the book never written

My first foray into the works of Chris Hedges came a bit of time ago, when I found his book Losing Moses on the Freeway at a nearby library. I was especially interested when one part of the book dealt with chess and some chess players. It was in reading this part, though, that I came on a rather interesting passage, this one here

The chess craze, ushered in by Bobby Fischer in the 1970s, hit the United States. Rossolimo, who made it into Fischer's book on the 100 greatest games he ever played, never capitalized on it, but Frohlinde did. He made money, big money, selling chess sets of of his shop.
Chris Hedges, Losing Moses on the Freeway, p 149

What gave me pause was his mention of a book by Fischer "on the 100 greatest games he ever played".

When I was pretty intensely into local tournament chess, I became rather familiar with the literature of the game. It was, of course, an ever expanding body of literature, and I haven't kept up with the latest things, but as I was playing in tournaments in the 1990's, it would have been well past the time when Fischer would have written anything, at least up until his return.

Fischer himself did not have a great deal of that literature to his name--much has been written about him and his games by other people, but I've found only three books that Fischer himself as the author.

One is rather poorly-made instructional book called Bobby Fischer Teaches Chess. I had a copy of it at one time, and it was a bit disappointing.

Fischer's most famous work, and one rightly considered a classic, is My 60 Memorable Games, published in 1969. In the preface to this book, Fischer himself makes mention of an earlier book, Bobby Fischer's Games of Chess, published in 1959. This book, Fischer says, has 34 of his games in it.

Now, My 60 Memorable Games does have a game that Fischer played against Rossolimo. It is game #52 in that book, and the game was played in the 1965-66 US Championship, well after Fischer's first book was published.

All of this rambling to say that, I have no knowledge of Fischer publishing a collection of his 100 greatest games, like Hedges says. The closest I can find to such a thing is Fischer's My 60 Memorable Games, which has 60 games in it instead of 100, and even the use of 'memorable' instead of greatest is telling. In Fischer's own words from the preface, "All of the 60 here offered contain, for me, something memorable and exciting--even the 3 losses". It would be doubtful that Fischer would put losses into a collection of his greatest games--at the least ,it would be an unusual practice.

In other words, although Hedges seems to be trying to reference a real work of chess literature, the information he gives about it is wrong, both in a concrete sense (60 games instead of 100) and a more abstract sense (memorable games instead of greatest).

It would be too easy to make too much hay over this error. It may have been a simple error, a bit of carelessness maybe. But the fact is, the error was made, and it was one that could easily have been avoided.

For one thing, the mention of the book is made in what is essentially a throw-away comment. It adds a bit of information, but nothing crucial to the point. One could understand that Rossolimo "did not capitalize one...(t)he chess craze" without having to know that Fischer included a game against Rossolimo in his book.

For another, it would have been easy to have verified the name and nature of the book. Hedges wrote this book fairly recently, it was published in 2006, and sites like Amazon were around. A quick search of some kind would have easily sufficed for him to get the correct information about the book.

But he doesn't seem to have done enough to verify, and so he wrote about a book with 100 games in it that doesn't exist.

And being wrong about a simple, easily verifiable thing like that, leads one to think, what else is he writing that may be wrong? Maybe nothing else, maybe all else he writes is correct, and this was just a singular slip. But it does cause the eyebrows to go up.

a view from overhead

The Gilead Baptist Church outside Detroit is on a four-lane highway called South Telegraph Road. The drive down South Telegraph Road to the church, a warehouse-like structure surrounded by black asphalt parking lots, is a depressing gauntlet of boxy, cut-rate motels with names like Melody Lane and Best Value Inn. The highway is flanked by a flat-roofed Walgreens, Blockbuster, discount liquor stores, Taco Bell, McDonald's, Bob's Big Boy, Sunoco and Citgo gas stations, a Ford dealership, Nails USA, the Dollar Palace, Pro Quick Luve and U-Haul. The tawdry display of cheap consumer goods, emblazoned with neon, lines both sides of the road, a dirty brown strip in the middle. It is a sad reminder that something has gone terribly wrong withe America, with its inhuman disregard for beauty and balance, it obsession with speed and utilitarianism, its crass commercialism and it oversized SUVs and trucks and greasy junk food. This disdain for nature, balance and harmony is part of the deadly, numbing assault against community.
Chris Hedges, American Fascists, pp 182-183

I read this passage, and could only shake my head. Typical liberal arrogance.

