Bobby Fischer, who put chess on the mainstream map for a while back in the early 70s, has died at the age of 64.

Those of you too young to remember may find it odd that the nation was riveted by his televised chess match with Boris Spassky back in 1972. In fact, those of us plenty old enough to remember may find it odd, as well.

I didn’t share chess fever. But many watched, entranced by the static but tensely cerebral scene:

“It was Bobby Fischer who had, single-handedly, made the world recognize that chess on its highest level was as competitive as football, as thrilling as a duel to the death, as esthetically satisfying as a fine work of art, as intellectually demanding as any form of human activity,” wrote Harold C. Schonberg, who reported on the Reykjavik match for The New York Times, in his 1973 book, “Grandmasters of Chess.”

Well, I’m sure it is intellectually demanding. But for me it wasn’t all that thrilling. The intellect demanded is a very specialized and narrow one, and Fischer was a particularly specialized and narrow example of the genre. A child prodigy, he seemed to be obsessed with chess almost from the start, and his personality was noted as being odd and off-putting even among a group noted for eccentricity. As he aged, he only became more odd.

Why am I writing about Fischer? It struck me, as I read his obituary, that one particular form his oddity took used to seem much more odd than it does now. I refer to his paranoia and conspiracy theories about the Jews.

Yes, of course, during World War II such ideas motivated an entire country, and much of Europe as well. But in the early years of my lifetime the sort of virulent anti-Semitism practiced by the Nazis was highly discredited, and thought by many to be relegated to a weak and very small fringe element, probably never again to rise again. Those views now seem hopelessly naive.

Some time in the early 90s when I first read that Fischer had gone off the deep end, and that part of his lunacy involved vicious anti-Semitism, he seemed to be an extreme outlier. But now his views seem more common, if not commonplace:

On Sept. 11, 2001, [Fischer] told a radio talk-show host in Baguio, the Philippines, that the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon were ”wonderful news,” adding he was wishing for a scenario “where the country will be taken over by the military, they’ll close down all the synagogues, arrest all the Jews and secure hundreds of thousands of Jewish ringleaders.”

And then there’s this:

“I applaud the act [of 9/11]. The U.S. and Israel have been slaughtering the Palestinians, just slaughtering them for years….Nobody gave a shit. Now it’s coming back to the U.S. Fuck the U.S. I want to see the U.S. wiped out.”

You get the idea. In an interesting biographical detail, Fischer was raised by his Jewish (pacifist, and Leftist) mother after his German physicist father deserted the family and returned home when Fischer was but two years old. A therapist could have a field day with such information, but I’ll leave you to draw your own conclusions.

What’s more important than Fischer’s unique biography is that viewpoints that once seemed the products of a demented but singular mind now read like standard boilerplate for extreme Leftist and Islamiscist causes. Such opinions have been mainstreamed to a certain extent, partly by the amplifying and unifying force of online communication.

How many people around the world believe that the Jews were warned about 9/11? How many believe that Jewish “cabals” (code word) are running the world?

Plenty, and some of them are not the least bit insane in the usual sense of the word.

In a related issue, the other day at the library I parked in back of a car that sported a bumper crop of bumper stickers, including the familiar ones about 9/11 and George Bush’s involvement. The man who stepped out of the car looked like the sort of person you’d want as your child’s Sunday School teacher—middle-aged, calm, intelligent, kind. Of course, I don’t really know—he could have been every bit as maniacal as Fischer, although probably not as gifted. But my guess is that he lives a quiet and otherwise sane-enough life, seeming to all intents and purposes to be a reasonable man.

This sort of paranoia and conspiracist thinking is not at all unusual among those who seem to be functioning otherwise at a fairly high level. For example, I first came across the 9/11-truthers long before the movement became well-known. Only about a year after 9/11 I was speaking to a friend (a therapist, by the way) when she casually mentioned that she thought the government—Bush included—knew about 9/11 beforehand and was implicated in it.

My reaction was, “You’ve got to be kidding!” But I found, to my horror, that she was deadly serious, and that she became more and more agitated as I tried to counter what she was saying.

This was the end of our friendship, which had never been a close one anyway. I didn’t have to do anything; it was she who stopped phoning me. In this case, I experienced the cessation of our friendship as a relief; I simply could not wrap my mind around the depth of her paranoia, distrust, and illogic.

This event shocked me at the time. It no longer does. Bobby Fischer may have once represented a fringe. But in the intervening years, that fringe has gotten larger and moved ever closer to the mainstream.