Batten down the debate hatches: It's TOC time.

This is the point, of course, when TOC takes over the conversation, seeing as the festivities commence this Saturday. Some people will arrive way early and stake out war rooms from which they will seldom emerge. Some teams will have young assistant coaches assigned to nothing but research, cutting cards virtually 24/7. Some teams will have scouts above and beyond their judging obligations, doing nothing but scoping out the most likely competition. Some teams will break case after case during the event to attempt to bar these machines from breaking down and destroying their cases. Some confident folks will publish their cases on the interwebs and thumb their noses at any attempts to shake them from their commitment to what they have developed over the last few months (or in the case of policy, the whole last year).

Winning any tournament is a big deal. Winning a national tournament is a much bigger deal, and at this point, the measure of the deal boils down to the nature of one’s forensic religion. TOC, of course, is the orthodoxy of the $ircuit debaters. Most people who are there have heavily invested in their debate experiences in both work and time and money, especially the latter. Anyone can work hard and often, but it takes a bankroll to travel to bid tournaments. I wonder if occasionally people get a little too wrapped up in the whole seeking of bids business, but in general I don’t think there’s anything wrong with it, in moderation. So a high school kid flies off to Timbuktu a couple of times a year for an intense tournament and misses a few days of school? Why not? (Every weekend, and you miss more school than you attend? In that case, why?) Nice work if you can get it, I say. Of course, there’s many reasons why, for the most part, it’s the same schools traveling to Kentucky year after year, and funding, however it is achieved (and this might be endowments and it might also be vigorous fundraising), is only one of them. Solid coaching committed to the TOC goal is another one. Smart kids is another one; one wonders about the socio-economic makeup of a lot of the regular schools (especially if one is me, who sees classism as a real and occasionally problematic aspect of American society). There’s exceptions to all of this, of course, but let’s face it: TOC is a club with a fairly regular membership, and like any club, there are reasons some people are members and other people are not. Don’t get me wrong; I was actively there year after year for a decade or so, so I’m not condemning it. I’m just pointing out that it is what it is.

We will now start seeing endless reports of people prepping for, traveling to, arriving at, debating/judging/coaching at, winning or losing at, politicking at, eating grits and ribs at, congratulating themselves or others at, traveling home from, getting stranded at at least one airport and perhaps suffering through a severe epidemic of ribose-5-phosphate isomerase deficiency. The social networks will bore you to tears with it, even if you happen to care about it. The perennial whiners will complain in their perennially whiny way, explaining to us the horror of having kids at TOC forcing them to—gasp—do their jobs and coach, while the cockeyed optimists will glow from the internal radiation of being close to debate ground zero, forgetting to repeat to themselves, It's only a debate tournament, It's only a debate tournament. Unfortunately we will not hear too much about the vicious internal politics of the advisory committees, the tribal conflicts practically leading to fisticuffs among the loving and gentle PF coaches, the total abandonment of civilized life of the policians who will stop sleeping today until their elimination Monday. (Presumably the Congressfolk have their issues too, but, being Congressfolk, they don’t really make it into the headlines much.) So you might want to turn off Facebook and Twitter for a while. Definitely you don’t want to see which grits and ribs your Foursquare contacts are slobbering over. Mark those debate sites in your RSS feed as read without looking at them.

This would be a good weekend to do Bioshock: Infinity. It’s not like there’s anything else to grab your attention.