gonewththekimel

The Slattern eventually left the apartment for a whole night—long enough to collect her possessions, anyway During this respite, Alan B and C returned to DeWolfe. Laughs were shared over drinks and video games, and thoughts for the upcoming year were thrown about. This would prove to be the final meeting of this kind, and Kimel wasn’t there.

Assuming that the night would be no different from any other, he made plans to spend the evening with Mona, who’d impressed him over the Internet by correctly identifying a very obscure quote from “Anna Karenina.” She was, obsessive readers will remember, once Alan B’s high school girlfriend, now APDA’s Novice of the Year, and the inspiration for this very blog. An early evening turned seamlessly into a late night, and Kimel unexpectedly found himself sleeping over at her apartment, news which did not fail to reach the party at Dewolfe.

An ascetic when it came to appetites of any sort, this was a rare occasion when Kimel would have really valued physical intimacy for its own sake. He looked back ruefully in those days to his romantic awkwardness in early college; he might have at least slept with the provocative Russian director he’d met his freshman year. But in fairness, those were days before he’d even shared a kiss with anyone yet, and he was afraid of intimacy and embarrassed by his body. Perhaps too some lingering notion from film or literature rendered sex without love distasteful; at least now, though he was virtually just as inexperienced as he ever was, he’d come to realize that filet mignon does not negate the existence of more humble cuts. He thought back to his role in “Sweeney Todd,” in which he’d removed a girl’s bra strap with his teeth. His lips brushed against her chest once. The thought of soft skin and thoughtlessness was comforting now.

But nothing came to anything; if the embarrassment of psoriasis and romantic inexperience had defeated his chances with Lucrezia, he had no higher hopes with Mona. They soon fell to talking, to Kimel’s chagrin. Her style of conversation either resembled Kimel’s in that it hopped from one non-sequitur to another, or she was passive enough that his own erratic preferences determined the course of the conversation.

“If you were going to die tomorrow, what would you most regret not doing?” she chirped.

“In the first place, I would regret not publishing a book of substance and popularity. I consider not having done so already a real personal failing. It enervates me—makes me listless and pessimistic. I take most things as they come, but this unrealized dream is something that festers. It makes me actively unhappy. It makes me ashamed of myself. I’m not powerless to do anything about the problem, of course. But the nepotism in the publishing world scares me—I’d almost rather entrust my work to no one than to someone who’d carve out a mediocre fate for it. Then at least in my imagination, I might have achieved great things. There are so many characters I want to bring to life—sometimes, it's all I can think about, meeting new people and wondering how to combine the best and worst in them into new souls. The thought of one stillborn birth after another is almost too much for me to stomach. But these are the sorts of things I learned not to talk about a long time ago.”

“And in the second place?” she asked as if he'd said nothing.

“I would regret not having had sex with more people.”

“Is that really so important? Sex is so mundane, so common. Everyone has it. It’s pretty boring.”

“The same could be said about money, my dear, but I’d still like to have as much of it as possible.”

She laughed at that. Kimel pressed his advantage,

“If we’re really on the hunt for a good analogy, sex is like conversation, isn’t it? Everyone has their own tropes, their own secret anecdotes for when the party turns tedious and a joke is in order. Yes, repeated jokes aren’t very funny, and listlessness sets in with repeated conversations about the same things with the same people. But isn’t there something to be said for a free discourse of minds and ideas? Even if everyone talks, doesn’t everyone talk differently? And doesn't it follow that we should talk to as many different people as possible?”

“Your metaphors aren’t very subtle. This isn’t really how you think, or you would make different life choices.”

“Would I?” Kimel laughed. “You might be right about that. I still think there’s something tragic about rabbits in a cage fated to reproduce only because their captivity happens to unite them. True love is a cousin to beastliness. But we’re trapped no matter what we do—even realizing you’re a cliché is a cliché. I’m humble enough to realize that now.”

“The same things you said about sex can be said about debate—the same talented mix of people losing to each other every year, some good, some bad, all balancing out to nothing very unique.”

“But it’s better to have questioned each other than never to have spoken at all, right? Better to have gone for it, to have created a memory. All that we have to live on are memories.”

Kimel kept his eyes fixed on the girl, but the subject of creating memories was uninteresting to the novice.

“I was talking about a debate case with Lucrezia and wondered what you thought. Do you think that debate make you a good person?”

Defeated, Kimel launched into his concession speech.

“Good and bad are relative terms, Mona. From the vantage point of deliberately twisting the truth to win rounds and insisting on seeing both sides of one-sided issues, even the ancient Greeks condemned debate, and the Romans periodically banned rhetoricians and philosophers from the city. Friendships might be made in the trenches, but the activity lends itself to jealousy and schadenfreude because it gives the illusion that academic discourse is a zero-sum game, and no one likes to lose an argument.“

“Is that the whole story?”

“Not necessarily. Debate also teaches you to weigh both sides of an issue carefully and to determine what percentage of black and white is mixed into a particular patch of gray. It makes you clever, open-minded; it rewards hard work and ambition, and it breeds the most intelligent conversations most people are likely to have at college. Ultimately, I can’t complain. APDA rewarded me with the distraction of competition, the thrill of the chase, and some memorable, superficial friendships. It taught me about the sacrifices people make to actualize the dreams for which they settle as they become adults."

“A lot of people love you, David.”

“Love is a dangerous word when it’s used too carelessly.”

He took a deep breath. Then he said that he was tired, and laid awake.

There are only two chapters and an epilogue left in “The Poison Ivy League.” Now that the end is in sight, I wanted to share some of my thoughts with you about its future.

To begin with, I eventually came to realize that whatever my best intentions, the account could not be completely transparent because, simply put, too much went on that would destroy reputations if I were totally honest. Be that as it may, I did my best to give a complete and, as far as possible, objective description of notable highs and lows of my career on APDA and my impressions of the characters who contributed to a formative period in the circuit’s history. But there is still too much missing for the account to feel really authentic to me—one would secretly rather read Graves’ “I, Claudius” than Tacitus’ “Annals of Imperial Rome.” The meat on offer here is fine but dry—it needs some juice, a little gravy.

I knew by the time I hit Chapter 30 that “The Poison Ivy League” as seen on “Confessions of a Latter Day Augustine” could only be a rough draft. While an interesting narrative, there is not enough here to grip casual readers unfamiliar with debate but interested nonetheless in the behavior of students from elite schools. Right now, the text at its best is like Tacitus—cynical, detailed, and solemn, with occasional plays on words and witty turns of phrase thrown in to spice up the broth. What I want is a text like Graves’s: more intimate, more excruciatingly honest, more truthful, more shocking, more sexy. I hope that the final version of this strange history, which I will begin publishing in installments again soon after Chapter 60, will continue to hold readers’ interest. If I can actualize my vision, “The Poison Ivy League” should become a ripping good read.

I made the decision to submit my work in progress to public scrutiny, partly because I enjoy attention, but also to gauge reactions to the narrative and entertain suggestions for corrections when corrections were due. I apologize that some were insulted by the way I sculpted them, but please believe that I did my best to provide balanced judgments and never to portray pure villains or heroes—in no version of this text will anything better or worse be said about anyone specifically, and Kimel himself comes across as no angel. Ultimately, I balanced the very real possibility of some hurt feelings against what I considered the artistry and importance of the project at hand and made the choice to describe things as I saw them rather than as I’d like to say I saw them.

To my loyal readership, you have my sincere thanks.

The Slattern was not beautiful but had the talent of being able to imitate beauty in a pinch through studied choices in clothing and makeup. A struggling sophomore at BU, day by day her mind turned from thoughts of finishing college to thoughts of finishing her career as an unmarried woman. At first she settled her hopes on the proprietor of the illegal poker game where she spent her nights dealing cards and flirting with strangers. Then, she transferred her hopes to the most talented regular player at the table, a red-head from Harvard with a fondness for swarthy Asians. His good fortune to live in a giant apartment in effect became her good fortune after a single date. She promptly made herself the latest piece of furniture and scarcely left the place, dropping out of school and spending her days in a daze.

The first time that Kimel met the Slattern, she decided to break the ice by describing her traumatic past—in place of polite discourse about television or film or literature or health or the weather was an awkward and graphic monologue. At first, she tested the waters with stories about her hardships as a Korean girl adopted by a white family, and then, when Kimel passed the test by keeping quiet, weaved into the conversation descriptions of her former suicide attempts, including grisly details of vomiting up black sludge in the emergency room. So this was the sort of discourse that had replaced Scott and Kimel’s philosophizing—nothing but a memory now, like Mario Tennis games and weekend debate parties.

Kimel did not begrudge Scott his sex life, but the unexpected alteration in his living situation proved unbearable. He had invited his friend to live with him for the last few months of the year and did not sign on for a third roommate who used the shower and ate the food and broke the furnishings. Paper-thin walls and closed doors finally prompted the decision to deny Scott’s offer to live with him in Cambridge the next year, a painful but ineluctable conclusion. He divulged the news mournfully after one of their daily workouts, a ritual the lazy Kimel detested but kept up with because it had by then become his only chance in the week to talk to Scott alone. Scott wrinkled his brow and asked Kimel where he would go. Kimel didn’t know what to say; it was too late in the year to make sudden plans. He eventually took the first job he was offered—a position teaching English in a South Korean school for some 20,000 dollars a year. The deal fell through at the last moment, prompting Kimel to take another job teaching English at a steel factory in a squid fishing village on the Sea of Japan—a Chosun Constanza.

And what did Kimel’s debate friends think of all of this? As Kimel discussed his uncertain plans for the next year with a supposed confidante, she replied gravely that she would be busy with law school in September and wouldn’t be able to return many letters. At the time, Kimel considered this response to be in supremely bad taste, but in retrospect he came to realize that his friend was only being honest with him, unlike some of her more hypocritical counterparts. They all had their own plans for next year; they all had their own problems. The superficiality of Kimel’s most valued relationships was starkly apparent to him for the first time. This seemed to be the grand revelation at the end of the bildungsroman: that no one cared about anyone, unless they were fucking.

Nor were Kimel’s family any more helpful. Accustomed to seeing him self-motivated and honored, his sudden lack of direction worried them, and their concern was manifested in the form of insults, sometimes deliberate and sometimes inadvertent. Had there been a single wise voice to advise Kimel, portraying the coming year as an adventure and his past record as an asset not as hollow as it seemed, he might have been a great deal less miserable and lonely than he felt at the time. But as it was, Kimel was left to the counsel of his chorus of inner demons. His last hope, a proposal to visit Pitcairn Island and write a novel detailing the experience of women on the island since the days of the Bounty Mutiny, was rejected in favor of providing a grant to enable a young musician more active in Eliot House social life to tramp around Europe for a year. (Kimel's consolation prize was a novel with an Eliot House sticker on the back cover.) Soon after this final rejection, the hope of finding answers in the haze of a hallucinogenic mushroom proved nauseating rather than enlightening.

