Tizzies

I somehow managed to set up a whole series of practice rounds and then mistakenly set dates a week early in the team calendar, thus sending all and sundry into a considerable tizzy. I fixed it, but this does seem to be a week for tizzies. There was the flap over the clone army of RJTs, which seems to have melted without a trace, and a tizzy about the impossibility of holding policy rounds at districts, and a tizzy of Nixon for President ads that Noah keeps sending me, presumably on the assumption that dead does not preclude tan, rested and ready, and there’s the tizzying lack of time for no apparent reason that has kept me from Nostrum. I’ve got to get things back on track. Considering that, unlike most of the VCA, I don’t have this week off, you’d think I’d be more organized, but that never happens. Disorganization by contagion. For instance, there’s a message from one Sailor that he is “kinda in Florida.” What can that possibly mean? That he’s in Georgia? That existentially no one is ever “in Florida”? Or something even more complex? You’ve got to wonder… In any case, like said Sailor, my mind is kinda in Florida. I hope to have it return to earth shortly.

Being that this is a forensic interstitial period, I do what all forensicians do when they have nothing more important on their plates, and their Netflix queues are all organized, and their hair is shampooed, and the cat has been fed and the baby has been milked, which is to trundle over and visit good old WTF. I have to admit that it’s been a while since I’ve done much more than glance at the thing, because mostly lately it’s been nothing but the usual adorations of the $ircuit (wikis of who’s going to Kentucky) and photographs of schematics from round 2 of the Uvula University Invitational (which O’C swears are of some interest to someone, and the minute I meet the person in whom this interest resides I promise you I’ll hit ‘em over the head with a frying pan and put us all out of his misery), although there were a few photos of the Huddians that I managed to pick up from hither and thither. O’C taking pictures at tournaments means that I don’t have to, which means I’d be saving film if I actually used film, if you know what I mean. Anyhow, I did notice that there was an addendum to their hotly discussed interview with Smilin’ J, this time a handful of Q&As from the curious multitudes. I love the way our hero does what can only be referred to as dropping J-bombs. He makes these wonderfully dry statements that are fairly difficult to elaborate, or are patently straightforward but the way he says them leaves you slightly askew. When asked about speed in LD, for instance, his questioner wonders how his opinion (he’s agin’ it) would apply to policy, and Smilin’ J says, and I quote, “I don’t say much about policy debate because I don’t know much about it, and it doesn’t really interest me.” This is a statement that is probably true of 110% of the people who read WTF, but there’s something about the way that he says it that makes the WTFian hair stand on end. I love that. How dare he not be interested in policy debate! How dare he feel that he can’t elaborate his opinions on postmodernism in the short context of a WTF interview! The nerve of this spalpeen!

In a way, Smilin’ J has taken on a burden comparable to Teddy Kennedy in the Senate. Whereas Teddy is so identified with liberal opinions that he is practically a parody of liberality, Smilin’ J is so identified with a traditionalist view of LD that he is practically a parody of traditionalism. This makes for a curious situation for traditionalists like myself (as, for that matter, Kennedy makes for a curious situation for liberals like myself). I mostly agree with everything Smilin’ J believes in, but I don’t seem to always agree with what he says or the way he says it. The hagiological aspect of WTF, which refers to SJ as “The Winningest Winner since the Invention of Winning,” makes matters that much more confusing. He is presented as LD’s brightest star, but as such he is immediately targeted by all the WTF amateur astronomers as glowing in a firmament that has been replaced by a new paradigm of night skyness, sort of like Zeus trying to find worshipers in the Vatican, and in his pronouncements SJ makes himself as unendearing as is humanly possible. I suspect that, to some degree, he’s being deliberately provocative, but mostly he’s just being himself. At this point, his just sitting still on a park bench reading a copy of this month’s Reader’s Digest would be provocative to WTFians. He is the face of “regressive” to all those who claim to be “progressive,” but who are, as I’ve pointed out often, merely different. Something different from what used to be is not, ipso facto, a progression, no matter how achingly it longs to make that claim. After all, he’s a couple of hundred years later but you’d have to go a long way to prove to me that the road from George Washington to George W. Bush is any sort of progress.

Anyhow, this being a slow debate week, one meditates on the demonization of Smilin’ J, some of it self-generated, and looks forward to tonight’s chez when I’ll actually be venturing into the darkest reaches of some Sailor brains with gun and camera in search of wisdom on March-April. Wish me luck. I’ll have O’C photograph me in my pith helmet when I’m in there. Look for the results on WTF, in photos, under Exploration.