Eschaton: SOUTHAF's enfilade, the Commentary gag, and the brawl

pivotal · 8 Nov YDAU, afternoon

• When: 8 Nov YDAU (Interdependence Day), the Eschaton game on the East Courts, through the game's collapse at the 1600h siren.
• What: Gopnik plays SOUTHAF, and his one strategic act is one of the day's two noted irregularities (the "SOUTHAF flurry"): Israel — a nation nobody is even playing — "seems in a fit of pique to have somehow persuaded SOUTHAF, who today is Brooklyn NY’s little hard-ass Josh Gopnik—the same Josh Gopnik who by the way subscribes to Commentary—to expend all sixteen of its green fuzzy warheads in a debilitating enfilade against AMNAT dams, bridges, and bases from Florida to Baja." AMNAT's president LaMont Chu then milks "the excuse of Gopnik's emotional strikes against the U.S. South" as a golden tactical goose. When the snow starts, he and McKenna abandon their quadrants for the weather itself, tongues outstretched; and once Kittenplan fires the first ball at a player and the boys smell that Ingersoll has "become fair game for cruelty," Gopnik is named among those "firing balls as hard as they can at Ingersoll." In the terminal chaos he goes fully hand-to-hand — "Josh Gopnik punches LaMont Chu in the stomach, and LaMont Chu yells that he’s been punched in the stomach" — and his last image in the scene is the book's defining one: "Fierce little J. Gopnik is flailing at the air and telling whoever wants it to come on, come on."