Oh, yes, how shameful that those who are not so well-off have to stay in such tawdry, cut-rate places like Best Value. Such a pity all hotels and inns aren't Marriots or some other where a night's rest would likely cost a week's wages instead of a day's.

And, of course, how unimaginative that stores are in buildings with flat rooves (or is that roofs, I admit I'm not certain). Perhaps Hedges would find them more acceptable if they had...oh, I don't know...domed roofs? Or maybe inverted V-shaped roofs? Steeples? Or like that famous opera house in Australia?

And, oh, that evil junk food. Never mind that the supposed all-natural health food costs a lot, problem doesn't taste all that good, and in likely not even all that much better. It only gives the health-food snobs a source for their feelings of superiority over those who enjoy Big Macs.

So much could be picked out from this excerpt. Wal-Mart, of course, gets mentioned. As do SUVs, those bastions of evil in the liberal mind.

Now, I have a different take on it. You see, I've been to a former Communist country, Russia.

There is a movie, a classic among the Russian people, I think, from the Soviet era. It's a holiday movie, though probably more concerning New Year's than Christmas, that being the Soviet Union and all. It's a comedy movie. The main premise of it is that, after an evening of carousing with his friends, a man unwittingly takes a plane from Moscow to Leningrad (once and now again St. Petersburg). Because buildings in both cities looked essentially the same, he didn't realize he was in a different city, and he even gets to an apartment or flat that is in the same address as his place in Moscow, and his key works and his gets in. The movie is essentially a romantic comedy, so you can guess where things go from there.

Another aspect of the movie is the animation that precedes it. A man, an architect, designs a building of flats. It's a rather basic but a bit ornate design, with balconies and some other bits of decoration. But in order to build it, he must make his way through the Soviet bureaucracy, and in doing so, a bit is taken here and there, and the final building design is about has basic and plain as one could imagine. At the end of the animation, we see lines and lines of these plain buildings, with legs, marching about, even into other, non-Russian places, I suppose to show how that form of housing will eventually be everywhere.

And in Soviet Russia, it pretty much was. I remember seeing city streets lined with these rows and rows of flat buildings. They may have varied a good bit in height or width, but overall there was a dulling sameness to them all, something even the Russian people knew.

So, one must pardon me if I'm not too taken withe Hedges sentiments and logic, if it does not do injustice to the word logic to apply to whatever thinking Hedges was doing. I simply cannot agree with his conclusions, and frankly think that his words display an arrogance and condescension that is rather ugly and unbecoming.

contradictions?

Adams (Dr. James Luther Adams), finally, told us to watch closely what the Christian Right did to homosexuals. The Nazis had used "values" to launch state repression of opponents. Hitler, days after he took power in 1933, imposed a ban on all homosexual and lesbian organizations. He ordered raids on places were homosexuals gathered, culminating in the ransacking of the Institute for Sexual Science in Berlin and the permenant exile of its director, Magnus Hirschfield...Adams said that homosexuals would also be the first "sociel deviants" singled out and disempowered by the Christian Right. We would be the next.
Chris Hedges, American Fascists, p 201

By way of contrast, here's an excerpt from another book, put out a bit after Hedges' own work.

