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Wednesday, July 19, 2006
Ravanera: The Queen's Gambit and the Bishops
By Maning Ravanera
Tintin's Banters
I GREW up in a family of chess enthusiasts. My father, as well as my three brothers and three sisters, knows how to play chess.
Even my mother is familiar with all the moves of all the chess pieces on the board with 8x8 grid of alternating black and white squares.
In my high school days, my father met a retiree from the Bureau of Customs, the late Bernardo Lagao, who lived in two nearby houses in our subdivision as he had two families. In the afternoons (except on Sundays), he would drop by our house to play with my father (after my father's office hours). Oftentimes, their entire Saturday would be spent playing chess -- their common source of joy.
During the championship match of Robert Fischer and Boris Spassky in Reykjavik, Iceland in 1972, we analyzed the moves of each player and followed the games like any basketball enthusiast follows the NBA play-offs these days.
In that milieu, my father was baptized by Lagao as "Fischer" while he christened himself as "Spassky".
So, every time Lagao would not arrive at about 5:30 to 6 o'clock in the afternoon, my father would request Cleo, the youngest among the boys, to call Spassky for the match of the day. Both the local Spassky and Fischer have faced their Creator and may be playing chess in heaven.
In the olden times, chess is comparable to the people in the Kingdom. The Pawns act as the peasants who are considered insignificant, the way our farmers are considered now. The Knights are the soldiers who make moves in "L" form.
The Rooks are those that guard the left and the right flanks of the castle and the Bishops act as the priests or the bishops themselves.
The King (may be considered the entire kingdom) does very limited movements and is supposed to be protected by all the chess pieces.
Curiously, chess is similar to the political moves of our politicians these days. GMA for instance, is the most powerful chess piece, the Queen.
She even uses gambits. A gambit in chess refers to the sacrifice of minor chess pieces to gain positional advantage. As an opening defense, the Queen's gambit sacrifices a Pawn in order to control the center.
During the 2004 election, PGMA deployed her Knights (soldiers) who made use of "incoherent" moves to attain victory.
And during the crisis in her administration when she apologized to the entire nation, she "sacrificed" or exiled her husband to the US.
History tells us that the Bishop is the last among the chess pieces to be introduced in the board game sometime in Europe in the late 16th century.
Perhaps this is due to the rise of Catholicism. The moves of the Queen are similar to that of the castle or Rook and the Bishop joined together. She can move horizontally, vertically like the Rook and diagonally like the Bishop.
At present, the Queen's castle, which may be considered as Malacañang, has created portals that are almost impregnable to any attack.
To strengthen such portals, the Queen has wooed our Bishops. The first she wooed was the Pope, the "first among equals" (Primus Interpares) of all Bishops also known as the Bishop of Rome.
Now, she is into wooing all the other Bishops who very recently seem to have sent a wrong signal when they released a Pastoral Letter on Social Concerns, declaring that they "are not inclined at the present moment to favor the impeachment process as the means for establishing the truth."
Yet, reading the six-page Pastoral Letter, it appears that the Bishops are opposed to the various moves of the government.
They declared that charter change would be best done through a constitutional convention. They called for a true electoral reform and the resignation or prosecution of a number of Commissioners. In defense of human rights and human dignity, they condemned the extra-judicial killings.
The Bishops in the Pastoral Letter reiterated their concerns for people empowerment as they said: "No social transformation is genuine and lasting where people themselves do not actively participate in the process.
We understand 'people power' to include greater involvement in decision-making, greater equality in both political and economic matters, more democracy, more participation".
The Bishops who are seemingly dancing to the tune of the "Queen" should not as yet be judged. Perhaps they do not want to tear our hearts again as we see the political lackeys of the "Queen" in Congress, representing all the Pawns, block the impeachment.
Again, history tells us that no impeachment in our Presidential System has ever succeeded, not even in the U.S. during a time when its President admitted publicly that he has acted with an "inappropriate behavior".
Now everyone is asking, if not impeachment, what else could establish the truth?
My brothers who play the chess, especially Engr. Cleo and Dir. Orlan who had gathered so many trophies in the game of chess, would surely tell us that there are millions of possibilities to trap the Queen until she finally falls.
A single impeachment move may not be the only answer. Let's not forget that the game is still going on and it rages not only in the Halls of Congress but in every corner of our country.
For us now, in playing the political game, it may be good to quote Spassky when he was asked "what chess is to him" and he said "chess is like life".
But the strategists who, and if asked the same question, would probably take the answer of Fischer by saying, "chess is life".
So, life goes on. If we play it uprightly and really fight for what we believe is right, time will take care of everything. Better yet, not the Queen, nor the Knights and perhaps, not even the Bishops, but God will lead us through.
(July 19, 2006 issue)
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