It is all memorization and prearrangement.” Few had studied and memorized though as well as had Bobby Fischer. For his endgames, he liked to combine a rook with bishops and a pawn to force a checkmate.

     Bobby Fischer died on January 17, 2008, at the age of 64, in Reykjavik, of renal failure following a urinary tract blockage, and after he had refused medical treatment. In October of 2003, doctors diagnosis pancreatic cancer in Steve Jobs. He received the best treatment, but he too passed away on October 5, 2011, at the age of 56. Bobby and Steve’s endgame had arrived too soon.

     Daring, smart, intense, driven, ambitious, and almost superhuman, these two American men dared to imagine and dream at a level that few others could ever hope to see nor achieve. Enjoy the movies.