Nazi attitudes toward homosexuality are also a source of confusion. While it is true that some homosexuals were sent to concentration camps, it is also the case that the early Nazi Party and the constellation of Pan-German organizations in its orbit were rife with homosexuals. It well-known, for example, that Ernst Rohm, the head of the SA, and his coterie were homosexuals, and openly so. When jealous members of the SA tried to use this fact against im in 1931, Hitler had to remonstrate that Rohm's homosexuality was "purely in the private sphere". Some try to suggest that Rohm was murdered on the Night of the Long Knives because he was gay. But the Rohm faction posed the greatest threat to Hitler's consolidation of power because they were, in important respects, the most ardent and "revolutionary" Nazis. Scott Lively and Kevin Abrams write in The Pink Swastika that "the National Socialist revolution and the Nazi Party were animated and dominated by militaristic homosexuals, pederasts, pornographers, and sadomasochists." this is surely an overstatement. But it us nonetheless true that the artisitc and literary movements that provided oxygen for Nazism before 1933 were chockablock with homosexual liberationist tracks, clubs, and journals
Jonah Goldberg, Liberal Fascism, pp 378-379

Goldberg seems to hardly be one who is trying to single out "social deviants" here--a couple of pages later, he writes that he thinks that some form of gay marriage is probably inevitable, and he isn't so sure that would be a bad thing. Which half-echoes my own take (it may be inevitable, but let's not pretend that flouting God's laws won't have consequences).

One telling thing, I think, about these two excerpts is this. Hedges' claims are not back up with any footnotes or other support, though he does have many footnotes in the book. Goldberg, on the other hand, has a footnote and even references one of his sources in the paragraph, the book The Pink Swastika.

good for me, not for thee

Dobson's attacks on gays are relentless and brutal. He likens the proponents of gay marriage to the Nazis.
Chris Hedges, American Fascists, p 103

Irony, thy name is hypocracy.

Adams finally, told us to watch closely what the Christian Right did to homosexuals. The Nazis had used "values" to launch state repression of opponents.
p 201

He (Adams) saw in the Christian Right, long before we did, disturbing similarities with the German Christian Church and the Nazi Party, similarities, he said that would, in teh event of prolonged social instability, catastrophe or national crisis, see American fascists, under the guise of Christianity, rise to dismantle the open society.
p 195

So, apparently it's ok of Adams (and, by extension, Hedges) to compare the Christian Right to Nazis. That's acceptable. But alleging that James Dobson compares those who want gay marriage to Nazis is, well, an example of how "relentless and brutal" Dobson's attacks are.

But one of the good things about many of Dr. Dobson's books is that they can be easy to find, particularly in libraries. A library close to me has a copy of the book Hedges' claims to find this example of a "relentless and brutal" attack. The book is called Marriage Under Fire, and Hedges' reference points to page 41. After a reading of that page, here is the only thing I can find that he may be refering to.

It was this regrettable decision that has created the present turmoil throughout the nation. It has emboldened rogue commissioners, mayors, and legislators to begin overriding laws prohibiting homosexual marriage. They have been passing out marriage licenses like candy. These minor bureaucrats now have things going their way, and they are going to strike while the iron is ot. This is why we are in the state of peril that faces our nation today. Like Adolf Hitler, who overran his European neighbors, those who favor homosexual marriage are determined to make it legal, regardless of the democratic processes that stand in their way.

Well. Ok, the name 'Adolf Hitler' is present in that paragraph. And there is a bit of "this is like that" there.

Hardly much, though, once you've seen it.

And let's look at the context, particularly "this regrettable decision". It's about the case Lawrence v Texas. To quote Dobson again from the same page...

By ruling that sodomy is a constitutionally protected "right", the highest court in the land declared, in effect, that considerations of morality and decency were irrelevant.

A reasoned take on Dobson's claims in the context may be interesting, but Hedges doesn't do that. He seems to simply latch onto the name Hitler, and so tries to spin Dobson's words to mean something they really don't seem to mean.

While, of course, going on himself about how Nazi-like he thinks the Christian Right is.

Yeah, double standard much?