Despite smiling less than he once did, Kimel the debater continued to convey the illusion of confidence and prosperity. By this time, the only major event left in the year before Nationals was the Swarthmore tournament. Kimel and Crassus made plans to partner together, which seemed like a promising arrangement. Over time, their mutual respect had become less grudging, especially now that the TOTY race was over; Crassus even threw his arms around Kimel and nearly sent him plummeting down a flight of stairs when Harvard B’s loss in quarterfinals of Yale was announced (thus destroying once and for all the TOTY pretensions of the only potential rival to the Triumvirate). But at the last minute insistence of Antony, Kimel took on a different partnership; though he never suspected it before, his younger rival evidently looked up to him. Antony was incredibly eloquent during in-rounds, deservedly winning a top speaker at the tournament and going on to debate beside Kimel until an undeserved loss in semi-finals. The next year, Lepidus and Antony would make finals of Nationals and run the case whether Faust should be condemned or redeemed at the end of the legend about him, a topic perhaps inspired by the types of rounds Harvard A had pioneered. For their part, Crassus and Pompey became the first team to win TOTY two years in a row.

We are approaching the end of this long, not-so-secret history. In the days leading up to the following week’s Yale tournament, the Internet was abuzz with debate about the TOTY Triumvirate. Not a few people considered the arrangement to be unsportsmanlike; Laurence urged Kimel not to agree to any sort of terms, and a big-mouth from BU actually suggested retroactively altering the APDA constitution to make the agreement impossible. Others defended the pragmatism of the Triumvirs. For her part, Mary implied that she for one did not condemn the arrangement, and it even had a side benefit for her. It indirectly protected her own TOTY-point total with Ryan, the second-highest ever after Brian Fletcher; the Triumvirs had to content themselves with a record of third place, which soon slid slid down the ranks when Hannibal went on to break all records as a senior.* Ultimately, though, no one’s opinion amounted to anything of practical import, and Kimel hardly cared about the gossip—he now had other, more pressing problems with which to contend, to be discussed in due course.

Kimel partnered with Scott at Yale and won a fourth place speaker award, impressing William with a speech defending a woman’s right not to prosecute abusive spouses for domestic violence. Kimel considered the 27 he received in the round one of the greatest honors of his senior career. Mary might have been more fearsome and slippery, but William’s ingenuousness was more worthy of emulation and respect than her ingeniousness, and this praise meant a lot to him. Nevertheless, “Harvard KL” finished the tournament at ninth place, just missing the break to quarter-finals. As it happened, Jason and Herbert won the tournament which, coupled with Kimel’s speaker award, led many a spectator to wonder “what if.” (Kimel himself was more skeptical; Yale was the only major APDA tournament at which he never broke, and he was not especially popular with certain judges on the team, as history proved). Before the final round began, Kimel crouched behind a podium and hid from the audience. Herbert began his speech by claiming that he was someone else in disguise and ducked down; then, Kimel emerged from his hiding place to the sound of applause, declaring “to hell with détente!” Directly after the final round, Alan C, Scott, Kimel, and Jason departed for Amsterdam. To put it cryptically, the trip moved memorable enough to be forgettable. Kimel was amused to see Jason and Herbert in the final round of Yale; since the latter was in no small part responsible for the rise of Harvard A, there was something comically appropriate about his final triumph on APDA.

It was around this time that Kimel received two pieces of news simultaneously: that he was to be one of 60-some students to graduate “summa cum laude,” and that he had been rejected from every graduate program to which he’d applied. Truth be told, this failure was due more to Kimel’s uncertainty about his future plans than a lack of credentials; he put perilously little thought into his personal statement and only completed the applications at the last minute, and then only to the most selective schools. Nevertheless, with the TOTY race over and only Nationals to look forward to, there was now no distraction from the practical problem of what was to become of him. A simultaneous and more disorienting blow was when Scott suddenly found himself with a virtual wife.

Scott and Kimel had become inseparable friends over the course of the year and enjoyed a lively intimacy bound to a mutual love of blunt and unpretentious conversation and, at least in those days, philosophy. To summarize their nightly conversations in a paragraph or two of even the most elegant prose is to do them a fundamental injustice; the only parallels they continue to call to mind are Socratic dialogues. Hours would be spent analyzing the nature of social behavior and cultural institutions working from the fundamental assumptions that on average, human beings are both lazy and self-interested. The most appropriate eulogy to these discussions is this: he could say without hyperbole that they taught him more about the analysis of history than four years of a Harvard education, and they shared a scope and liveliness comparable to the sum total of his debate experience, but were by contrast never self-interested or ill-natured. They were an oasis of questions and answers the memory of which would often make Kimel’s subsequent thirst in Sinai all the more scorching. The wells dried up suddenly rather than over time. The problem was the Slattern.

*Mary claimed in a forum post that she was an impartial voice in the debate, despite her apparent interest in no one improving upon her record.

Thanks to the presence of a swing team, the Providence College tournament was exactly well-attended enough to be worth 14 points, in other words, enough for Kimel and Jason to tie Lepidus and Antony for first place TOTY in case of a victory. There was a good chance of this, since the playing-field was relatively thin. As it happened, a large portion of the tournament’s population was composed of teams from Harvard, including Kyle and Kong, sophomores now. Kimel was glad to see Kong at the competition and reminisced with him about their unexpected victory there the previous year. In the back of his mind, Kimel wondered what was underway at the University of Virginia’s tournament; a victory there would likewise allow Pompey and Crassus to tie Lepidus and Antony at 82 points.

That Kimel and Jason would fight their way into the break was only expected. They found themselves against Arianna in quarter-finals and hoped that she might punt to them, since her partner was an infrequent participant, and she was so ill that she was openly lamenting her continued presence at the tournament and threatening to leave. In fact, she had even tried to punt her fifth round to another team, but this irritated the judge, and so she broke to quarter-finals unexpectedly. Kimel's hope for an easy time did not go fulfilled, for Arianna very much wanted to win the round. She ran a case Opp choice about whether prescription drug commercials should be legal and peppered her observations with insights derived from her thesis. Kimel intuitively felt that these commercials should indeed be legal, and all of Arianna’s specific knowledge about the issue came to no end. The fact that a doctor’s approval is necessary to take any medicine and that and a list of side-effects is required by law to accompany all airings seemed to mitigate the harms of her case. This sort of reasoning was enough to win the judges over.

In semi-finals now, Kimel and Jason were paired against none other than Kyle and Kong. Alan A now openly declared that Kimel and Jason should have to throw the round, in keeping with what he and Alan B had done to help Alan C’s girlfriend to qualify for Nationals at Dartmouth. Ilan, Vikram, and Alan C loudly took up this preposterous cause, and the latter, newly crowned heir to Scott as President of the team, even threatened not to provide funding for Harvard A’s participation at future tournaments should the round not be thrown. These arguments, however, were petty and unreasonable. TOTY was on the line, which was a more important distinction for the team than an umpteenth person qualified for Nationals; indeed, no one from Harvard had ever won the distinction of first place TOTY before. Scott overruled Alan C’s rash decision, and Kimel and Jason proceeded calmly to their round, running the case about champerty against the sophomores, the strongest in their casebook. They were not about to lose this round.

The case about the legalization of legal maintenance was as strong as it was boring. In response to it, the sophomores cautioned that corporations would take advantage of gullible clients by duping them into agreements with abusive contingency rates, but Kimel proved why this was not in fact the case. As it stands, lawyers hold a monopoly on the contingency market. More competition could only lower the rates for prospective clients—for now corporations would vie with law firms to entice the most claimants to their offices. This was a subtle counter-response to the argument at hand and deserved to win Kimel and Jason the round, though it was worrisome when one of the judges fell asleep during the PMR just while Kimel was emphasizing its importance.

As it happened, Kimel indeed won the round and now proceeded to finals, where he was to face none other than Scott and Alan C. They had triumphed over Lucrezia in semi-finals, who had in turn beaten Ilan in quarter-finals, inducing him to remove his outlandish woven ski-cap in frustration during the round. Thus, the four teammates who were planning the trip to Amsterdam were all against each other. Lucrezia, doubtless overjoyed by her first real success on APDA, could console herself with a first place speaker award; Kimel was second.

Alan C now had a sudden change of heart and offered to punt the round, admitting that a TOTY win outweighed the marginal benefit of his potential victory. However, everyone knew what had happened to Arianna during her fifth round. Something like that would be a disaster, so it was decided for the round to go forward, though whether this meant that Alan C and Scott would not try hard was unclear; Alan C’s request that Jason and Kimel buy him dinner for his efforts, however, suggested that they would not be doing their best. The topic of the round was secretly known to all beforehand by the arrangement of its participants—the question was whether dueling should be legalized.

Alan C either changed his tactics when the round started or acted in accordance to a plan he had wrongly assumed everyone had understood once it began. One way or another, he delivered a marvelous speech and made every effort to win the round, probing Kimel with questions during his LOC and, to Harvard A’s horror, winning over the sympathies of the audience, who were still angry that semi-finals had not been thrown. Kimel delivered good reasons that dueling was undesirable in an ideal society; in addition to clichéd arguments about the nature of consent, he offered also more imaginative points about the potentially destructive effects of legalization in an urban context (innocent bystanders killed, the effective permission it would give to the justice of gang violence, etc.) But the audience was unenthusiastic about these points and they thus lost persuasive vigor--no applause meant no support. The speeches of Scott and Jason balanced each other out; Scott delivered his oration nervously, and Jason confusedly. Then Kimel delivered a caustic rebuttal speech proving in exhaustively intimate and graphic detail the terrible repercussions of the policy and the message it would send to the world about the US’ legal priorities. The mood of the room was suddenly uncertain. But then, Alan C delivered the PMR of his life. The sympathies of the audience were decided, and they were not on the side of the victor—Harvard A, on a 4-3 decision. A great deal of damage to friendships had been done, but Kimel hardly cared. He was now at the top of the TOTY board again, and agreed with Jason that they did not owe Alan C a meal of any kind.

On the way home from the tournament, a telephone call informed Kimel and Jason that William and Mary had in fact won the University of Virginia’s tournament, meaning that the TOTY race was now down to a three-way tie for first place. Yale and Swarthmore were the only tournaments left in the year—it looked like they would decide the day. Kimel and Jason had one important advantage on their side: merely reaching the final round of Yale would give them enough points to ensure a sole TOTY victory, while their rivals would actually have to win the tournament to inch ahead.

In his heart, Kimel immediately wondered whether it might be worthwhile to come to an armistice and allow everyone to split the title. Simply put, the marginal benefit of winning TOTY alone, a subtle distinction few people would know or care about in the long run, was not worth the very real risk of losing the award through bravado. Kimel soon learned that he was not the only debater with these kinds of thoughts; on the way back from PC’s southern counterpart, Crassus and Lepidus had talked of nothing else but a deliberate end to hostilities and a declaration of a three-way peace on their own ride home. The offer to split the award was submitted that very night to Kimel by IM, and within a few days, Harvard A had agreed to it. There was only one stipulation: that Harvard's name would always be placed first in official listings; in the mind of Harvard, this was as a credit to the seniority of its members and their more advantageous position in the race; in the eyes of everyone else, this was a reflection of the alphabetical supremacy of the letter "H." When William and Mary and Johns Hopkins conceded to this point, there was not much more to say. Diplomacy had won the day, and the closest TOTY race in APDA’s history was over. This course of action immediately drew a storm of strong words, both for and against it.

