After stuffing myself full of theme parkiness last week,
I headed over on the weekend to debate parkiness (whatever that is).
I’ve talked about the NDCA often. I ran for the board at
CP’s suggestion, but I admit to not accomplishing much as my three-year term
comes to an end. Not that the organization needs a lot of change, but there is no question
that we are light on the LD and PF sides. If I had some great solution I’d
propose it, but I really don’t, aside from a couple of small points, like
running the Feb PF rez rather than April, and even that is controversial. The
board runs a very tight ship procedure-wise, probably a necessity when we’re
all over the map. But email discussions can only go so far. But more to the
point, I simply don’t know where the catalyst is for the necessary change. I
don’t think anyone does.
In any case, they do run a great tournament, and I’ve always
enjoyed it, both when I had entrants and now when I don’t. I judged a bunch of
rounds, and most of them were very entertaining, while all of them were fun
insofar as I got to sit in the back of the room again for the first time in a
while. I used to live in the back of the room when John Stuart Mill was not
only popular in cases, but if there was any disagreement about what he was
saying you could call him up and ask him. PF allows me to do it again (i.e., judge, not ring Mill up on the Ameche), with no
fear of not understanding what’s going on. LD, on the other hand, becomes
progressively more out of my ken. I listened to a critique of a break round and
had no idea what was being talked about. The descriptive language is one I do
not speak, which presumably indicates they are talking about things I do not know. Which is fine by me. One of the reasons I opted out of LD is exactly
that, the increased specialization of the business. I am a low-level debate-for-everyone-regardless-of-skill
kind of person, as compared to a high-level debate-maximization-for-the-top-debaters
kind of person. And PF seems to serve my desires for that mass-market approach.
I can’t say much favorably about the topic, though. Most of
my rounds were clash free. It was obvious who was winning, but it wasn’t easy
to lay out an RFD. “You beat them with a stick” isn’t all that great a
criticism, even if it’s true. “You lost because this trumps that on the flow”
is much better. But on the one hand, the two ideas, infrastructure and
means-based welfare, aren’t particularly in opposition in the real world, and
on the other hand, this being a new topic, people were running some stuff that
they probably wouldn’t have been running next week, given the opportunity. It
is ever thus with a new topic, and in PF, where you can’t swing a cat without
getting a new topic, life is nasty, brutish and short. So it goes. (Give Hobbes a call if you don't believe me. Or Vonnegut.)
One nice thing about NDCA, as Chetan posted on FB, is that
so many top coaches are in the back of the room. The people who are there are
there because they’re serious, and they’re more than willing to adjudicate
rounds. I don’t think there’s a better way to learn about debate than watching
it, and in the case of these judges, directing and educating after watching it.
That’s a good thing.
Next year the tournament will be back at Weber, in Ogden,
Utah, which was a spectacular venue with superb hospitality. And it was a nice
little town with all the great western landscape one loves about Utah, short of
going into a national park. It’s about a half hour north of SLC. You should
think about going. You will not have a bad time. I promise you.
___
/
No comments:
Post a Comment