Tuesday, May 05, 2009

Bietz continued: the snobs vs the slobs

Bietz talks about the schism between local and national circuit teams. He does not go far enough, not so much in explaining how bifurcation exists, but how people in debate, who wish to cast aspersions at someone, usually end up accusing them of being a member of the other camp. In my experience, when people have disagreed with me, they have complained that my problem is that I am too committed to the $ircuit.

Puh-leeze. I mean, I’m the one who put the dollar sign in there (only because I couldn’t find the cents sign).

Then again, I guess you could accuse me, on the basis of this semiotic, to be anti-national circuit, but loyal members of the VCA know that that is not the case either. I have enjoyed the challenges of circuit debate with my debaters at that level. I am critical of everyone, everywhere (including myself). I play no favorites. My point is, and always has been, that there are two different arenas, that the one that is right for an individual debater is the one that is right for that individual debater, that both are valuable, and that it is the responsibility of coaches to foster sensibilities that support an open attitude on their teams.

Again, I come back to the coaches. That’s where the responsibility begins.

But still, although debaters may not have reached their legal majority, then again, they are not totally blameless. Tribalistic practices among any group isolate the others who are not in the group, with all the hoo-ha that goes along with otherization, but in forensics there isn’t a lot to be gained from it in the long run. We are all competitors, but more importantly, we’re all citizens of a relatively small and rather exciting little group, and the others are not those who debate differently from us, but those who are not in a position to benefit from debate at all. Those debaters who see themselves as leaders, who actually believe in what they are arguing, need to take their own meaningful positions on this. You need to ask yourself, if you’re a hot circuit debater, how do you treat your random draws? With respect and friendship? Or with disdain and, after they are gone, scorn? In a universe of very few people interested in debate, do you really have the myopia to treat some of those people poorly? These are your spiritual compatriots. Sure, they might be your “inferior” in a particular debate sense, but I don’t think that sportsmanship somehow doesn’t apply to debate, or that the purpose of sportsmanship doesn’t apply. On the other side of the coin, debaters who do not aspire to the circuit should nonetheless welcome learning what they can from circuit styles and content. I personally look with suspicion on a lot of the popular styles that come and go over time, and I expect anyone with half a brain will do likewise, but some of the stuff always proves out to be useful in the dialectic move toward truth. For instance, maybe knowing a little theory might enlarge the brain even if you never use it yourself in a round. Say what you will about Nietzsche, you’ve got to admit that he’s important to anyone studying modern thought. And so forth and so on. Different and/or new doesn’t make it bad, it just makes it different and/or new. Study it for a while. Learn about it. If you’re going to reject it, reject it based on knowledge of what it is, not ignorance. But probably you’re going to get something out of it. Which is not a bad thing at all.

I don’t expect everybody at a tournament to start singing Kumbaya and holding hands and whatnot, but a level of respect is required from everyone. If you don’t have it, question your motivations and your actions. Did you sign up for debate only because you wanted to debate, and not because you wanted to hang out with like souls, to exist in a multicultural realm where intelligence is valued (a rarity in some high school milieus) and where increasing intelligence is the name of the game? As I say, it begins with the coaches, but students are culpable here too, if they are not treating everyone with respect. That the activity is about treating people with respect, about fairness and justice, about otherization, about ethical behavior, only underlines the need for all its citizens to act in accordance with the principles to which we are giving lip service. If it’s only lip service, well then, it’s just a lot of lip. And at the point where debate is just a lot of b.s., it has virtually no value whatsoever, and you can count me out.

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