Ultimately, why did Kimel agree to come to terms with his TOTY rivals? The situation seemed like a classic prisoner's dilemma, where reason proved that it was in the best interest of all actors to reach an agreement rather than pursue a selfish course of action. Reasonable minded people, like Alan B, applauded the decision, which Jason left in Kimel’s hands. For her part, Esther correctly predicted that the result of the race would render it the most memorable in the circuit's history. TOTY had been seized through treachery in the past, but never before or since had TOTY been reached by consensus, and never before had it been enjoyed as a Triumvirate.

After the Mt. Holyoke Tournament (which Kimel sardonically branded the best he ever attended to that college’s newspaper), the members of Harvard A arranged a pagan rite to ensure their victory in the TOTY race. Herbert, Jason, Scott, and David gathered together in the large apartment on DeWolfe street. Rose petals and tom-toms were distributed, then Venetian and African masks. With so much done, the procession of four marched to the sound of music to a bridge spanning the Charles, where the flowers were scattered over the water. Kimel intoned prayers in Latin, English, and Hebrew. Addressing the spirit of the river, he cried,

“Oh spirit of the river—bring us victory over our enemies!”

Then, however, some Judeo-Christian scruple impelled him to add,

“Let our triumph be one/won among gentlemen—for there is a thin line between friends and foes in our current world.”

With the rite concluded and immortalized on video-tape, the four ambled back to Scott and Kimel’s apartment. More friends arrived and the evening assumed a festive atmosphere. To finish off the night in proper style, a handful of adventurers smoked Diviner’s Sage, which was legal in those days. While it induced some to laugh hysterically and others to temporarily lose their wits, it seemed to have no effect on Kimel, beyond inspiring him to jump on his bed and then hide behind an oversized lamp.

At the end of the evening, Scott, Kimel, Jason, and Alan C made plans to take a trip to Amsterdam. Alan B was their only fellow Mario Tennis aficionado to pass on the prospect. In a few days time, everything was arranged. Their flight was scheduled to leave in three weeks, directly following the conclusion of the Yale tournament.

The next competition for Kimel and Jason was Bates, a small contest so out of the way that Lepidus, Antony, Crassus, and Pompey left its results to the fates, competing instead at Duke, its southern counterpart. Kimel, Arianna, and Jason arrived one day early to participate in a demonstration round against members of the Bates team, winning over enough of the crowd for the match to be declared a draw.

The three were presently led to a well-furnished guesthouse meant for visiting big-shots. Since there were only two bedrooms, Arianna was given one to herself, and Kimel and Jason were left to share a king-size bed between them. Harvard A promptly joked about the last time necessity compelled Kimel to share a bed with a teammate—two years beforehand, when in the middle of the night, Alan A turned in his sleep with the cry “Final round!” inadvertently hitting Kimel squarely in the face. (He had yet to reach a final round in those days). This time, Kimel was allowed to sleep more soundly. In the morning, however, a cleaning woman burst into the room thinking it empty, screamed when she saw two men side by side, and slammed the door. This provided more fodder for laughter. The remainder of the morning was spent stealing junk food and soft drinks from the amply-stocked cabinets.

The tournament itself proved disappointing. Though Jason won a third place speaker award and Kimel a second (Alan A was first), both Harvard A and B faltered in quarter-finals. For his part, Kimel was defeated by Alex from Amherst, avenging his previous loss in high style. Amherst considered punishing Harvard by running the case that gerrymandering should be reformed in a duplication of their semi-final round at Columbia, but then decided against it. Ultimately, Ilan won the tournament, a well-deserved victory, and his first in ages.

Kimel and Jason were, of course, bitterly disappointed. Now only three weekends remained until Nationals. As the god of the Charles River would have it, though, the TOTY scramble would in fact end before that. Only one more weekend would count, which, as the next chapter of this remarkable history will show, proved to be more than ample time to endanger friendships forever.

Perhaps Alan A’s most far-sighted contribution as President of HSPDS was to alter longstanding tradition and allow teams to compete by their initials instead of by ranked letters, an innovation Scott wisely decided to continue as his successor. For this reason, Kimel and Wen usually competed as “Harvard KW.” Since the graduating class of 2005 was so riotously touchy, this policy was likely a blessing. At Princeton, however, the conservative tabulation room forced everyone to follow their own team’s practices and compete under letters. Since Kimel and Jason were ahead of the Alans in the TOTY race, they were given the title Harvard A by the staff.

This led to a pleasant repercussion. Before the announcement of outrounds, Kimel sat by himself in the general assembly room drawing cartoons of eyeballs in his notebook to pass the time. He thought about the expressions on the faces of William and Jacob when they failed to break at Princeton their senior year. Nervous and bored, he looked for someone to socialize with and found Lucrezia sitting among her friends from Amherst. They talked about the TOTY race for a while and how exciting it had suddenly become. Kimel said that he hoped that things would turn out well for himself and knocked on wood—if he were an ancient Roman, he observed, he’d make some kind of sacrifice to a chthonic deity to help himself along. Lucrezia smiled and said that regardless of the outcome of the race, Harvard had managed to qualify more people than any other school for Nationals that year, more people than any other team in history in fact, and to compete as Harvard A in the company of such a crowd was already a victory. Kimel thanked her for these words and committed them to memory, considering them a fitting epitaph with which to console himself should he ultimately lose out on TOTY.

The tournament broke to octo-finals and every important team but Crassus and Pompey managed to advance. After avenging themselves against Saul and Gideon, Kimel and Jason faced Johns Hopkins in quarter-finals. Harvard was on Opposition. The Alans had fallen in octo-finals and were in the audience, so Kimel hoped to put on a good show for them. As it happened, this hope went unfulfilled. In no mood to lose, Antony and Lepidus ran the case that the United States should grant asylum to individuals in danger of assassination in foreign countries due to their homosexuality. In retrospect, this was an almost impossible case against which to effectively argue, but Jason did exceptionally well milking the idea of the slippery slope as best he could. He was in rare form in his Member of Opposition speech and seemed to carry a good deal of positive sentiment among the audience members. Nevertheless, Harvard lost the round on a 2-1 decision and was forced to watch mutely as Johns Hopkins mowed over Silas and reached finals. Another victory would have ended the TOTY race then and there—only Esther and some anonymous student from Swarthmore now stood in their way. Herbert, Jason, and Kimel sat beside each other in a cramped car during the round with no idea what its outcome would be. It was by telephone that they learned the news: Lepidus and Antony had lost. Needless to say, this was grounds for celebration.

Kimel knew that a victory at the following week’s Mount Holyoke tournament would be just enough to propel him from third place back to first in the TOTY race. Realizing the contest's importance weeks beforehand, he had systematically begun setting the battlefield to his advantage, forcing himself to memorize the names of the leaders of the Moho team and socializing with them in hopes of endearing himself to his future judges. He was well aware that Lepidus had been dating the former leader of the team and that he was consequently very popular at the school; Kimel knew that he would have to do everything possible to deflect any favoritism toward his cause. Feeling out the sentiments of each individual student, he gossiped strategically about Lepidus but managed to learn nothing more interesting than the old rumor that his family transported him around exclusively by limousine and helicopter.

Ultimately, Kimel and Wen broke to outrounds and, as if the Fates were determined to make matters as dramatic as possible, faced Crassus and Pompey in quarter-finals, who also had TOTY in their sights. This would in fact be the last time that these teams would debate against each other.

Crassus and Pompey were strong adversaries who went on to achieve legendary status on APDA—seldom had a pair from the North or South seen such competitive success week after week. By the end of the following season, Crassus would in fact even break the record of the legendary Brian Fletcher in his total number of final round appearances, though in fairness, many of the tournaments that he won were comparatively small. That Crassus of all people would so distinguish himself was surprising to Kimel, since he was known for sticking mainly to a handful of strong rhetorical points in most speeches and seldom presented especially original ideas. He was masterful at swaying judges to his side in ambiguous rounds, but certainly not especially effective at responding to barrages of strong, concisely stated counter-arguments, as quarter-finals at Moho proved. Crassus ran the case that public universities should not favor in-state students in their admissions processes. Kimel pointed out that these universities were funded by local tax-money, and that it thus seemed reasonable to favor the local populace; an additional advantage would be preventing brain-drains by enticing talented local students to attend state-schools, to say nothing of the competitive disadvantage the state would suffer compared to its neighbors who would effectively discriminate against her students by continuing to favor their own. This ability to map out a web of arguments was usually enough to ensnare Crassus--he was really more of a murmillo than a retiarius.

Johns Hopkins also advanced to semi-finals and were meant to hit Harvard now, but the well-meaning directors of the Moho team evidently wanted to wait until the final round for this matchup, since this would lead to the most drama and help both teams' TOTY ambitions; what this hope implies about the likely results of semi-finals readers can decide for themselves. As it was, Alex from Amherst, partnered with Arianna and very rarely a survivor in the break, caught that the rounds were paired incorrectly. Like it or not, Hopkins would have to face Harvard in semi-finals.

Stuck on Government, Kimel knew that he had a difficult, pivotal round before him. Lepidus and Antony were more effective than Crassus and Pompey at facing a diversity of arguments and then focusing the debate on more singular issues, a potentially effective antidote to Kimel's manic approach. Kimel somberly remembered that he should have been more assertive at Northams when it came to case-selection in semi-finals, and so he convinced Jason to let him run the case with which he was most comfortable: whether the Brothers Grimm should censor their fairy tales. But this was a case that everyone had heard by now, and dealing as it did with issues of aesthetic taste, Lepidus and Antony were especially well equipped against it. As it played out, the round was tense but unmemorable enough that Kimel eventually forgot what side each team defended. When it was all over, the three judges looked nervously at each other and left the room.

Everyone waited in the general assembly for the results. Minutes felt like hours. Kimel had done his best to stare at the judges during his opponents' speeches (he'd picked up this habit from William) and, after gauging their reactions, guessed that he might have won, but just barely. But then a member of the Mount Holyoke team shuffled sadly to the microphone and announced that on a “fiercely contested decision,” the winner was Johns Hopkins. Lepidus and Antony would be facing the Amherst/Harvard hybrid in finals.

Kimel shook his opponents' hands and then wandered out of them room. By chance, he met one of the judges in the hallway. She began to cry.

"Sic transit gloria mundi,eh?" said Kimel with a forced smile

"I'm so sorry."

"Don't be. Besides, what control did you have over the situation?"

“But you don’t understand,” she said with sudden urgency. “You weren’t supposed to hit until finals. And besides, you and Jason should have won semi-finals.”

“Truth is in the eye of the beholder."

