THIS, Sir, Is My Case!

Disclaimer to the Dartmouth Community:

Many people at Dartmouth consider themselves writers. At the bottom of this food chain are lowly Mirror writers like myself, and at the top of this hierarchy, as we all know, are the six writers for the Generic Good Evening Message (known to some as the Generic Good Morning Message, or GGMM). In Collis last week, I saw one of the GGEM writers, Bosozuku, reading my article in disgust.

Like a serf talking to a noble, I nervously approached him. He looked up at me and said, "This isn't your best. They're getting progressively worse."

Now, if someone of lower status in the writing world (a creative writing major, the chair of the English department, etc.) had come at me like that, I probably would have grabbed my Collis omelet and slapped the offender across the face.

But this was different. This was Bosozuku. I had been challenged as a writer and I had to respond not with violence, but with prose. Good prose.

So, in addition to apologizing for the declining quality of my articles, get ready to be figuratively pimp-slapped by the best article I could muster with Collis pasta sitting heavy in the belly, 77 percent of computer battery left and no charger in sight.

In this day and age of budget cuts, as students weigh in on what aspects of Dartmouth they can't live without, most people say things like "Fuel" or "the gym" or "academics."

My answer is simple: Blitz.

To the novice that simply labels Blitz a tool for e-mailing, shame on you. Blitz is more than that -- it's a community. In any community, you have those who are agents of good, and those who are agents of harm. Blitz is no different.

A person who blitzjacks someone by forwarding inappropriate pictures to people with addresses like "Mom" and "President Wright" is an agent of harm. Someone who blitzes out to a large list of people and forgets to repress the recipient list during the height of finals is considered an agent of good.

I'd say maybe 99 percent of people who send out mass blitzes and don't repress the recipient list do it by accident. There is that one percent of us, however, who know exactly what we are doing. Other than being annoying and ruining most of the student body's afternoon, we understand that nothing brings a Dartmouth student's true colors to the forefront like a blitzwar.

So, when "The Dartmouth Mathematical Society" sends a blitz and forgets to repress the recipient list of 500 students, the next five minutes become very important. Every student does one of four things:

1.Deletes it and immediately moves on with his life

2.Doesn't hesitate and instantly reply's to the entire list

3.Blitzes a friend, saying "Egads, one of us has to reply-all. You do it. No, I'm scared. Okay, I'll do it."

4.Is the person who made the initial mistake and, sensing the world of pain that could ensue, foolishly replies to the entire list with "I forgot to repress the list, please don't take advantage of the list," thus Fort Sumtering the blitzwar.

To quote Sir Winston Churchill, "Never, never, never believe any [blitz] war will be smooth and easy, or that anyone who embarks on the strange voyage can measure the tides and hurricanes he will encounter. The statesman who yields to [blitz] war fever must realize that once the signal is given, he is no longer the master of policy but the slave of unforeseeable and uncontrollable events."

Externally, every Dartmouth student knows that Churchill speaks the truth and that there's technically nothing one can do to stop a blitzwar, and it's therefore best to just submit to its mercy.

Even so, the majority of students believe that they can actually send that magic blitz that ceases fire and essentially Yorktowns the blitzwar.

As it becomes apparent that a blitzwar has picked up enough steam to start pissing people off, those aforementioned "true colors" begin to flood inboxes. If you're the type of person that finds comedy in blitzwars, you do things such as:

1. Reply with a blank blitz.

2. Announce the entrance of your friends and organizations to the blitzwar.

3. Blitzbomb the blitzwar.

4. Ask what people are up to tonight.

5. Reminisce about Guy and Fellow and Roah Niner.

6. Ask if anyone will proofread your papers.

And, conversely, if blitzwars are the bane of your existence and you wish ill will on their participants, you do these things (as evidenced in the 41-hour "Blitzwar of '08F"):

1. Ask politely to be taken off the list (bahaha)

2. Ask if there's a way to get participants in trouble with Parkhurst.

3. Threaten to report names to Parkhurst.

4. Say you have just filed a report to Parkhurst.

5. Blitz out a Word document that you have apparently "filed to Parkhurst."

6. Threaten to beat up people up.

7. Offer to pay people to stop blitzing.

Utter chaos. It's unbelievable. After the Great War of the fall, I really felt like I had made some new friends. Here at Dartmouth, we constantly talk about social spaces and needing more places for students to socialize, but we forget about Blitz as a space.

Who needs a new building when I've got 4,000 of my closest friends and enemies one click away?

Blitz, I love you. I swear I'll solely use my alum account instead of having it forward to my Gmail.

I wouldn't do you like that. We've been through too much together.