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Theory bores me; it should bore you too.  A debate that comes down to theory avoids the topic; it avoids the chance at debating an issue with significance beyond the round

There’s a great diner in Watertown, the Boston burb where I eat & sleep when I’m not coaching debate or paying homage to the ancestors back in Fitchburg.  I discovered that the ownership’s opened a new location, in Newton Center in an old train station.  The menu is mostly the same, and the food’s just as good.

I had dinner there a few Sundays ago with Wild Bill, who’s a Team Palmer alum from my second forensics stop, Newton South.  WB was one of the first debaters I’d coached in a long time, after a long run doing purely speech events.  He switched over from extemp to PF and never looked back, foreshadowing my doing the same.

He graduated just three short years ago, and headed to Delaware for college, and is about to graduate from there a year early.  He’s not quite 21; so while I had a hot toddy — it was cold out and my throat was sore — he stuck to water.  He did most of the talking, which is good, because he had some great stories to tell.

WB comes across as old, which is jarring, because he looks so young; he has that blue-eyed blonde-haired fresh look that means he’ll get carded until he’s 35.  He’s conservative in his manner, if not his politics.  He maintains a brash, over the top and loud public persona to hide a deeply private inner life.  In normal conversation, when he’s not playing the dictator, he comes across as sad; he speaks slowly, and with little affect.  Sometimes he is sad, sometimes he’s just being quiet; I figured out the difference a long time ago, through coaching him.  He got overlooked a lot, and could sometimes be hard to deal with.  But he was always worth dealing with, I thought.

Much of his story involved a somewhat typical bout of college relationship angst whose details are important to the actors and their friends, and unimportant to anyone else.  The other half of the story was the traditional Plans After College.  These were less typical.

Next year, WB is going to spend a year that he could have spent in college instead working on the Delaware Right to Marry PAC, a non profit group agitating for full marriage rights for gays and lesbians in Delaware.  WB himself founded it a few years ago, and now he’s going to take his tuition dollars for his nonexistent fourth college year and use them to make a serious go of effecting a big change within a small state.

It’s ordinary for college kids, especially former debaters, to go off and try to get involved in politics after college.  Usually they take a much safer route; finding an internship in some Washington office where their work is dull but they can suck up to the right big names and hopefully increase the size of their own.  These types run up a spiral of increasingly lofty titles, but ultimately end up doing different types of clerical work all their lives and calling it power.  Liberal or conservative, they usually just become agents for the status quo, finding more difficulties than opportunities and calling that experience.

WB’s doing it better.  He’s going to spend a whole year living on ramen fighting a thankless battle for equality in a state that may not yet be ready for it.  If it fails he’ll have gotten nearly nothing.  If it succeeds, there’s a good chance a better-connected figure will swoop in and claim much of the credit.  But if he can move the lever and be the difference, he will be.  He made it abundantly clear — through action, not words — that he’s doing this because it’s right, not just because it’s right for him.   He can, he should, and therefore he is.

He’s straight, by the way.

For graduation, I gave WB the 2nd volume of Robert Caro’s excellent biography of Lydon Johnson, Means of Ascent, whose second half is a hugely entertaining tale of how LBJ engineered a stolen election against an entrenched Texas legend.  I wrote a note in the cover, which WB apparently re-reads often; I remember taking care to tell him the 2nd half of the book was not to be treated as an instruction manual; but more to the point, to remind him that power is to be used, not simply gained.  I told him I had faith he could be a rabble rouser and a big name someday, but if he didn’t harness it to a real cause or a real purpose, it’d be hollow and dry.

Mitt Romney fails to inspire because nobody knows why he wants to be President beyond having his name in history books; Barack Obama likewise has disappointed by conserving power instead of maximizing its effect.  Power conserved is power wasted; especially if it’s conserved for so petty a goal as re-election.  WB is better than both; underlying his sadness and sometimes anger, his occasional abrasiveness, and his aggressive public demeanor is a moral compass that puts most of our high leaders to shame; he’ll tweak Important Personages wherever he can find them, but the thing that surely must annoy them most is that he’s usually right; he’s shining light on areas they’d prefer to keep dark.

I can hope I had a small part in writing this story instead of simply hearing it.  If I taught him something about moral philosophy, political theory, or general causticness that nudged him onto this path, then 16 years coaching speech & debate were worth it.  I tend to be deeply cynical about What Is, but demand a lot of people to shape What Will Be, and try to impart some of the same to everyone I teach.  The Right Thing is often clear enough; we don’t fail to do it because we don’t know what it is, but because we don’t want to; and for that, there’s little excuse.

WB wasn’t my most talented or successful student, not even in his class.  He had a better than average debate career, but not a spectacular one.  Perhaps he was saving his spectacular for later.  I’m privileged to watch and find out.

 

• The Jan-Feb topic-induced emotional meltdown count, to my awareness anyway, is now at 4.
• The NDCA email list decided to explode in a soul-searching Nature of the Organization thread the week leading up to our tournament.  Hurrah.
• The Lexington tournament ran well, apart from the fact that I was dreadfully sick and lost my voice.
• Bill Belichick’s pact with Satan is apparently more comprehensive than Tim Tebow’s arrangement with God.
• UPenn approaches, and has significantly grown.  That, at least, is gratifying, in a month when there’s not much in debate to gratify.
• And new, exciting things are in store for tabroom.com.   More on that later…

 

The last post certainly stirred up the world a bit, but it didn’t unfortunately put together enough of a consensus to produce action in our nebulous, poorly governed and disunited community.  That’s a shame, because students will suffer for it.