“But you lost... lost because of politics.”

For a moment, Kimel said nothing. He had never been told that a round was deliberately fixed or somehow evaluated less than impartially before. His first instinct was to doubt what he heard. The round had been messy and unpleasant, and Kimel’s victory was by no means obvious. At the same time, he could not believe that Lepidus’ popularity, for all of its strength, would ever pave the way for deliberate corruption on his part. He was, however, willing enough to concede that feelings of friendship toward Hopkins might have swayed some decisions in the ambiguous round. After all, who was Kimel to argue with someone who would know?

“Is the TOTY race over for you now?” she asked mournfully.

“It will be,” Kimel said quietly, “if Hopkins win this round.”

“Oh!”

“But if that wasn’t to happen, I would say that the race would remain most contentious.”

The judge looked at Kimel thoughtfully for a moment, and then they both smiled.

Arianna and Alex now faced Lepidus and Antony. Arianna was thoughtful and intelligent as always, but Alex was magnificent. Finally in a final round and eager to show off his long-overlooked talents, he ran the case that Amherst should not have excluded a radical Republican speaker from its campus, but should rather have welcomed his views in service to open discourse. This was perhaps almost as difficult a case to argue against as America supplying aid to oppressed homosexuals, but Lepidus and Antony did a good job making their observations sound more meaningful than they really were. The judges soon left the room to deliberate. A few moments later they returned. Kimel caught the eye of his confidante. On her face she wore a grin.

It was an 8-1 decision. With Arianna by his side, Alex had managed to do what never proved possible with Ellen. Lepidus ultimately won a third place speaker award. Kimel was second, and Jason first. The TOTY race was now anyone’s guess.

Before the narrative picks up and approaches the home stretch, here is an article published about Kimel by the Boston University debate team. A group of BU jokesters published satirical articles about several debaters in their "NORPDA News." This issue was released at the BU tournament.

Harvard's Kimel Remains Committed to Debating Important and Highly Relevant Issues From the 14th Century

CAMBRIDGE--Sources close to Harvard debater David Kimel have informed NORPDA News that he has finished work on a new case that is "as important to 14th century Europe as all his previous ones." Kimel has made his name on APDA by running cases about philosophical concepts relevant to the everday lives of citizens of Medieval Europe. Past cases asked whether farmers ought to be obligated to feed and house crusading knights, and if it is permissible for a husband to burn his wife for Eve's original sin.

(Debater from Cornell) has been quoted as saying "I love hitting David. It's like going back in time to see what debate was like in the 1300s. Though it gets kind of weird when he starts speaking Latin."

Kimel refused to comment on the content of the new case, but he assured reporters that it would be in line with his previous work. "I want to keep it a secret for now, but I think fans of my earlier cases will be happy with it."

Kimel's frequent partner Jason Wen was slightly more forthright. "Kimel made me promise not to tell anyone what the case is about, but let's just say that if you thought you'd heard a good debate case about St. Francis of Assisi before, you were wrong."

When asked about his plans for the future, David said that he intends to continue to propose serious issue-oriented debates on topics that his distant ancestors struggled with in their everyday lives. But rumors are beginning to spread that Kimel intends to 'step it up a notch' in his final semester of debate. A credible source on the Harvard team confirmed for NORPDA News that Kimel has obtained the traditional garb of a Franciscan monk to wear to the Providence College tournament. And don't be surprised if he debates at Nationals solely in Iambic Pentameter. Kimel's dedications to his ideals of debate is truly remarkable.

(For more NORPDA News, see: http://people.bu.edu/budebate/norpda/index.html)

Having lost two out of their initial three rounds, Kimel and Scott enjoyed relatively easy draws on Saturday and managed to just sneak into the break after successfully opposing the case that a doctor who discovered his daughter’s boyfriend had AIDS should leak the confidential information. In quarter-finals, they were paired against a team of infrequent debaters from Bates. Unsure at first who their opponents were, they eventually discovered that it was the same pair of young competitors to whom they’d lost the previous day. “I think that we’re hitting that morbidly obese kid again,” Scott observed rather more loudly than he intended, horrifying a good number of members on the opposing team.

Kimel decided to experiment on his adversaries with a new weapon, a lethal bludgeon adapted from Mary and Ryan’s arsenal. In their heyday, Yale A had won some notoriety for their case advocating the legalization of champerty. The obscure term refers to the sharing of the proceeds of a successful lawsuit by its winner and a potentially anonymous third party who paid for the expenses of the trial. Its legalization would likely lead to a competitive market in lawsuits, with corporations investing in those cases most likely to result in profits. While the ramifications of the proposal seem extreme, it's difficult to argue against the fact that the creation of such a free market might help impoverished individuals to bring deserving cases to court; the illegality of barratry would diminish the possibility of frivolous law suits. After a lengthy online conversation about the case with Ryan, Kimel decided to broaden the concept and argue that all forms of legal maintenance, of which champerty was only a subset, should be permitted. After all, in many legal systems, an individual can only contribute to the expenses of a trial if he or she has a specific interest in the facts of the case—the total legalization of maintenance would mean that anyone could pay for anyone’s legal fees, whether for a chance at profits or for more altruistic purposes. Overall, the case was a nasty and boring one far removed from all of Kimel’s areas of interest other than conquest. Keeping it secret, he hoped to wield it in the future in important rounds against other people from Harvard, since his teammates already knew most of his other cases. Little did he know that this plan would soon lead to melodramatic consequences, bringing tensions in Cambridge beyond the boiling point and almost ruining friendships.

After unceremoniously slaughtering Bates, Kimel and Scott now found themselves against another team from the same school, the very pair to whom they’d lost in semi-finals of the previous year’s Clark tournament. They capably avenged themselves on Opposition after their rivals ran the same case about ICBMs that they’d just presented in quarter-finals, though this kind of repetition at the same tournament was taboo on APDA. On Opposition again in finals, Kimel and Scott went on to defeat Stanford and win the tournament, arguing that “truth and reconciliation committees” should not be used to heal animosities between Sunnis and Shiites in Iraq; why would something which failed so miserably in sub-Saharan Africa, they asked, work any better in the volatile context of the Middle East? Thrilled to have won a tournament with his best friend, Kimel returned to Cambridge in high spirits, particularly since he was also awarded a first place speaker award despite his 3-2 performance in in-rounds. This cemented his position as the only speaker from Harvard in the top ten SOTY (Speaker of the Year) race. Unfortunately, since he wasn't partnered with Jason, his victory had no impact on the TOTY competition.

Kimel’s pleasure quickly turned to apprehension when he was told that Lepidus and Antony had won the same weekend’s William and Mary tournament against Saul and Gideon. Learning on the grapevine that the final round was extremely close, Kimel could hardly believe that Crassus and Pompey would willingly pave the way for Johns Hopkins to potentially overtake them, since this victory propelled them toward the front of the TOTY board. (He learned in retrospect that Crassus, at least, recognized the danger.) William and Mary were promptly rewarded for their good-sportsmanship when they failed to even break at the following week’s Princeton tournament, one of the largest of the year at 94 teams, just as Harvard A had faltered at Fordham and Johns Hopkins at MIT. Since Crassus and Eliza were APDA’s golden couple, this showing at Princeton was all the more unexpected.

Princeton’s tournament, named for Adlai Stevenson, is always a prestigious event; readers will recall that in the 2002-2003 season, Yale B effectively conceded the TOTY race when they failed to break there, William and Jacob gallantly refusing to allow the results of the few small competitions that remained before Nationals to determine who would take home the honor. Even if a similar impulse lay buried somewhere in the minds of any of the new TOTY competitors, Princeton was no longer the last major tournament of the year, since it was only late February and Yale was scheduled to be held exactly one month later. In the eyes of the APDA community, the TOTY race was thus still very much on. Ultimately, the results of Princeton served to make it the closest and most ruthless scramble in the circuit's history.

It was around this time that Alan A withdrew from Harvard for the rest of the semester and moved away. The announcement was an unexpected one for Kimel, who had been his roommate for three years running. Their mutual ambitions had cast them as rivals since they were sophomores, but they had always lived happily together and Kimel was sorry to see him leave. (He would still meet him, however, every weekend at debate tournaments.) Now left alone in a two bedroom apartment complete with a kitchen and a living room, Kimel could safely boast that no one at Harvard enjoyed better on-campus housing than he. Nevertheless, preferring company to spacious solitude, he promptly invited Scott to move in. Their respective doors were always open to each other and their friendship was further cemented by proximity.

Again hoping to channel the dynamic of their conversations into success at debate, the two made plans to partner together at the Bowdoin tournament in Maine. No one else from Harvard was planning to attend.

After winning two rounds, or so they assumed, Kimel and Scott walked confidently into their third. That they were paired against novices from Bates was immaterial; half of the tournament was made up of people from Bates. Finally, the judge arrived.

"I'm a very informal judge," he said, taking his place at the center of the table. "So first speaker, speak."

Kimel did his best to contort his face into a smile and shuffled to the front of the room, increasingly wishing he’d worn socks with every soggy step in the aftermath of his odyssey through the snow. Ignoring his frost-bitten toes, he put forward his case about returning the Elgin Marbles to Greece. When the LO only gave a three minute response, Kimel leaned over to Scott.

"We're not two up," he said.

Scott nodded gravely. Then he rose and gave a first-rate speech, somehow filling up the full eight minutes. He pointed out that the Elgin marbles were not "balls," as the LO was calling them, but famous statuary. Then, two more speeches; the MO was four minutes long, and the LOR was three. Kimel gave what he thought was a compelling PMR, but noticed that the judge was no longer bothering with the pretense of taking notes. It is a credit to Kimel’s good nature that he was more amused than annoyed by the news that he had lost the round—the judge’s only comment was “the first speaker should remember to zip one’s fly” (sic).

Kimel and Scott then deposited their luggage on couches at a dormitory and parted ways—Scott for a horrendous APDA party at a frat house, and Kimel for a meeting with Bathsheba. This Bathsheba had been the most popular and beautiful girl at Kimel’s high school. They’d spoken together on the telephone almost every night as Kimel tutored her in history and English. His cynical friends warned that he was being manipulated, but Kimel never thought so. He very nearly asked her to the prom, but then second-guessed himself and skipped the dance altogether. Better to maintain the pretense of intimacy, Kimel told himself, than to destroy it altogether by inviting a refusal. They parted ways at graduation, he to Massachusetts and she to Maine, and they were now seeing each other for the first time.

They hugged awkwardly and complimented each other just as ineptly. Then, they fell victim to inane chatter. Deciding whether to shake hands or to embrace was a difficult decision; the weather was cold; their old friends from high school were up to miscellaneous tasks; rumor had it that so and so had done this and that. Their meeting was over quickly—she had to get back to her boyfriend, she said.

“Can you give me a lift back to the fraternity house?” asked Kimel. “You know, I never learned to drive. I would have nightmares about it when I was younger; the slightest turn of the wheel could slam me into oncoming traffic.”

