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I couldn't let this go by.
Slate is hosting a string of articles on Wisenheimer, the memoir by a former prep school debater. The first two essays are between the author, a former Parli geek, and a critic who is a former Policy geek.
If you didn't do this particular thing, you don't realize how large an ecosystem "debate" is. In my misspent youth I did Parli(mentary), several Speech events, which are basically drama competitions (my favorite were Extemp [oraneous] and After Dinner: variants of a contest where you are given a premise on the fly, five minutes to compose an address and eight minutes to give it), I did Model U.N. to some point past "mental illness." I always wanted to try Mock Trial, which is half role play and half prepared debate.
But here's where life gets lonely and pointless. If you google "debate" or "debate champions", you will get the standard (USA) form of debate. Which is Policy or CX (cross-examination). Which are closely regulated, well-funded and focused on ... issues.
At the beginning of each debate season, the scoring body releases this year's topic. Say, "America should adopt an agressive stance against illegal immigration." For nine months, every team in the country will debate that. They will use the Summer to sit in libraries researching it. They will assemble file boxes. They will assemble 6-inch stacks of index cards, on which are footnotes. They will be scored on how many of these footnotes they can cite in ten minutes. Taking the same stances. For a year.
It's like playing Magic but without art, love or decency. You chain your citations together and the other team chains theirs. Kids think this will get them into Princeton. They hire tutors. As a scholar quoted for Slate says:
The real debate takes place on the notepad, not at the podium ... there is no time to waste on pleasantries like "Good morning"; a more useful introduction is a preview of where the speaker plans to go with the flow. ... Since everyone in the room is taking detailed notes, it's unnecessary to refer to a previous argument as-anything but "B(1)." ... The velocity starts to increase ... the role models for high school contestants speak at ... nearly 270 words a minute.
You don't argue. You don't convince or educate or confuse or charm or impress. You arrange every thing written on the subject in alphabetical order, then stand stiff, look down and blast it from your face. I watch a good CX or Policy debater and don’t see a thoughtful, cunning student. I see someone possessed by the devil. And the devil is autistic. Every aspect of the sport could be improved by rolling your eyes back and chewing Alka-Seltzer. Watch:
I've had to judge these things. Your mind goes weird places. Why is he doing this? It looks like pain. Does he critically have to go to the bathroom? That would be a little fascinating. This kid is locked in one of Dante's punishments. Can he motor out every syllable of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual before he poops himself? Where the hell is he going to apply this? Why am I here? No one wants the DSM IV yelled at their feet. It's bad for your heath. God, the kid is still yammering. Okay! He wins! Would an authority please run onto the stage and put a gold medal around his neck for World's Most Boring Schizophrenic? Maybe he'll stop.
Parli 4 life.
Syndicate
God i miss CX.
You're right, it doesn't even belong in the same category as Parli or (as we had in our school) Lincoln Douglas. Parli is victorian boxing, or perhaps fencing - graceful, civilized. Maybe ballet would be a better comparison.
CX was a fight between the Dead Rabbits and the Natives. Except halfway through, somebody says "Fuck this" and breaks open a crate of high-powered firearms.
Actually, I think you hit pretty close to the difference: Parli et al was Theater. CX was much closer to a sport.
Despite discussing the same topic for nine months, no two debates were ever the same. You were certainly never bored. Whereas your speech competitions stressed eloquence and thoughtful argument, CX rewarded attention to detail, quick thinking, and the ability to keep 100 pages of arguments (that your opponent had spit out in its entirety in 8 minutes) straight in your head at the same time you're formulating a response and finding support for it.
Sure, speed kills. But that's more of the inevitable outcome of putting time limits on kids who, by the end of the year, know more about their subject than the average LA in DC who works on the stuff for a living.
You describe it as Magic without a soul, but I had a lot of fun. I was playing Final Fantasy VIII a lot at the time I was in CX, and started to think of a boss battle. The enemy launches a Political Capitol DA? You counter. But wait, this DA is different from the one you met last round - cards go flying as you cannibalize your federalism DA Response for the quote you need - because by the end of the season, you've basically memorized two tubs worth of newspaper cites and data.
And I think the difference is apparent in our personalities today. At a party, you're much more likely to be running around, extemporaneously wowing people. I'll have found the other policy wonk and we'll be on the side of the room, arguing about realigning incentives between doctors, insurance companies and patients, or turning the last MEDPAC report into a drinking game.
1) I would love to see the rules to that game.
2) It's Political Capital, I think. You're referring there to accumulating and spending a resource of consent, not to the ZIP code where laws are made. Either way it's not the bloody building. Also I just said all that even though it wasn't written directly in front of me, in that order. Does that make me a god in your world?
3) The FF image is funny and apt.
4) Much more later.
You're totally right. I wrote the whole comment stream of thought after a 16 hour day and not enough recovery time. also, while I was late for a deadline.
so while i appreciate your correction (and i do, really), you can also go fuck yourself sideways in the ass with a pitch fork.
But yeah. The RPG image is pretty apt. Especially because you really do seem to level up.
A pitchfork is the rare object that might hurt less if you took it up sideways.
Thanks for looking out for me.
The problem is Time.
I love research and structured arguments. I love debate over real issues, scored in part on your understanding of those issues. That's why Model U.N., for all its inherent silliness, was crack.
