The October Surprise

It has been almost a month since the scoundrels rose up from within our own staff to perpetrate their shameless grab for power.

The laughter of the coup leaders still burns in my ears as I sit here in my cramped little office, banished from my luxury suite. No longer the art director of Sojourners, I'm now forced to work in the archives removing the faces of former editorial staff members from old photos, and replacing them with the faces of the new leaders.

Details are still sketchy, but it seems the coup was engineered by the poetry editor and the newly named assistant publisher, whose recent promotion was apparently insufficient to satisfy her hidden lust for power.

The editorial staff was away on our fall retreat, tirelessly planning the 1992 issues during breaks between volleyball and "Scattergories" (a delightful vocabulary game that I would have been much better at, had I chosen to apply myself). Knowing that the business staff and interns get a little insecure when we are gone, we made our daily phone call to reassure them when, suddenly, the phone line went dead. It was the first act, we found out later, of the crazed coup plotters who then went from office to office enlisting supporters.

The interns -- always eager to help out -- were first to join in the sinister plot, foolishly deluding themselves that they would hold high positions in the new personnel structure. The subscription staff was next to turn against us, and they immediately broke into the computer files and issued lifetime subscriptions to themselves and their parents.

By noon it was over. In less than three hours, the office hierarchy, which had for years served us so well (at least the ones of us at the top), was turned upside down, leaving this respected religious publication at the mercy of people who know nothing about magazine publishing. (They confirmed their journalistic incompetence in their first official act by promising readers more white space and shorter, easy-to-read articles. Ha! What a dumb idea.)

The full consequence of the coup did not reveal itself until we returned from our retreat and discovered our keys did not open the office doors. As we pondered this predicament on the sidewalk outside, voices shouted at us from behind barred windows. They kept chanting, over and over again, "It's a coup!" "It's a coup!" "It's a coup!"

And then it hit me. "Maybe it's a coup," I said.

We realized we had only two choices. We could stay and compromise our deeply held principles and allow ourselves to be mercilessly subjugated by the whims of the new regime. Or we could leave and get real jobs. We decided to stay.

We reported the next day for our new assignments, which mainly affected:

· Jim "what's this button for" Wallis, now the computer troubleshooter for the whole office.

· Joyce Hollyday, whose daily task is to transcribe the Rush Limbaugh radio show.

· Former publisher Joe Roos, who now is the new office tour guide for non-English-speaking visitors.

· Former news editor Brian Jaudon, who is now forced to watch reruns of the All New Dating Game. (Wait a minute. He does that already ...)

· Joe "don't mess with me, I'm a Franciscan" Nangle, who must spend the next 12 months reading and cataloguing back issues of Jerry Falwell's Liberty Lobby newsletter.

SO NOW the magazine is run by a bunch of prima donnas, greedy charlatans, and, yes, a poetry editor. (Actually, I never thought she was much of a poetry editor, since the stuff she selected almost never rhymed. And last month, instead of giving us a poem on El Salvador or spiritual struggle or something like that, she insisted we print a poem about her brother CATCHING A FISH!).

Well, as leader of the fledgling underground resistance to this coup, I pledge that we will struggle tirelessly to return to leadership. We will plot night and day to seize the power we once had and return to those heady days of award-winning magazine publishing.

Maybe then I'll get back my big leather chair.

Ed Spivey Jr. is art director of Sojourners.