“I remember that I would give you rides back in high school” she said, collecting her things. Then, to break the silence: “Are you excited about your debates for tomorrow?”

“Not really,” lied Kimel. “After all, debate doesn’t mean that much to me. There’s something slightly comical and slightly pathetic about loud-mouthed people getting together to argue with each other every weekend. And for what? Plastic trophies? The memory of honors that no one will eventually remember?”

“If you feel that way, then why do you compete every weekend?”

“To distract myself from myself! And besides succoring my existential despair, I’ve made my closest friends at debate. The relationships I’ve fostered mean more to me than the competition. Those are what will last. As for the rest, I guess that circus freaks can’t take life in the travelling carnival too seriously, or they’d lose their minds.”

By the time that Bathsheba and Kimel reached the frat house, the APDA party was breaking up. Kimel embraced his old friend again, and said in farewell,

“You know, I had a crush on you in high school.” Laughing preemptively to avoid the possibility of an awkward pause, he added, “Would you have gone to the prom with me?”

“Aww.”

“Let’s leave it at that. There’s something poetic enough about a sigh to make it more than a glorified grunt.”

She smiled at him. Then he watched her car disappear down the road and, eventually, rejoined Scott. The friends walked back to the dormitory through fields of ice and snow; the sky was so clear that the wide band of the Milky Way was visible against it. Scott mentioned that Kimel was back earlier than expected.

After a long wait locked outside of the building, Harvard’s two delegates to Bowdoin were finally let inside. The Brandeis team was playing a game of Hearts along with a ragtag collection of people from BU. The air smelled of alcohol- everyone was drunk. Kimel noticed that his backpack was thrown on the floor, Michael Glint from Brandeis having seized his prospective bed.

"I think that that's my couch," Kimel said in what he hoped was a polite voice.

"No it's not," said Michael Glint. "It's mine now."

The room burst into laughter.

“But I was here first and I don’t have a sleeping bag.”

“I don’t care.”

Kimel thought that Glint might be joking, so he gave him a sort of half smile; he returned the gesture. Seeing this as an indication that the couch was relinquished, Kimel approached it, but Glint extended his arm to wave him off, saying he had no valid “property rights” to the territory in question. (People found that funny for some reason; everyone but Scott burst into laughter again). Defeated, Kimel hobbled over to the far side of the room, snapping "Now I know how the Palestinians feel."

Slouching uncomfortably in a wooden chair draped in his winter coat, Kimel noticed an empty ottoman, which he used to prop up his legs. An Amazonian BU member actually punched Kimel in the stomach when she saw what he did, hissing,

"That's MINE."

As the lights turned off, he sat quietly in his little chair, feeling a dull pain extend in concentric circles from where she'd punched him. Soon, there was a symphony of snores, annoying at first, but ultimately hypnotic.

Classical scholars since at least the time of Gibbon have pegged the beginning of the Roman Empire’s decline to the death of Marcus Aurelius and the coronation of his mad son, Commodus, in 180 AD. However, at least until the defeat and humiliating capture of the Roman Emperor Valerian in 260 AD, life largely progressed as normal in the capital city after Aurelius’ death. But despite appearances, something new was indeed in the air. For the eighty years between the expiration of the philosopher-king and the catastrophe at Edessa, a gloom hung over the empire, a sort of polluted haze belched out from below, the kind that diffracts light and creates glorious sunsets almost beautiful enough to distract viewers from the poison lurking in their very nostrils. What was a succession of mediocre emperors and the beginnings of an umpteenth civil war in the eyes of most observers compared to the glorious spectacle of Rome’s one thousandth anniversary celebrations held by Philip the Arab, a violent usurper whose face even today graces the banknotes of his homeland?

For Kimel, February and March were like those eighty ambiguous years rolled into two months. To be sure, the marble facades of Rome still shone brightly as ever; honors were still won, friendships were still strong, and the future still seemed promising. But lack of success at debate soon threatened Kimel’s title, and he was forced to resort to base politics to secure access to that for which he hungered. And hunger itself was only a distraction from a deeper and altogether more sinister condition--Hamlet’s curse, the indecision of the artist in the face of growing up. Until the end of March, greatness on APDA, the possibility of graduate study, and the strength of his camaraderie with Scott remained as crutches for a man already secretly disabled. They were soon to be removed, and Kimel would be promptly left to topple on his own devices. Now sing through me, Muse, of opening and closing doors.

Between the fourth and fifth of February, New York University held its annual tournament. At 100 teams, it was one of the largest of the year, and even reaching the final round would have virtually assured Kimel the title of TOTY. In fact, Harvard crowded out semi-finals, representing three of its four teams. In one room, Harvard B faced off against Arianna and Scott, a new and unexpectedly effective partnership. In another, Crassus and Pompey were left to battle it out for the circuit’s highest honor against Harvard A. Having just soundly defeated Esther in quarter-finals on Opposition, Kimel and Jason were now on Government and produced an old case for the skirmish—that the NAACP should not have staged a boycott of the state of South Carolina for flying the Confederate flag. The case had been strong enough to disarm Antony and Christopher at Brown; the argument that African American workers would be harmed by a lack of tourist dollars was hard to disarm. The laurels were Kimel and Jason’s to lose. They lost them.

Kimel had never quite appreciated the artistry of Crassus and Pompey before that round. To be sure, the case was so old that he was able to anticipate every response to its arguments. His opponents even missed the most piercing counter-point: that few people would take the NAACP’s boycott seriously, and with minimal real-world economic harms, it was mostly a symbolic gesture of disapproval. Simply emphasizing the gross injustice which the Confederate flag symbolizes for African Americans, Crassus and Pompey completely carried the sentiments of the room and dominated the round. Unique and unexpected arguments were not this team’s forte, but a sort of raw charisma was. Pompey was magnificently mocking and calculating in equal parts. At his best, the sound of defiance and self-assuredness in the voice of Crassus was enough to make the strongest analysis seem insubstantial. Challenged to name other means by which the NAACP could voice its objections, Kimel read at least ten off of a pre-prepared list. But the unexpected liveliness of his adversaries and their primal abilities brought out like cornered beasts scrambling to defend their survival in the TOTY race robbed his speech of persuasive vigor. William and Mary won on a landslide, their style and substance as speakers, it seemed to Kimel, virtually united.

Having deservedly lost their respective rounds, Kimel and Scott went off to philosophize rather than watch the Alans defeat William and Mary in the final round. But the following week, Crassus and Pompey unexpectedly won the BU tournament over Mitch and Ilan. Triumphing over 81 teams, the victory was just great enough to push them ahead of Harvard in the TOTY race. For their part, Kimel and Jason had lost a messy octo-final round to a resurgent Saul and Gideon. Kimel was robbed of his title—he now set himself to winning it back by any means necessary.

To the shock of almost everyone, Kimel and Mitch’s opponents in semi-finals were Alan C and Vikram. They had by some miracle outlasted every other American team in the competition; Lepidus and Antony and the Alans had fallen in octo-finals, and they themselves had defeated Saul and Gideon in quarters. Alan C was, in fairness, an orator of great capabilities who defeated Kimel on more than one occassion, but Vikram had never progressed especially far in the activity and had rarely ever broken to outrounds. Their success at the competition suggested to many observers how surprising at best and arbitrary at worst even the largest and most well-judged competitions could be. Whatever the case, now Kimel, Mitch, Alan C, and Vikram were left to fight it out for a ticket to finals of the Championship. They knew that at stake was the opportunity to represent their nation, since the other round, interestingly enough, pitted one team from Hart House College, a Canadian institution, against another.

Finding themselves on Government on the motion that “this House would curb political extremism,” it was recommended to Mitch and Kimel that they run the case that homosexuals should be put into a special political class that mandated heightened scrutiny against discriminatory legislation, similar to what was once done to protect against unfair laws penalizing gender or race. The framework of the case was strongly grounded in American constitutional politics, which no one on either team knew especially much about; at the same time, the topic was perhaps inappropriate for a trans-national tournament judged in large part by Canadians. Pleading ignorance about the nuances of the case but with no better suggestions of his own, Kimel surrendered his position as Prime Minister to Mitch and crossed his fingers, badly underestimating the degree of bad feeling that the case would promptly cause. Indeed, some evidently felt that it scarcely fit the resolution.

The round, which was played out before virtually the entire APDA community, can best be described as a long sequence of mediocre speeches. Mary reigned over a panel of judges with a look of impatience and disgust on her face, evidently knowing more about the laws in question than any of the speakers. Her cool attitude was likely further chilled by the fact that her two old enemies from Fairfield were arguing it out against each other; perhaps she humored herself that they had little improved since their freshman year. Mina copied her older counterpart's scowls, and they shared wry looks until the end of the round. The Canadian judges rolled their eyes from moment the case was announced; in fact, only Silas, Raymond, and Christopher seemed well-disposed to the proceedings after Mitch's first speech.

In the estimation of many people, Kimel’s effort was the best of the round. He spoke at length about the responsibility of a nation to allow its citizens to undertake their respective life-projects in a supportive and non-discriminatory environment, and openly mocked Alan C’s hastily-made point that pro-gay legislation might encourage more people to be gay (this at least sounded like what he was suggesting). But all of Kimel’s efforts were largely forgotten by the end of the round after eight long minutes of Vikram’s complaining and a succinct, elegant rebuttal from Alan C that more than made up for the inadequacies of his first speech.

The consensus of the spectators seemed to be that the round was a mess, but that Kimel’s speech was enough to give victory to the Government—certain members of the audience, such as the dignified Antony, even took the time to preemptively congratulate Kimel on his success despite the disappointment of not making it deep into outrounds themselves. Unfortunately, Mary, Mina, and their Canadian counterparts did not agree with these sorts of opinions, and despite the strong opposition of Silas and his entourage, gave the round to Vikram and Alan C on a 4-3 decision so surprising that Laurence was forced to loudly confirm it with Mary before announcing the breaks to finals. Kimel was greatly irritated. After privately commiserating with Mitch, he asked Silas to destroy his tape of the round and flew off to sulk rather than help Harvard prepare for the finals—Alan C and Vikram were now to be Government on a motion defending moral relativism.

Fighting their way to finals of the North American Championship was perhaps the pinnacle of Alan C and Vikram's careers as debaters. In the last round, they more than availed themselves against their counterparts—two Canadian women who seemed like a low-key pair, giving unadorned and unmemorable speeches; that one of the participants would one day go on to win the World Championship was unbelievable to Kimel. Throughout the round, Alan C insisted that moral obligations did not exist, giving all of the usual arguments for moral relativism. His Canadian opponents only asserted again and again that society was bound by common codes of decency. Kimel, along with a large portion of the room, considered Harvard the rightful winners of the round, but a panel led by Mary reached an almost instantaneous consensus decision that Hart House had won—the results came so quickly that the floor speeches which were scheduled to occupy the deliberation period were cancelled. Vikram and Alan C must have been bitterly disappointed at this hasty indifference on the part of the judges, but Kimel secretly rejoiced in their failure and took quiet comfort in the dubious honor of finishing third place two years in a row at Northams--at least he was consistent. Besides, he was still TOTY, though he was soon to learn that thrones collapse more readily than more humble seats.

