With new and exciting presidential debates on the horizon, I thought I’d interject with a non-political memory.
I was a debater back in high school, but only for my freshman year. I won the Best Freshman Debater award, and then I neglected to go to a prestigious debate institute over the summer, and, consequently, my career as a debater was all but over.
Oh, well. No big loss.
The problem was that debates became an exercise in who could speak the fastest. You only had a few minutes for each speech, so you had to cram in all the info you could by speaking at six zillion miles per hour like that guy from the old FedEx commercials.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NeK5ZjtpO-M&rel=1]
I was a pretty good fast speaker, but I never knew much of what I was saying. I would make an assigned point and then sift through a file of index cards to read a piece of “evidence” supporting my position. The cards had been prepared by senior debaters on the team, and most of the time I had never read them before. I couldn’t tell you what was on them even after I read them. But if I could make more points in my speech than the other team could respond to in theirs, I won by default.
It all seemed so futile.
The debate topic that year was “Resolved: That the United States should significantly curtail its arms sales to foreign countries.” Every freshman debater was given a copy of a case that maintained that the US should cut off its arms sales to Taiwan. Opposing teams often opposed us with a “topicality” argument, which asserted that our Taiwan case didn’t match the assigned topic because the topic said foreign countries, plural, and since Taiwan was only one foreign country, we were breaking the rules.
Seriously. We would argue about this for hours on end. Totally pointless.
So the most delightful experience I had that year did not involve a debate in which I was a debater. I was just the assigned timekeeper, watching as varsity debaters competed in the regional tournament. An odd friend of my brother named Alan and his partner were competing on behalf of our school, against a team that obviously was more concerned about maintaining the integrity of the process than Alan was.
Alan and partner were assigned the “affirmative” position. So they ran a case that asserted that the United States ought to provide more free health clinics to its citizens. The problem was that the topic was supposed to be arms sales to foreign countries. Not to worry, though – Alan offered a clear plan for how their case would be implemented, and it included a provision that one handgun would not be sold to Canada. So it was topical after all.
Or maybe not. After the first speech, the opposing team leader stood up for the assigned period of cross examination – “cross ex” in debatespeak – and asked a very simple question.
“Alan,” he said, “would you mind telling me why you are running a case about health clinics, which wasn’t even topical last year?”
Alan responded that he was fully prepared to respond to any topicality issues they may raise.
And prepared he was. He had over 137 different topicality arguments on file. Their sheer volume made up for their total incoherence. In his rebuttal, Alan launched into his topicality defense, giving each of them a number and reading an evidence card to support them.
Argument 1: President Ronald Reagan states that topicality is not relevant to the debate process.
Then he would read the card that supported the statement. It was a direct quote from President Reagan, saying the words “It’s not.”
Then Alan moved through the list. Apparently, a lot of public figures said the words “It’s not.” Alan used each of them to support his argument, giving each a number in his barrage of irrefutably stupid facts.
Not all of the facts had evidence to back them up, though. I remember “Topicality Argument #42: Big rock” and “Topicality Argument #73: Flouride is safe.” There were other assertions that included verbose evidence cards that had nothing to do with the preceding statement. So topicality argument 89 could have included a statement like “Topicality causes cancer among rats and should be avoided at all costs,” followed up with a paragraph talking about the rising cost of car washes.
Alan lost.
This is a story without a moral. It just makes me laugh.
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