Politics and Chess Made Clearer

A renewed interest in improving my mediocre chess game brought me to an epiphany of sorts and leads me to (temporarily) abandon my usual format of comment on this or that article. Friend Bill Karneges recently put online perhaps the finest instructional book on chess ever written. More on that later. What, epiphanized me (in that moment of sudden understanding) is that modern American politics is but a chess game, where we are frustratingly unable to see the board.

Obama moves a knight (delivering health care) and we fault him for its shortcomings, failing to see the endgame because it is withheld from our view. He advances a pawn (bailing out the deceivers) and we scoff, feeling an abandonment of principle.

Yet perhaps, just perhaps, Obama and Rahm Emanuel are Grand Masters and, were we to see the board with all its challenges, various threats and opportunities, a different opinion might form in our minds. I (and our nation alike) have been myopically focused on opening moves (a president's first year in office) and opening moves do not a chess-game win. Forgive me, it's early days.  

Bill's book-video CD is titled The Six Power Moves of Chess and it bypasses all those mossy old tomes that require photographic memorization and an unrelieved attention to games long past played. That's not my long-suit, perhaps not yours either, but I am far from its only fan.

Chess Grand Master, five time U.S. champion and Bobby Fischer's second, writes on the cover of the CD;

"A fresh, bold, lucid approach to improving your game."

I am a big fan of lucid, no matter that it occasionally escapes me as a writer. Be you a beginner or Master, Bill teaches how to think to win. It will vastly improve your game over several outstandingly pleasant days of instruction. It may even change your observation of the political process. Happy New Year!