Let the Eagles fly!

Noah, the piker, stole my messenger bag. Because I have an LL Bean credit card, I get free monogramming from them (as well as free shipping, the value of which should never be underestimated), which means that occasionally I put my initials on things, like this bag, so if you’re wondering, Noah’s the guy with the nice new messenger bag with my initials on it. My cell phone was also in the bag, so if you want to talk to me, you’ll have to talk to Noah first.

The piker.

Actually, Noah and Robbie had come around to the chez to shoot the breeze and eat chicken in advance of Emory. Although their arrival was surrounded by plenty of Grabowitzian sturm und drang, once we settled in it was fun, first, to hash over old times as one always does, and then to hash over Jan-Feb. As far as old times are concerned, Noah has, as Liberty Valence would have it, printed the legend. But the legend, as everyone knows, is a much better story than the reality. As far as Jan-Feb is concerned, Noah lives in a world where the negative is true, while conveniently enough I live in a world where the affirmative is true, so for the sake of dialogue, we were able to dig through it. Meaningful dialogue about topics is, in my opinion, the best tool for understanding them. But it’s hard to get such dialogue going, because it depends so much on social chemistry. In a team like the Sailors which at present is predominately Plebes and Senioritis sufferers, there aren’t a lot of people willing to offer (or capable of offering) well thought-out positions, or for that matter workable albeit unthought-out positions. That will change, but it will take time.

This week’s meeting, though, was a good example of how it can work. We picked the negative to death until we finally boiled it down to the required morally relevant distinction, framed in language that would work in a debate context, i.e., you could build a case around it and defend that case. Or at least I could, and Robbie concurred. Seeing that there’s still plenty of debate left in this particular resolutional dog at Newark and Scarsdale and Harvard and maybe beyond, it can’t hurt to comparably attack the aff at the next meeting.

A lot of people are down in Georgia this weekend, of course, doing the Emory thing. Emory is one of the tournaments I’ve never been to. I almost made it one year, but we cancelled at the last minute, and I think that knocked whatever small resolve I had had to visit the place clear out of me. My impression of the tournament is that it holds an awful high opinion of itself, and that it is more for the coaches than for the students, and preferably for coaches who have more barnacles on them than they can scrape off single-handed. The use of mutual judge preference favors the most experienced of the national circuit (I won’t go into the whole MJP rant again), while the barnacle people sit around wearing crowns and carrying scepters and generally enjoying their one annual opportunity to be treated like, if not nobility, at least gentry. Ah, the South… If they show evidence of enough barnacles, they are given a key (presumably to the tournament but maybe just to the teachers’ bathroom), and if they have the most barnacles, they get a round named after them. You don’t ask, Who’s in Finals? You ask, Who’s in Soddies? Cute. When I first started, every tournament I went to up and down the line seemed to have some sort of award the coaches were giving to the other coaches. I always found that strange, as if the coaches were jealous of their kids taking home hardware all the time and wanted some hardware of their own. Given that there were only so many coaches, pretty soon they had all won all of the available accolades, and the awards went away. As I say, cute. The awards were always named after some former luminary, of course, much as the Sailors’ tournament is named after our old coach, who was very influential in the region back in the day. O’C, the tradition maven, is big on award blitzes and names all his awards after old Jakes. There’s the “Bedroom Eyes” award and the “Doing the BB” award, and of course the Soddie, which I think was awarded the first year to, ah, Soddie. Or me. I forget. I do have my Jake award proudly displayed at the Chez. I’ll take a look and let you know (or, I guess, you can read the inevitable comment O’C will post to clarify the issue for us). It’s not that I’m not proud of it, but pride and bemusement are far from mutually exclusive.

So this weekend, since I’m home and the weather promises to be marginally frightful, I’ll do some more catching up. Or, maybe I’ll begin the next Post-Dialectic essay. Noah, by the way, claims he disagrees with me violently on my P-D analysis. Which means that no other indication is required to warrant my absolute correctness.

The piker!