Okay it was crack because of the silliness, also.
For those debates, (which were very competitive) we had three or four days. Not 45 minutes. This is an effective way to bring out knowledge, understanding, and use your depth to beat the competition. You actually speak. Like a human. You convince others. You have to present (and re-present, and re-frame, and re-present ...) your understanding and make your case and ... oh yeah ... get that knowlege down on paper in public.
(For savant patterns of thought, I dare you to top "speaking conversationally in Be It Resolved...")
I think back to hauling those file boxes, drafting in hallways between sessions, juggling 4 arguments on 3 topics addressing several different constituencies. Manipulating parli pro to decide who speaks, when, on what, with no preparation but that you did beforehand.
You know what wouldn't make that better? Scrapping it. For 6 minutes of shouting at one person like you're in front of the Supreme Court and have ten seconds to live and also are the Tazmanian Devil.
You say spew and shorthand are the "inevitable outcome" of the time limit. I agree. That's why the way we score CX (and Policy) is unbelievably stupid.
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LD and Parli have all the requirements of CX. Judges flow arguments. They score for "makes" and "drops" and "rebuttals." There is crosstalk. The criteria for solvency, harm and benefits are just as tough.
What those formats add, is that you be understood when you speak.
By aggressively scoring "style," you force debaters to debate. To make a few good arguments with the information they have, and phrase them to convince a fellow member of our species. Because this is what time is for. This is how time is really used in business or law or politics.
A speech is pithy and effective. Policy-making is gradual. If you scale the second to the first, you get sound bites and canned arguments and the kind of horseshit we see on the nightly news. If you scale the first to the second, you get kids using lung exercises to do something pointless. It's not "harder" or "more competitive" because it hurts your face and uses abbreviated nonsense. Those things make it (Like Final Fantasy VIII) a badly designed game. One that is less fun to play and less useful to learn.
In a real life, you must give an elevator pitch. That means you need to know your shit deeply, condense your shit effectively, and make your shit shiny. You do not have the option to pull the emergency stop open the Wall Street Journal and scream the contents of "Marketplace" until the firemen get the door open and the police get you on the ground.
I mean you do. But in real life, they don't fucking give you scholarships for that.
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Also, Gangs of New York? Really? Leonardo DiCaprio. Kinfe-to-knife with thugs who choreograph throwing their top hats while a fat man in a tuxedo runs around yelling "MY GIRAFFES."
I cannot think of anything more gangsta.
(Seriously. Instead of Uniting the Clans or whatever, I would have huddled my gang around a paper sign: "STAB ALL WHEN PLAY WITH HATS." You could draw a stick figure too.)
Many of these are good points. Others are what I hope are ironic strawmen. But I think what it boils down to is that I'm good at creating evidence-supported arguments and poor and expressing them eloquently. I'm good at anticipating arguments but bad at thinking on my feet. So CX basically played to my strengths and downplayed my weaknesses. Parli's not a perfect game, and there are things that CX are better at. More than that, there are things you count as advantages that I cound as disadvantages.
I never wanted to be aggressively scored on style. I sucked at style. That's why I always went 1AC, the position that involved as little of what you define as "debate" as possible. The research always interested me a lot more than the debate. The debate was just when you got to see how your research paid off. The fact that I had to be physically involved in the debate itself always seemed inconvenient.
Maybe LD/Parli is closer to what business or law are really like (although I would make the argument that most politics far more closely resembles CX). And maybe people in LD or Parli go through the same sort of research and prep beforehand - having done neither, I wouldn't know. But I do know that I never got involved in LD or Parli specifically because of its emphasis on style. In my experience style and eloquence are only tangentially related to whether you are actually right. And CX wasn't immune to this either - more than once we'd lose on a point because our opponent made an eloquent rebuttal that happened to be wrong, but it convinced the judge. Obviously we didn't do a good enough job convincing the judge why our opponent's argument was persuasive but specious, and that's on us. But I like that situation to happen as little as possible. Maybe it is the way of the real world, but it's not fun.
Perhaps CX went too far in deemphasizing style. That's certainly a possibility. But I liked it. I liked having every point have to be backed up by a reliable source. I liked the emphasis on evidence over style (not that LD/Parli doesn't place a high emphasis on evidence, naturally, but just that style is elevated). Maybe I would have enjoyed LD or Parli prep as much as I did CX - but I never found out, because I was turned off by the focus on style.
CX isn't a very good way to teach people to make elevator speeches, but it's an effective way to teach people to write papers. You say that it's less fun; well, it may have been for you, but a lot of people thought the opposite. And frankly, a lot of people liked Final Fantasy too.
One final point on speed: once you get used to it, it's no less indecipherable than parlimentary procedure. If the judge can't hear your argument it's a very bad thing. So it pays to be fast and clear. Spectators often have no idea what the hell is going on but rarely did I ever have trouble following anybody's speed, and if I did the judge did too and my team ended up winning.
I guess the subtext to that whole post is that LD and Parli are probably better forms of debate, but the things that I liked about CX were the those that were the least debate-like.
Or maybe more dickishly, LD and Parli more closely adhere to the ideals of debate Bizzo has derived from his love of LD and Parli, but I do not share those ideals.