Part 22 (1/2)

He dropped her hand and whirled to face another castmember. ”Is it true?” he demanded, raising his voice, slightly.

”No!” the castmember said, his voice unnaturally loud after the whispers. A nervous chuckle rippled through the crowd.

”Is it true?” he said, striding to the podium, shouting now.

”No!” the crowd roared.

”NO!” he shouted back.

”You don't _have to_ roll over and take it! You can fight back, carry on with the plan, send them packing. They're only taking over because you're letting them. Are you going to let them?”

”NO!”

b.i.t.c.hun wars are rare. Long before anyone tries a takeover of anything, they've done the arithmetic and ensured themselves that the ad-hoc they're displacing doesn't have a hope of fighting back.

For the defenders, it's a simple decision: step down gracefully and salvage some reputation out of the thing -- fighting back will surely burn away even that meager reward.

No one benefits from fighting back -- least of all the thing everyone's fighting over. For example:

It was the second year of my undergrad, taking a double-major in not making trouble for my profs and keeping my mouth shut. It was the early days of b.i.t.c.hun, and most of us were still a little unclear on the concept.

Not all of us, though: a group of campus s.h.i.+t-disturbers, grad students in the Sociology Department, were on the bleeding edge of the revolution, and they knew what they wanted: control of the Department, oustering of the tyrannical, stodgy profs, a bully pulpit from which to preach the b.i.t.c.hun gospel to a generation of impressionable undergrads who were too cowed by their workloads to realize what a load of s.h.i.+t they were being fed by the University.

At least, that's what the intense, heavyset woman who seized the mic at my Soc 200 course said, that sleepy morning mid-semester at Convocation Hall. Nineteen hundred students filled the hall, a capacity crowd of bleary, coffee-sipping time-markers, and they woke up in a hurry when the woman's strident harangue burst over their heads.

I saw it happen from the very start. The prof was down there on the stage, a speck with a tie-mic, droning over his slides, and then there was a blur as half a dozen grad students rushed the stage. They were dressed in University poverty-chic, wrinkled slacks and tattered sports coats, and five of them formed a human wall in front of the prof while the sixth, the heavyset one with the dark hair and the prominent mole on her cheek, unclipped his mic and clipped it to her lapel.

”Wakey wakey!” she called, and the reality of the moment hit home for me: this wasn't on the lesson-plan.

”Come on, heads up! This is _not_ a drill. The University of Toronto Department of Sociology is under new management. If you'll set your handhelds to 'receive,' we'll be beaming out new lesson-plans momentarily. If you've forgotten your handhelds, you can download the plans later on. I'm going to run it down for you right now, anyway.

”Before I start though, I have a prepared statement for you. You'll probably hear this a couple times more today, in your other cla.s.ses.

It's worth repeating. Here goes:

”We reject the stodgy, tyrannical rule of the profs at this Department.

We demand bully pulpits from which to preach the b.i.t.c.hun gospel.

Effective immediately, the University of Toronto Ad-Hoc Sociology Department is _in charge_. We promise high-relevance curriculum with an emphasis on reputation economies, post-scarcity social dynamics, and the social theory of infinite life-extension. No more Durkheim, kids, just deadheading! This will be _fun_.”

She taught the course like a pro -- you could tell she'd been drilling her lecture for a while. Periodically, the human wall behind her shuddered as the prof made a break for it and was restrained.

At precisely 9:50 a.m. she dismissed the cla.s.s, which had hung on her every word. Instead of trudging out and ambling to our next cla.s.s, the whole nineteen hundred of us rose, and, as one, started buzzing to our neighbors, a roar of ”Can you believe it?” that followed us out the door and to our next encounter with the Ad-Hoc Sociology Department.

It was cool, that day. I had another soc cla.s.s, Constructing Social Deviance, and we got the same drill there, the same stirring propaganda, the same comical sight of a tenured prof battering himself against a human wall of ad-hocs.

Reporters pounced on us when we left the cla.s.s, jabbing at us with mics and peppering us with questions. I gave them a big thumbs-up and said, ”b.i.t.c.hun!” in cla.s.sic undergrad eloquence.