Though the title of North American Champion sounds more lofty than that of National Champion or TOTY, the award was in fact secondary in prestige to the latter badges of merit. Unlike Nationals, the contest was open to all participants rather than an exclusive set, and the fate of many rounds was decided before they were held by the existence of restrictive tight-links (forced topics) which often favored one side over the other; for all intents and purposes, "NorthAms" was nothing but a large tournament with Canadian contenders thrown in for good measure. Still, the magic of a prospective title held its charms for those who participated in service to their thirst for glory, and as for the hoi polloi, merely making it to quarter-finals meant a qualification for Nationals.

The possibility of winning a Championship was not enough to tempt Jason to brave the long trip to Cornell, where the contest was to be held that year. Kimel consequently made arrangements to partner with Mitch, Ilan pairing up with Arianna. Although Silas and his entourage would be out of the running as hosts of the tournament, all of the best teams in the country would be there including Crassus and Pompey, Lepidus and Antony, the Alans, and a reunited Saul and Gideon. Along for the ride were Alan C and Vikram; the latter scarcely debated now. Much of the pre-tournament banter centered on the impending presence of Laurence and Mary at the contest among the organizers. It seemed strange to Kimel to encounter these figures after so much time. Laurence had in fact visited Harvard once before that school year and complained that his welcome seemed more muted than he would have hoped. Now it was his return to return the favor, for he stayed in the company of the other staff-members that weekend and scarcely fraternized with his old mess-mates.

On the way to the competition, Mitch and Kimel discussed the possibility of scratching Mary as a judge. Though she was more than a first-rate debater, she had something of a reputation for being a harsh adjudicator, and Kimel was afraid that she was not favorably disposed toward him—after all, they had little to unite them but the memory of shrill rounds where she had lorded it over him, to say nothing of the bitter recollection of the Fairfield tournament Kimel’s freshman year when he and Vikram refused to support her during the pivotal floor vote that might have decided TOTY in her favor. Moreover, Kimel had seen Mary judge several rounds and consistently disagreed with her decisions; for example, he recalled that she had dropped Laurence and Craig in quarter-finals of Nationals the previous year in preference to Vern and his lackluster partner when it seemed clear to most observers that Harvard had won the debate. Nevertheless, Kimel and Mitch decided that the bad will they would incur by scraching her, which was sure to reach her ears in the tabulation room, was not worth the effort of doing so.

As it happened, the tournament proved to be a triumphant success for Kimel and Mitch. The combination of Kimel’s verbal agility and Mitch’s imposing, jovial presence disarmed their adversaries round after round, including a magnificent Lepidus and Antony after a particularly interesting, intense sequence of speeches. Their combined powers in fact won every in-round but one, when Mary happened to be among the judges. It was about whether lawyers should be required to perform pro-bono work. In answer to his Canadian opponent, Kimel pointed out that lawyers owed a great deal to the state—they made their very livelihoods on the foundations of the public court system and could thus be expected to support society in turn when duty and the greater good called upon them to do so. Mary herself nodded grudgingly at this argument, which Kimel counted as a singular honor.

Breaking among the top-scoring teams, Kimel and Mitch progressed smoothly from octo-finals to quarter-finals, where they were pitted against Crassus and Pompey. In a repeat of the previous year’s drama, Kimel again robbed his Southern counterparts of the opportunity at a title. This time, William and Mary ran the case that Belgium should be required to pay reparations to the Congo. Kimel pointed out that the guilt for African colonialism far transcended Belgium, but extended to every nation that had participated in the 19th century Berlin Conference which partitioned Africa. If anything, the EU should sponsor aid programs rather than individual countries doing so, and it should certainly take every precaution when dealing with the Congo, where aid could well fall into the hands of rebel soldiers. Kimel also mentioned that despite the evils of imperialism, the Belgians entered Africa with good intentions, and much of the infrastructure in the country, or what exists of it, owes a great deal to its colonial past. Finally, it was unclear why modern Beligium, a cosmopolitan and multi-ethnic society, should be forced to spend tax money for the guilt of past centuries. Kimel won the debate on a unianomous decision and came to consider it one of his finest rounds. It was promptly followed by one of his most disappointing.

The end of January saw the North American Championship at Cornell. Before we come to that memorable competition, however, something should be added to this account of Kimel’s social life on APDA, his position on the circuit by his senior year, and his inept attempts at romance.

Kimel seemed to be blankly friendly to everyone, treating his TOTY competitors and anonymous novices alike with equal respect. He had no enemies who were known to him and deliberately made friends with everyone he could meet, partly a reflection of his gregarious nature, and partly the result of his strategic hopes for success at future tournaments, when the votes of practical strangers to APDA could become important. Beloved in the North as a long-standing “character”—witty, energetic, and always smiling—he even became popular in the South over time, winning some positive press for his off-beat casebook and lively conversations with Antony, Saul, and Esther. Everybody’s friendly acquaintance and nobody’s friend, he did his best not to step on any toes and soon found himself a figure of some regard.

Kimel was popular, yet he was no Casanova. Handsome but psoriatic, he was equally insecure about his complexion as his odd gait, marred by a slight, permanent limp from a childhood injury. Conveying a sort of asexual aura, he never showed interest in the drunken overtures of his junior admirers, and while he was voted the best looking man on APDA in an online poll before Ilan hacked into the database and ruined the results, he was never in a serious relationship while he was on the circuit.

Before his senior year, Kimel’s only romantic memory on APDA was when a girl at Middlebury, Melody, saw that he was up all night writing a paper and spontaneously prepared a cup of hot tea for him. Slight gestures like this moved Kimel deeply, and he was equally charmed by the girl’s kindness as her ability to make conversation. Most people, Kimel found, were terrible conversationalists, but Melody knew all the right tricks, asking questions about Kimel’s past, feigning interest or sincerely feeling it when he answered, and responding to questions about her own life with short, interesting anecdotes that never became taxing. Raven haired and pale, she was the most charming person Kimel ever met on APDA. But just as he had never seen her at a tournament before, would never see her again. He didn’t even have an opportunity to exchange emails before a more aggressive, senior teammate stole her away from him.

As a senior, Kimel fumbled toward romance three times. The second two incidents will be described in due course, but the first was when he invited Lucrezia from Amherst to a formal dance at Harvard, just before the North American Championship. Lucrezia was a picture of elegance, but though Kimel had a crush on her, they spent the night chastely together; she wore a green Egyptian house-gown her host had picked up over the summer. Ultimately, the thought of casual romance was as terrifying to Kimel as the thought of a relationship.

This sort of innocence stood in marked contrast to the social tone of APDA at that time. Members of a circuit dominated by weekly drunken parties, everyone was on edge when an accusation flew out that a young female participant was assaulted at a party—that the event was evidently witnessed by a roomful of spectators made the story all the more horrifying. When the girl’s boyfriend (who admittedly had only just begun to date her and thus didn’t know what he was about to face) complained that he found himself playing the part of the concerned lover, he gained some notoriety. These sorts of events seemed to happen once or twice every year, though they were always hushed up.

Kimel did not attend Dartmouth, which was 2005’s inaugural tournament. Jason and Krystal placed second behind Bruno. They made it so far because the Alans deliberately lost their semi-final round to them to allow Krystal to qualify for Nationals. Johns Hopkins failed to even break, and William and Mary stumbled somehow in quarter-finals after winning all five of their in-rounds.

This bizarre habit of throwing rounds would prove to be an ominous highlight of the season, and ultimately a destructive one. It was relatively wide-spread by now and long since virtually codified in Harvard tradition (though many say that the root of the contagion could be traced to prior practices at Yale). In his mind, Kimel justified the practice in this way. Many activities, including sumo wrestling, in fact possess a secret culture which involves throwing important rounds to ensure that junior members meet certain qualifications, and lesser ranked players likewise sometimes defer to more dominant competitors in the ring, either to bring glory to a specific dojo or to inspire the memory of a service owed. Every sport falls short of the ideal—the all American pastime itself is bathed in steroids. Ultimately, Kimel considered the art of throwing rounds a complex piece of theatre that should in no way be applied as a general rule. In this, his opinion differed from the majority's on the Harvard team, which believed that rounds should always be thrown no matter what in order to qualify as many people as possible for Nationals. To Kimel, this was nonsensical, as if attendance at Nationals, a single competition subject to all the randomness of every other individual contest, was the be-all and end-all of APDA, even if it was a prestigious event; recall that Yale A had failed to even break at Nationals in 2002, and Princeton B, TOTY in 2004, similarly faltered at the year's final tournament.

To be sure, Kimel loved his teammates enough to deliberately lose unimportant rounds to them, at least in theory. For example, he would have happily done so for Arianna and Kong during Brandeis semi-finals, though they little needed his help. However, by the same token, if TOTY came down to success at a single round or tournament, he would equally expect close friends to play soft-ball with him, realizing that a year’s worth of work was on the line and individual decisions at rival competitions were often highly politicized to the point of bias, with the South by no means favoring Northern interests, or vice versa. It soon became no secret that Harvard A was the darling of the North, with several teams offering to punt rounds to them if only to ensure that a pair of upstanding seniors beat out a pack of precocious Southern juniors. After all, people still whispered about the conclusion of the 2001-2002 debate season, though the geographical designation was now reversed. All of this made the TOTY race a tortuous political mire. At the end of the day, however, only one round was ever legitimately punted to Kimel, though he was often disgusted at the hypocrisy of his peers on HSPDS when they did their level best to prevent him from winning the TOTY award while simultaneously throwing unimportant rounds to participants who hardly debated. The only excuse for this, in Kimel’s mind, was if the rival Harvard teammates were in competition for the TOTY award themselves, when punting would be absurd.

It was before this complex backdrop that Harvard A, B, and C played out the Amherst tournament. A terrible snowstorm drove off several participants before out-rounds, including Crassus, who happened to be debating with Herbert that weekend. Herbert was thus left to compete in quarter-finals alone, and when he heard that he was hitting Harvard A, he overtly agreed to throw the round to them. In preference to this, however, Kimel suggested that he would run a humorous case rather than choose a more lethal arrow from his quiver, and all participants agreed to the arrangement, with the understanding that Herbert in no way hoped to win. At first, Kimel and Jason considered running the case that the Seven Dwarfs should turn Snow White out into the cold. In the end, however, Kimel selected a jewel which, in retrospect, he perhaps should have shown off more often.

On a trip to Constantinople as a teenager along with his Israeli grandmother, Kimel once acquired a mock-erudite book in a bazaar about the sex lives of the Ottoman Turks. The most fascinating story was that of Sikevar. Evidently, the mad Sultan Ibrahim II desired the most obese woman in the capital as an ornament for his Harem. The singular progress of the tale can only be related by the book’s author, one "Sema Nilgun Erdogan."

