"David Kane" <davidekane@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote in message
news:UeqdnZKHCc8t3YrVnZ2dnUVZ_uOdnZ2d@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
>
> <parrthenon@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote in message
>
news:c4ab7bd5-4f96-44fe-8e42-9cc570d3c58e@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
>>
>> One reckons that nearly every reader on this
>> forum knows that Kanester inverted truth when calling
>> Larry Evans an apparatchik of the USCF. He has
>> been an independent contractor, never a USCF employee.
>
> One has to laugh. When faced with an unpleasant
> reality, Parr comes up with the defense that Larry
> Evans was not technically "on the payroll" but rather
> an independent contractor! I stand corrected. LOL
Not the point I took, which was that Larry Evans was independent of
employment and also the need for a few hundred bucks a month, since he is
a
millionairre.
> Of course, that detail has little to do with anything,
> and does not resurrect the Evans mythology (of
> someone bravely takes on a corrupt establishment) that
> Parr has been assigned with promulgating.
Who else has bravely done so? There are few truly independent voices. The
inverse of Larry Evans is Jerry Hanken, eg.
> GM Evans, a player I admire and an author of chess
> works of which I am a satisfied customer (believe it
> or not, he actually wrote about chess at one time!),
> chose to make his chess name writing for the USCF's
> "government" periodical. As such, his survival was not
> related to excellence or even competence, but rather
> his skill in negotiating the political winds of the
> federation. He's done that in admirable fa****on -
> and I don't deny that in part that relates to having
> a group of loyal followers, mostly of the Sam Sloan
> variety.
My opinion is that people use their own judgement rather more than an
weighted attention from Sloan, who, after all, is only known to chess
politicians and the reader of the New York Times, if that is a distinction
worth making?
> Of course, when CL made it mandatory for
> every article to have a red-baiting angle, Evans
> complied with his wild, fact-free allegations - often
> contradicting his own prior writings.
These facts, you know, like judgement at chess, are not always
communicable
to those with not the slightest sence of the culture addressed. Soviet
ba****ng is relatively easy, since there are now plenty of facts to sup****t
it, in fact, to assume innocent action from a Soviet-era figure would be
the
exception, and facts would be required to explicate that person from the
system.
Korchnoi was certainly such an exception to corruption to the degree that
he
could still exist in the SU and say anything at all. A bit later Boris
Spassky was the same. They both got the hell out of there. Gulko was
merely
a refusenik and was persecuted for his religion and culture.
Are there ex-Soviets chess players in the West who actually contest this
as
a basis?
> But I will grant that
> Parr does have a point in that the USCF
> does not speak with a single voice and
> at times he's been at odds with certain factions
> within the organization. Perhaps the wily politician
> is a more apt image than apparatchik, which
> emphasizes conformity above all else.
Like in the SU, non-conformity is treated the same way - by being
frozen-out; by being ostracized by the burocratic class in chess who
rather
like it the way it is.
Phil Innes
|
