Chess Nazi goes to Iceland

article
Well, not nazi exactly, just anti-semetic.

New Icelandic citizen Bobby Fischer is volatile, uncompromising and defiantly eccentric. He should fit right in.

Tiny, wind-lashed Iceland has long drawn artists, loners and dreamers attracted by its remoteness, empty spaces and otherworldly, lava-strewn landscape - the very conditions that kept most migrants away and helped forge the proud, independent Icelandic character.

"What was it Buzz Aldrin said about the moon? 'Magnificent desolation' - that's Iceland," said Jose Tirado, a U.S.-born Buddhist priest who has lived near Reykjavik for four years. "Iceland affords the natural inspiration to spend as much time as you like in your head, formulating ideas."

As a result, he said, "Everybody here has a guitar or a poem, some artwork or a play."

Chess icon Fischer, who spent nine months in Japanese detention fighting extradition to the United States, was granted citizenship last week by the country that was the site of his greatest triumph - a 1972 world championship victory in Reykjavik over Cold War rival Boris Spassky of the Soviet Union.

Chicago-born, Brooklyn-bred Fischer, wanted in the United States for playing a 1992 rematch against Spassky in Yugoslavia in defiance of international sanctions, arrived in Iceland on Thursday. The next day, he told journalists: "I was crazy to leave."

He may be right. If any country is willing to overlook Fischer's erratic behavior and often extreme pronouncements, it's Iceland.
...
Large-scale immigration is a relatively new phenomenon for a country where almost everyone is descended from 9th-century Viking settlers.

The number of foreign-born residents has doubled in the past decade, but is still only 10,000 people, just more than 3 percent of the population. There are Portuguese construction workers building a major dam in the east of the country, Poles working in northern fish factories and Thai cleaners in Reykjavik's hotels, as well as a smattering of young Europeans and North Americans attracted by the country's coziness, strong social safety net and high standard of living.

"It was clean, peaceful, isolated - just what I wanted," said Paul F. Nikolov, an American journalist who moved here six years ago. "Not at all like Baltimore."
...
The bill granting Fischer citizenship passed through Iceland's parliament in just 12 minutes. But for most others, it's not easy to become an Icelander.

Those who get a residence permit - usually conditional on a job offer - must wait seven years before they can apply for citizenship, a process that involves multiple forms, character references and often extensive medical tests.

The article is more about Iceland than Fischer, and perhaps rightfully so. It is exactly right about Icelandic culture; very isolated, and more cerebral and old-fashioned (for lack of better term) than most in most western countries. In many respects, the nation is incredible. For example, it has a 2.46% unemployment rate, the second lowest in Europe (just behind Liechtenstein), and is has one of the fastest growing economies in Europe, due in large part to a low tax rate which is actually approaching a flat tax. It also tied for 1st place in the 2002 Reporters Without Borders media freedom index. Until the 70's, Iceland had only one television station, and it stopped all broadcasting for several months of the year. Thursdays were television-free until the late 70's.
The Icelandic language is also a pain in the ass, in large part because the few people of Iceland were just about isolated from the 9th century until the 20th century. With so few people, spoken language had little ability to develop in the way that larger languages did. Literature has a different history, but I don't know it as well.
Iceland is producing some surprisingly good computer games. A notable one is Eve Online, which you can get a free one-week subscription of, but you probably have to give credit card information for. After that week, it's about $14 per month. The game has a monthly charge because it's entirely online, and both bandwidth and servers cost money, and the programmers constantly improve it. The music, in my opinion, sucks, but that can be replaced with any other music you have on your computer. Graphics are beautiful, and the company finally got the plotline right: just give the players a way to develop it, or ignore it, if they wish.
Never tell an Icelander that their music is horrible, because they simply don't seem to understand that their music could not sound good. Icelanders may also be justified in any environmentalist positions, even some rather extreme ones, given that they don't really have much pristine environment of their own. After all, most of their island was formed by volcanic eruptions, and magma doesn't support much plant life.

Now, about Bobby Fischer. One of the best chess players to ever live, no question. Incredibly energetic, original, and brilliant on the chess board. He developed Fischer Random Chess, in which the pieces (king, queen, bishop, knight, and rook) are arranged randomly, in protest of the predictable opening moves of most chess games (you can find volumes on chess opening theory) and in favor of originality. Fischer is notoriously hard to find – few, if any, reporters have been able to track him down in the last decade – and has a short temper. In one Japanese chess club that Fischer visited, he saw a painting of one of his games, and offered to sign it. He was furious when the painting was replaced by a Harry Potter poster. He has done several interviews on Icelandic and Japanese radio, as well as in a few other countries. He has his own website, but I won't link to it, because it destroys the image of a chess genius. I really wish that guy would see a psychologist and get a few pills, as he seems to be very paranoid. He'd also need something to forget large swaths of his past, which are less-than-enviable. If Fischer were nice to people, he would be far better off and not be put in jail for months at a time. When he was wrongly arrested for a bank robbery, he was held for several months, and charged with destruction of a mattress. I believe I am right to guess that he was held for months in response to his horrid behavior.

Well, Iceland, enjoy your newfound crazy, and I hope he doesn't destroy your culture of tolerance and freedom. If anyone wants to start a Medicate Bobby Fischer fund, I'll be overjoyed to link and try to get my parents to donate a bit – I don't have the credit cards.