The Non-Queen's Gambit

Much like many folks during this pandemic, I've watched a lot more television.....or at least tried to. Unfortunately, the pandemic closed down the movie and production studios as well, so there hasn't been a ton of new shows to watch. As such, you get some shows that EVERYONE sees, just because there's nothing else on. Tiger King is one of those shows and yes, we watched it. But we also watched Queen's Gambit, a six episode show about an orphan chess prodigy in the 1960's. 

While only six episodes, it was an extremely compelling story about savants and how they deal with life as a savant (in whatever area, this one happened to be chess). As a child in an orphanage, the 9 year old heroine sees the janitor playing chess and eventually has him teach her how to play.  You can imagine that it starts out a little rough on her, but she catches on surprisingly fast (as you would expect from a savant) and away the story goes. 

She learns many lessons along the way and one that she learns early and that the story flashes back to a few times, is that you lose gracefully. When you are defeated, you resign. You don't play out every last move wasting people's time, you resign. You don't abruptly get up and walk away either; you tip your king or just stand up and shake your opponent's hand. We just watched the last episode last night and it struck me as a great life lesson for people of all cultures, but certainly here in the U.S. Our competitive nature is often like that of a child; play until there's no more hope instead of resigning with dignity and acknowledging your opponent.

Now, in some sports you play to the whistle as they say and that's absolutely fine. But down by 30 with 2 minutes to play in football or a similar amount in basketball or hockey, seems to make less sense. 

In politics, t-Rump continues to embarrass himself, the republican party, the presidency and the U.S. with his ridiculous, hopeless, classless lawsuits. When cornered by multiple pieces and no where to go, he opted to play it out to the last, filing some 57 lawsuits including one just the other day with the SCOTUS who has already sternly rebuffed him once. Any dignity that t-Rump had was lost probably before he did his television show, but he is clearly now showing how much of a buffoon he has always been. He would have been a reprehensible chess player.