“One day, this crazy Sultan told his men to search for to (sic) the fattest woman of Istanbul. They looked everywhere and found a chubby Armenian who weighed 130 kilos. The Sultan who was very pleased with this woman called her Sikevar and never favored the others. Her caresses became a shelter for his slight and feeble body. Perhaps he was cured of his psychosis when he got the feeling of being in her (sic) mother’s womb." (Sexual Life in Ottoman Society, pp. 18)

Inspired by the anecdote, Kimel asked Herbert, Opp choice, whether Sikevar should have accepted the Sultan’s offer to live in his Harem or refuse it, with the caveat that she wouldn't lose her life should she choose not to join him. There were actually several layers of interesting, substantial arguments in this case. The Armenians were an oppressed community, for example, and Sikevar might use her influence with the Sultan to improve her nation's lot. At the same time, the charms of being a princess were obvious. Then again, the Sultan was known to be mad and might at any moment turn on her, and the Harem was, in all reality, a euphemism for a gilded prison. All of these issues were discussed in the round, but the main debate centered on the feasibility of using cranes or a series of interconnected logs over which the woman could be rolled to transport her to the palace. Harvard A won quarter-finals on an uncontested decision, and to the round’s credit, Kimel never saw a more witty or biting sequence of speeches, insensitive though they were to the overweight. In retrospect, Crassus must have been furious when he found out about what happened—though no more irritated than Kimel was when William and Mary or, for that matter, Johns Hopkins racked up TOTY points at competitions that were often admittedly less competitive than their Northern counterparts.

Semi-finals were against Harvard C, and it proved to be a tough battle, for this was Ilan and Mitch’s last chance to have a realistic chance of finishing among the very top TOTY teams that year. Kimel and Jason ran a difficult case against them about the injustice of Presidential pardons. The panel of judges was extremely ill-disposed to the case, and Harvard C might have seized victory, had not Ilan and Mitch complained erroneously that the case was tight, to which Kimel had a whole battalion of pre-written responses. He delivered each of them with a growing sense of aggressive indignation, as if he were furious at his friends for questioning the purity of his motives.

The final round, against Harvard B, was perhaps the most balanced of the tournament. Cursed with a position on Government again, Kimel ran a case that all four debaters knew well, Opp-choice; should the British Museum return the Elgin Marbles to Greece? Kimel and Jason gave strong speeches in support of restoring a major national landmark on par with the torch on the Statue of Liberty. Alan A faltered before the onslaught, but Alan B, who knew the case well, gave what was undoubtedly the best speech of the round, pointing out that the Classical tradition belonged to the entire world, and that the return of great artworks was a slippery slope--would the Mona Lisa or the Venus de Milo be next? Kimel and Jason lost the tournament by a single vote, with Alan B being given a special award for his final oration. Kimel won fourth place speaker, and Arianna second, an exciting distinction. Irritatingly, the 5-4 verdict against Harvard A was evidently only reached when a junior member of the Amherst team learned that his was the deciding ballot, and changed his decision in favor of the Alans, whom he idolized. Still, a ten point victory at Amherst would certainly do no harm in the TOTY race, and Kimel and Jason remained securely at the top of the slippery pole.

MIT was to be the final competition of the semester. Herbert, its puppet-master, had by now become Jason’s best friend, and Kimel knew that if there were ever a favorable field for battle, this was it. Openly immodest but seldom arrogant, he had come to greatly enjoy the prestige of his position at the head of the TOTY board and the admiration that the position entailed; when married to his general amiability, his celebrity was such that a large portion of the circuit, at least in the North, was almost as eager for him to win the award as he was to seize it. But he couldn’t take victory at MIT for granted by any means, and his competitors, conscious of their own accumulated victories, were out for the kill. Lepidus and Antony had won Wesleyan, a 16 point contest out of a scale of 20, to say nothing of the 20 point Fordham tournament. Crassus and Pompey had won the less prestigious but still important GW (16 points) and American (12 points) competitions. Still, Kimel and Jason’s 18 point win at Columbia and 20 point win at Brown were nothing to sneeze at, and a 20 point victory at MIT would propel Harvard A to the then-highest single semester point total in APDA history. For all of these reasons, Kimel knew that the stakes were high. In fact, the competition would prove to be the pinnacle of his success as a college debater.

The road through the tournament was by no means straight and narrow. Herbert arranged for Kimel and Jason to have sympathetic judges, to be sure, but this only meant that they were inclined to reward strong performances when they were merited, as they usually were in Harvard A’s case during in-rounds; victory was by no means promised at any point, though. In fact, Hebert accidentally worked against Kimel and Jason’s interests when he confused their order in the eight team break. At MIT, the teams which broke with the highest totals were to be allowed to pick their own opponents. Kimel and Jason should have had the second pick, but were accidentally placed down the list. Whatever the case, no one chose to face them, and they were left to debate Gabriel and Jessie from Yale. Lepidus and Antony failed to break at all. Crassus and Pompey slipped into outrounds but were invariably chosen as early-targets when the time came for rounds to be paired, which was an insult to their dignity as speakers. Whatever the case, they proved the foolhardy teams who chose to face them wrong when, round after round, they defeated the best of the North and paraded triumphantly into finals over the bodies of Harvard B and Silas and Raymond from Cornell.

Kimel’s performance in his quarter-final round against Jessie and Gabriel was perhaps the best of his career; that it wasn’t taped was lamented more than once, particularly since there were few members from Harvard in the audience, everyone being preoccupied with their own rounds. Gabriel was a quiet, dignified speaker with a calm and erudite charm about him; at the Worlds debating championship that year, he went on to partner with the redoubtable Mary and win a joint top-speaker award with her. This accolade, a great honor, seemed unexpected for Gabriel, for while he invariably spoke well at APDA tournaments, he almost always faltered in outrounds when more aggressive, assured tones were in order. Though he hit Kimel half a dozen times in his career, he never managed to outmaneuver him; it was too easy for Kimel to make gentle fun of his quiet, musical voice and to drive his points home with greater élan than his somber Canadian peer. When Gabriel and Jessie ran the case that the US should remove all of its troops from the Middle East, Kimel’s full arsenal of knowledge about the region of his fatherland was unleashed, combinined with his aforementioned advantages over his opponent. What about Red Sea ports and their submarine bases, he asked, to say nothing of small-scale stations designed to pick up cell phone and other signals from suspected terrorists? Jessie was reduced to maintaining that the Red Sea was not in the Middle East, all but assuring Harvard’s victory. Theodore, one of the dino judges, seemed particularly impressed by Kimel’s maturation as a debater.

In semi-finals, Harvard A hit Harvard C. Kimel ran what might have been in retrospect his most creative Opp-choice case: namely, if a savior figure like Jesus were to be crucified in a hypothetical world, would it be better for the Bible to cast blame on one dastardly individual for the death, or on society in general? Kimel knew that if one individual were signaled out for blame, it would undermine the world’s collective responsibility for the sin and undercut the death's redemptive value. But if a group were signaled out for censure, it would mean that in the future, that specific ethnic or cultural unit might be oppressed. Essentially, the case explored the ambiguity of the Christian crucifixion narrative in terms of the relative fault of Judas, Caiaphas, Pontius Pilate, and the crowd of onlookers. Unfortunately, the round was muddled, with both teams claiming the historical case of Christianity for its side. Mitch and especially Ilan were fiercely determined to win, defending the side that an individual rather than a body of people should be accused of the evil. They drove home the point that blood-guilt on minority groups was an inherent danger of the case. It took all of Kimel’s eloquence to explain that collective guilt could be seen as a metaphor for the common inadequacy of all humanity compared to the brilliance of the child of God, and that shared responsibility implied the promise of shared forgiveness. He and Jason won the round on a 3-2 decision, with Herbert casting the deciding vote. Kimel was greatly relieved at the news, because the debate truly could have gone either way, and he overheard one of the dino judges complaining about the case when it was over.

Kimel and Jason now found themselves against Pompey and Crassus in finals, that pair who defied the low-opinion that the cream of the North held of them by defeating them one by one. In the final round, they ran a hypothetical case Opp-choice. Suppose, said Crassus, that before the upcoming Beijing Olympics, a mass of demonstrators should begin to protest in Tiananmen Square—should the government of China leave them alone or brutally crack down on them? To Kimel, the side of peaceful protest seemed so clear that he hesitated for a long while before choosing to defend it, fearing a trap. In fact, he and Jason defeated the case rather easily. Even Hitler, Kimel commented, held off on his oppression of the Jews before the Munich Olympics, wary of an international outcry. China’s attempt to seem modern and self-assured to the First World would be completely undermined by violent tactics more at home in a Maoist regime. Kimel's performance was pitch-perfect, enlivened rather than undermined by his naming "jousting" as a summer Olympic sport. But Crassus was very much convinced by the point that large-scale protests could spell the end of communism in China as it had in Russia, and was clearly flustered when Harvard won the tournament on an 8-1 decision. All the way home, he evidently complained about the biased judging; only a handful of honest voices dared to defy his interpretation of the round. The careers of Crassus and Kimel did not truly coincide until 2004-2005, and neither had much chance to see each other at their bests; then, when they were at their bests, envy often muted praise. Until nearly the end of each other’s careers, they perhaps viewed one another as upstarts. For now, though, Kimel was completely triumphant, squarely at the head of the APDA pack and a newly crowned member of Harvard’s Phi Beta Kappa besides. Little did he know what the gods of chance had in store for him, and what a Machiavellian game the TOTY race, to say nothing of life in general, truly was.

By 2004, Middlebury was officially a Pro-Am tournament. Arianna organized matchups in her capacity as Comp Director and paired Kimel with a bumbling mutterer who was fated never to debate again. Round after round, he staggered awkwardly through his speeches. Luckily, the incompetence of the novices on the opposing teams coupled with Kimel’s skill and reputation propelled “Harvard Gone With the Wind” (for everyone was competing under the name of a film) all the way to semi-finals. There, he lost on a close round to Michael Glint from Brandeis and his partner, the mysterious Mona. Kimel had run his case about whether a religion should teach natural evil or goodness, having forgotten that Mona was in the audience at Brown finals and already knew of all the best arguments. He subsequently lost the round to the echo of his own reasoning. He received a third place speaker award, though, and the satisfaction that he had all but single-handedly driven himself to semi-finals. Mitch and Charlie, an ambitious freshman from Harvard, placed second in the tournament after this team from Brandeis.

Once upon a time, Mona was Alan B’s girlfriend, and even now they were either too-close friends or too-distant lovers. Phenomenally learned in English, Russian, and French literature, she was as attractive as she was eloquent-a remarkable beauty with creamy white skin and blonde hair. A novice on APDA, she was nevertheless in the twilight of her college years, and her greater worldliness and bearing compared to her peers helped her to easily capture the NOTY award that year with the highest point total ever. She was an extremely friendly young woman with either a warm spirit or the ability to dissemble one when the circumstances demanded it. All through the season, she stayed close by the side of Alan B, confiding in him in private and flaunting her intimacy in public, increasing her notoriety on the circuit by her chatter with the mighty. Alternately obliging and ebullient, she wore a neat social mask equally well adapted to heartfelt banter or heartless gossip.