The objections to a topic change came down to two categories.  Some defenses are largely procedural in nature; essentially, they say my objections weren’t lodged early enough, and the voting of the NFL member chapters must be respected.  I disagree; the governance structure of debate does not have enough inherent value to me not to give way to the needs of substantial numbers of debaters.  I didn’t pay close attention to the topic list earlier because I’m not an NFL member, I have no vote, and since the NFL doesn’t release voting figures — probably because turnout is very low, as with most nonprofit voting systems — I have little concept of what it would take to change the topic consensus.    Furthermore, in the days before the topic release, I honestly didn’t believe that a responsible educator could vote for that topic.  Apparently I’m wrong.  But  I don’t believe there is a time limit on objections of this nature.

The second category of defense says we should face this issue and give it a platform and voice, and that it could empower people.  Platforms and voices are important, but this platform is ill suited to it.  We should talk about, and confront this issue.  I actually relish the discussion online about the topic, as it has certainly increased awareness in our community.  We should not, however, force minors to engage it in switch-side debate.  Debate is not about giving voice to your own opinions, because you cannot choose which side you’re on.  There are some victims of abuse who would like to, and should be able to, speak loud and often about this dark problem in our society.  There are others who choose privacy and would prefer not to fight for the cause.  We should respect both choices.   There are plenty of venues to speak up on topics of your choosing; we have one in forensics, called original oratory.  Debate is too restricted for such a live-wire emotional issue.  We should not be in the business of excluding people who feel they can’t talk about this issue, or even who could but don’t want to.  This topic makes them choose between their private choices, and debate education itself.

The process of topic selection strikes me as primarily focused on competitive concerns.  For instance, the topics are released in dribs and drabs, not all at once — which hurts pre-planning, but reduces the perceived advantage that “those who go to camps” have.  I can forgive that the process produced a bad topic; I don’t blame anyone on the committee or anyone else for not thinking about my objections ahead of time.  To be honest, it didn’t fully hit me until after the topic was  announced  and I gave it serious thought.   Wider exposure of proposed topics before they hit the ballot might have caught this sooner, but it might not have.

However, the reactions of those in a position to do something about them has deeply disappointed me.  Just as the replacement to the Islamic cultural center PF topic betrayed a lack of understanding of the nature of the objection to said topic, the responses coming from many of the leaders in our community, formal and informal, tell me that they’re not just respectfully disagreeing; they don’t get it.   A lot of the commentary tells me that many coaches at heart believe debate is  all game, no matter the subject.  The game, and the need to win it, trumps all; those who can’t hack it be damned.  The competitive instinct underlies a lot of the discussion; and its presence is why I object to this topic.  If coaches can’t separate that out in their online discussion of a topic, how can we expect minors to in the heat of a limited-time round?

I gave serious thought to leaving debate; maybe just for this topic, maybe just LD, maybe for good.  I’ll be honest, it’s still a  possibility.  It grew in likelihood the more I read people I otherwise like and respect defend this topic in ways that ultimately assert that debate matters more than the debaters.  I do debate because it’s fun.  It’s not my career; I accept no money for coaching.  This topic is not fun.  Nor is discussing it in the context of a debate round going to produce valuable education.

For now, I think I’m going to add this to my paradigm.  It’s still not perfect, feel free to suggest alterations.  Feel free to also adopt it yourself, if you’re a judge.  Feel free to strike me because of it, because I don’t want to judge this topic anyway.

Some rules aren’t meant to be followed.

——

I've decided that in my own right I will not force you to debate this
topic. The NFL may be uninterested in reconsidering their decision, but I am
under no particular obligation to them to enforce it. Ultimately what happens
in a round is up to the judge.

Therefore, if both debaters mutually agree to debate an old topic of their
choosing, or any of the topics on the 2011-2012 NFL ballot, I will happily
judge that round. I will also give both debaters 30s for their efforts.

If there is no agreement on using an old/alternative topic, then the
affirmative, after notifying the neg before the round, may run advocacy that
addresses a topic about the core of the resolution -- vigilantism and self
defense -- while avoiding domestic violence specifically. If an aff pushes this
debate into non-emotionally charged ground thereby, I will not vote on topicality and I
will give the aff 30 points. The aff must only inform the neg; the neg need
not agree. Negs should have answers to those types of positions anyway.

If the aff doesn't decide to do so, then I will hold the aff responsible for
the entirety of the resolution, and will not affirm on PICs bad theory or
other limiting factors that attempt to box neg into ground where they must
risk arguments that offend or trip over emotional landmines.

If you don't like this, please do strike me. Every strike I get on this topic
is a gift, because I don't want to judge it anyway. If that makes me a
terrible judge so be it; I assure you, I would be a terrible judge for this
topic anyway, because I feel zero compunction on this particular issue about
intervening if one of the many lines this issue raises are crossed. There's a
chance that I may refuse to sign ballots on this topic; for example, if a
student simply cannot continue a round (which has happened in practice).
I don't really know what the limits are and don't want to find out, and
I'm willing to shower you with astonishingly liberal speaker points if
you help me avoid it.