The Steroid-User's Guide to Pumping Irony

Irony never works. Trust me on this.

The point of the previous entry was to juxtapose two concepts in the hopes that the expectations of the one would help inform the lack of expectations of the other. My commentator takes approach that the analogy was bogus, and that the framers (in this case the NFL) are not to be considered in the equation of what makes good or bad LD; this was my point exactly, that many debate judges disregard the “intent” of the activity. At tournaments we are all, alas, judicial activists.

As for my opinion of postmodernism, I doubt if I have been unclear over the years. I applaud any student studying these texts; this is a triumph of grit over incomprehensibility in many cases, and great entertainment in others. I very much enjoy Baudrillard as a social commentator, for instance, and would recommend him to anyone looking for that sort of reading. But educators (despite their being, in my commentator’s opinion, old and in the way) ought to start students on the canon, and the problem I see is that judges, who fill the educator role in rounds, are often college students whose personal taste overcomes their good sense, and who prefer to see rounds that are relevant to them, with material relevant to them, rather than rounds relevant to the high school students debating those rounds. Of course, it is a commonplace that students should feel that the canon is to be overcome rather than embraced and learned from: it has been ever thus. Teacher’s should be wiser than this. I do not claim that the canon is the end-all, be-all (note the correct usage of this phrase, unlike the usage by our illustrious in-coming Veep), but that its mastery is required before proceeding, much like knowledge of the scales is required before playing Mozart, or perhaps more relevantly, before becoming Thelonius Monk. If you don’t know where you’ve been, it is rather hard to plot a path to where you are going.

As for the use of the phrase pomo crap, I may have been overarching in that comment. Much of it is interesting, but little of it provides applicable ethical structure for debate rounds, and its days in academic circles seem to be coming to an end. Of course, the reason it is interesting, non-applicable and dying out is because most of it, if not nonsense, is incoherent, never a particularly strong value in the exegesis business. And when it is coherent, as with (most of) the Old Baudleroo, it is rather silly. One wants to stand with my favorite Frenchman in Hiroshima in 1945 and have him tell me how the use of nuclear weapons is impossible. Actually, I’ll stand somewhere in Kansas and he can write me a letter from Japan explaining it to me, if you get my drift. Or maybe he can send me a letter from the Mideast, where wars are not happening. That would be just as good. And remember, my favorite Onion headline of all time: Derrida “dead”

Oh well. You can’t please everybody. Onwards to Jake!