Charlie was lucky to qualify for Nationals as a novice and was profusely grateful in his thanks to Mitch. Taking advantage of Scott’s weekly parties, the shy novice soon expanded his social circle and became close friends with many of his elders; he likely felt a great social loss when the year ended and the seniors graduated, especially Arianna, whom he worshipped. For now, though, he took advantage of the sense of equality and camaraderie on the team which was so conspicuous under Scott's administration; he would likely have been relegated to the sidelines in most earlier manifestations of HSPDS. Also enjoying the benefit of greater intimacy between the years was a new couple: Alan C and Krystal. Krystal was a sophomore now. She was the only African American on the team and, by the looks of things, too cool a consort for Alan C—she performed in a rock band, had distinct taste in music, and possessed a sense of personal style and subtlely at odds with the unhip, unkempt, and outspoken junior’s character. But they shared a similar sense of humor and proved to be a friendly match; the cliche' that opposites attract is a cliche' for a reason.

By then, Alan C had greatly improved as a debater. He was by most accounts the best speaker of his class, more than a match for the erudite George and easygoing Scott. When he was at his best, he was in fact more than a match for anyone from Harvard A to C when they were at anything less than their best, but his performance was still uneven. His vanity was likely satisfied when he and his partner from Brown progressed as far as semi-finals at the 101 team Fordham tournament. No one else from Harvard so much as broke at the tournament, which was won by a beaming Lepidus and Antony over Saul and his old mainstay from NYU. Harvard departed after semi-finals, characteristically boycotting rounds of which they weren't members.

Discouraged by Fordham, Kimel now realized that his position at the top of the TOTY board could easily be upset by either Johns Hopkins or William and Mary, to say nothing of Harvard B and C. On the eve of the MIT competition, he thus redoubled his efforts to make friends with anonymous participants on the circuit in hopes of establishing favorable judging at their future competitions. This won him a reputation for great congeniality which, in retrospect, he at least in part deserved--for while his affability often had some end in mind, he also found conversation with strangers interesting for its own sake, and he always respected the characters that he met as people if not as competitors.

It was around this time that marijuana made its appearance on the Harvard debate team. As a whole, APDA is by leaps and bounds more a drunk place than a high one, with alcohol ingrained into the very culture of the circuit. But there have always been notorious pot-heads, and the substance is readily available to those who know where to look for it; in fact, a member of a final round in 2003 once wanted to call the case tight that weed was a preferable drug to alcohol! Interestingly, during Kimel’s senior year, marijuana in many ways took center stage on HSPDS even more than liquor, enlivening the weekly social gatherings which the new President’s administration helped to organize. More than alcohol, the drug’s side effects provided lively opportunities for impromptu debates and complemented the characters of chatter-boxes well. The team was soon divided almost evenly among those who preferred drink, those who preferred smoke, those who were indifferent between the two, and those who abstained from either. (Ironically, several members of HSPDS were once stopped by the Harvard University Police Department for suspicion of smoking reefer on the sidewalk when it was the rare occasion when it was really cigars).

The team soon became more cohesive than ever before, and its ambience was much happier and more welcoming than in previous years. Thrilled by their position at the forefront of the circuit, its ambitious members enthusiastically blurred the lines between rivalries and friendships. Ken and Kong, sophomores now, were the closest of friends, as were Arianna and Mitch, the Alans, and Kimel and Scott. Kimel was also on very warm terms with Alan C and Jason and soon became reacquainted with Alan B’s witty charms; together with Scott, the five of them often got together for impromptu games of Mario Tennis by moonlight. Alan A, though only a room away, did not participate in these games.

Just below the surface, however, the team was not without its tensions. There were perhaps two major problems. First, some of its members, like Vikram, were denied good partners by the existence of three teams in the TOTY race. Second, besides the increasingly slim participation of Emilia, HSPDS was almost totally devoid of girls and dominated by a cocky, testosterone-drenched culture of nerdy men. In the case of Arianna, the two problems overlapped. She was by far the most talented member of the class of 2005 without a consistent partner. At the same time, there were many moments when the inadvertent callousness of her arrogant peers probably very deeply hurt her feelings, though she did her best to hide her discomfort when she felt it. Whatever the case, though, for all its faults, HSPDS was a remarkable group of people, and to spoil the surprise, it went on to set the all-time record that year for the most individuals to ever to qualify for Nationals, with fifteen. This was, however, at least partially thanks to the team’s unwritten policy of deliberately losing out-rounds to unqualified members to help them reach finals. Whatever one thinks of the custom, that top TOTY teams were willing to sacrifice potential wins at major tournaments to do this shows the unity of spirit among the rank and file and their generals.

Kimel and Jason were pleased to break among the top teams at the all Opp-choice Brandeis tournament in November. Disappointingly, however their winning streak was broken when they lost a close quarter-final to a pair of eloquent nobodies from Yale. It was a 2-1 decision and Kimel was rather annoyed at the result, though he could console himself with a second place speaker award and the continued position of first place TOTY. He was also comforted when he heard that the winning team was to hit Arianna and Kong in semi-finals, since it would have been expected of him to throw the round even if he had progressed.

Yale presently ran the case whether it would be right for a hypothetical person to allow his or her decision to be swayed when, despite the obvious guilt of the accused, race was the only reason that fellow jury-members were voting the way they did—or it was at least some variant on this idea. Kimel greatly enjoyed the spectacle of Arianna slaughtering her opponents. He had never seen her so confident or so happy in a round and was duly impressed with the way that she avenged his loss. Without resorting to ad hominem attacks or even overt sarcasm, she made the other team look like a pair of fools.

Arianna and Kong ultimately won the tournament, but Kimel was disappointed for her when her victory was tarnished by an attention-stealing performance by a Yale novice in the final round. Yale had greatly decayed since the days of Mary, Ryan, and William, but its members maintained a high opinion of themselves and what they believed good debate to be. Questions of policy, law, and world politics were worthy topics, but time-space historical cases or, worse yet, comedic ones were greatly frowned upon. Their ideology was based in longstanding "Northern" practice, but it was perhaps influenced at least in part by the team’s increasing interest in British Parliamentary and World debate, which adhere mostly to these sorts of topics; for Mary was now a graduate student in England and her presence helped to bridge the oceans between the leagues. (Gossip promptly affirmed that she began to debate in an affected accent, by the way). In the final round, Silas had the misfortune to run an off-the-wall case about whether a hypothetical Japan should declare war on a ghostly army of aborted fetuses who were out for revenge; in contrast to rounds which encourage raw analysis, this made finals a game of wit and rhetoric. Yale disapproved, though, and several of its members began to groan and mutter--not because they thought abortion a grave topic, but because the case seemed insubstantial. Alcohol, the consolation of the vanquished, soon exacerbated bad feelings.

Hannibal, a former high school champion, paraded to the front of the room when the time came for floor speeches and proceeded to deride Silas for running a ridiculous case, calling it a debacle and a waste of time. No wonder outrounds were losing audiences, he said—the disgrace of these sorts of antics were to blame. For the most part, the audience composed predominantly of Harvard students by this point did not take the upstart's harangue in good part. He staggered angrily back to his seat after several minutes on his theme, and the entire round was ruined. The rebuttal speeches almost couldn't help but be awkward and hollow following the novice's condemnation.

The Poison Ivy League will now continue at a pace of one chapter per weekend, every Friday through Sunday, until its conclusion.

The following week’s Brown tournament was just a bit more well-attended than Columbia, at 90 teams. To the enthusiasm of the crowd, the tournament director announced that he would be breaking to octo-finals. Today, this procedure has become established practice at several universities’ tournaments, but it was something of a novelty in 2004; in the earlier days of the circuit, competitions evidently often broke directly to semi-finals.

Fresh from their victory at Columbia, the members of Harvard A broke to outrounds and managed to carve their way through them one by one, always on Government. They defeated Alex in octofinals and the terrifying combined forces of Antony and Christopher in quarter-finals; to their credit, they were armed with the confidence to run more open cases than they had at Columbia. They then found themselves hitting a team from the University of Chicago in semis. Craig and Laurence had auctioned off their casebook to the class of rising seniors, and Kimel had inherited the gem about whether vote-selling was ethical. Jason and he ran it to great success against Chicago. The example of Craig was strong in Kimel’s mind that round, particularly when he answered one of his opponents’ arguments with a direct retort from the former President. To the point that Immanuel Kant would look down on any action that couldn’t be successfully universalized, Kimel responded, “what does it matter what Immanuel Kant thought?” This was a fair enough question, since Chicago never showed the relevance of his philosophy to the round beyond asserting its importance. At their best, Kimel and Jason advanced to the final round of the tournament. The Alans had fallen in quarter-finals, and Harvard C, Mitch and Ilan, in octo-finals.

In finals, hitting Silas and Raymond, Kimel and Jason ran the case Opp choice whether someone founding a religion should teach that humankind is naturally good or stained with inherent evil. Cornell chose to defend the side of natural goodness. Kimel and Jason convincingly defeated their opponents after an interesting hour spent over-generalizing on the philosophies of several faiths. Cornell argued that religions should promote the fundamental benevolence of God, and that the problem of evil could be explained away by the presence of demons; Kimel successfully pointed out that if on his side of the House God deliberately created evil, Raymond's world was one in which an equally ill-tempered deity deliberately manufactured monsters. This was a flashy highlight of the round, as the catching of logical contradictions often is. In the minds of most judges, however, Harvard seized victory on the pragmatic argument that a religion could best win adherents by presenting itself as a unique means of cleansing the soul of inadequency—God might have made evil humans, but he also provided a potential exit for them through the unique vehicle of the religion. In the eyes of Jason, the nature of humankind's wickedness could be equated with the cold self-interest of individualism. For his part, Kimel mentioned that a religion that taught that there was virtue in all men and women might as well be a pagan philosophy--only a faith that humbled someone before God could win true religious fervor.

The round is available online, and since it was chosen as the demonstration round for a Nationals competition, it has been well analyzed by a variety of judges. A viewing will confirm Kimel’s popularity with the crowd, who groaned in sympathy with him when he so much as frowned; his off-handed affability and carefully affected shows of modesty had evidently won him many friends on APDA. Though he spoke well enough, careful observers can hear him abuse the word “right?” as a crutch throughout the round, an unfortunate verbal tic which he might have easily eliminated if he'd had the courage to watch himself debate on tape before his graduation. Other than this, Mitch delivers a delightful floor speech that shows off his style well; a halting subsequent effort by an anonymous speaker takes up so much of the video's time, however, that Kimel’s PMR is unfortunately cut off. Nevertheless, in the eyes of most observers, what survives of it confirms that Harvard A merited its victory on a 9-2 decision, and, for the time being at least, the coveted honor of First Place TOTY.

The final round: http://www.parlidebate.com/recordings.php?tournament=Brown&year=2004