In which we talk about good debate citizens

We are in a hiatus for Presidents’ Day. It kicks off with the Harvard Tournament (don’t get me started on that one) and then everyone goes to Goa for winter break. Next up on my agenda is the Westchester Classic in a couple of weeks, about which much might be said when the time comes. 

Meanwhile, there is a concept we casually refer to as being a good debate citizen. There is, to begin with, a debate community. This community is a complicated organism that comprises everything from simple two-school weekday afternoon scrimmages to the NSDA and NCFL mega-tournaments to National $ircuit tournaments where rich schools travel across the country to purchase their TOC bids. In the middle of the debate community is the bread-and-butter of local tournaments, often within a local or state organization. Whichever, big or small, it is all one community, with many different speech and debate activities, and many different approaches to those speech and debate activities. And everyone in that community is a debate citizen, one way or another.

So what is a good debate citizen? In a word, it is someone who prioritizes forensics overall as compared to their own particular interests. It is someone who believes that debate (and here I’m including speech but I don’t want to keep saying speech-and-debate or the more complete but non-mellifluous forensics) is intrinsically of value, and aims whatever they do toward the end of supporting that value. It is not about their own team winning competitions, although of course they support their students and applaud their wins and commiserate over their losses. It is not about their personal idea of what debate ought to be, where they are right and everyone else is wrong. It is not about ignoring your region in aid of bigger goals, being willing to travel to Cooch Behar to get a bid while ignoring the local high school event just around the corner. Being a good debate citizen, in a nutshell, is doing whatever it takes to get students—all students—as many rounds as possible. It is seeing debate in the broadest terms of education. It is seeing competition as a necessary evil, a means to an end, that end being education. 

Why do I bring all this up? No specific reason, no recent slight or malfeasance, but I think it always bears mentioning, because it underscores everything we do. In a world today where knowledge is under attack, where history is being rewritten in the most bluntly Orwellian fashion, where free speech is a commodity limited by what that speech is saying and who is doing the speaking, where freedom is limited to what other people say you should be or do, the activities of the debate community are in the foreground of true learning, of true free speech, of true personal freedom. Being a good debate citizen, putting the activity above your own interests in that activity, is what keeps this whole thing going. And keeping this thing going means putting out into the world educated human beings who have the personal ammunition to withstand the worst a blighted national culture throws at them. Will truth win in the end? I don’t know. But at least good debate citizens are doing their best to arm their soldiers the battle for it.  

In which we have our heads in a book

Have Jim Butcher’s Dresden novels made it to the top of the Times bestseller list before? His latest immediately hit the top—more power to him—and I was reminded of an old saw in my Day Job, where we reckoned the best way to get on the Times bestseller list was to have been on the Times bestseller list in the past. There were a lot of reasons for this, and I won’t go through them now, but we thought this because some writers who had once been strong were now putting out something less than their best work, and nevertheless they were selling like the proverbial hotcakes. Authors’ names became brands, and people mulishly stuck to brandnames. I don’t think this is true of Butcher, though, that he’s past his prime. I like the Dresden books, but it’s some of his other work that I am really big on. The Codex Alera books were big hits with all of the DJ staff, and we passed these audiobooks around to practically everyone in the building. The Cinder Spires series is equally as good. Wikipedia says this new steampunk-ish series going to comprise nine books. I’m up-to-date, and a lot of books short of a nonet. C’mon, Jim!

In other publishing news, there have been a bunch of articles lately about the death of rack-size paperbacks. In a nutshell, as a business they’ve been replaced by e-books. I mean, I certainly do 90% of my reading on my Kindle, so I’m not surprised at this. Still, one can remember certain moments in one’s life that revolved around the little paperbacks. My parents used to dump me in the book section of Macy’s when I was a kid just past the Hardy Boys, and I could hang out there for hours. Later, in my adolescence, when one arrived at Grand Central Terminal for one reason or another there was a vast paperback collection at the bookseller downstairs, and walking through it one learned what literature was all about just by seeing the books there in real life. In the 70s there was a used paperback bookstore down the street from us on Columbus Avenue, which is now all mall franchise stores without the mall. It was from these piles of paperbacks in the mystery section that I randomly picked up a copy of Rex Stout’s The Doorbell Rang, and have since lost track of how many times I’ve visited the brownstone on 35th Street. At a church flea market in the 80s I bought half a dozen little Oz paperbacks when my daughter was 7 or so, having no idea that there was more than one of them, and subsequently spent countless hours thereafter reading them aloud, and every single other Baum and R.P. Thompson book we could get our hands on. 

So I wonder how the serendipity of book discovery will proceed in the future. The good news is that the number of independent booksellers in the US is growing, so the act of roaming the aisles and just absorbing the titles and the genres and the names of the authors will continue, but maybe a cheap portable book will no longer cap this particular journey. But books will survive. Reading is an elitist activity that helps define civilization. It opens us up to minds other than our own, going back as long as the written word has existed. It will keep on keeping on, one way or the other. 

In which we listen so that you don't have to

Music (audit division): There’s been a lot of movement in the audit queue that I haven’t been talking about. Time to catch up.

“Odyssey and Oracle” by the Zombies. There are those who place this among the rock album GOATs, and I have listened to it many times trying to figure out why. It’s not that I disliked it, but I didn’t find it particularly special. On this go-round, on the other hand, I really started to enjoy it. I may not be ready to put it into my own GOAT collection, but I put it right back into heavy rotation for another listen. All of which demonstrates how sometimes you have to give music a chance in order to appreciate it. (The album was released in 1968, so we're talking a lot of chances here. But over the years one kept seeing it come up in the conversation.) There has been enough music in my life over the years for me to realize that some music takes time and to act accordingly. Yes, more often than not you can dismiss something immediately for one reason or another (see below), but you need to discriminate. Is it an artist you’ve always otherwise liked? Was it really highly recommended by someone whose taste is similar to yours? Is it just different from what you’re used to? Be careful. A second listen never hurt anyone. 

Next up, the Mavericks, their self-titled album. I liked them back when they first arrived on the scene, and I had a few of their albums on cassette back when one had albums on cassette. It is a cliché that rock and roll died back in the 70s and was reborn as country, and the Mavericks are proof positive of this. They show a lot of influences, and when they’re country, well, they're good enough country if you're in the mood, but when they rock, they absolutely do rock. An easy group to like. 

The group Peppermint Trolley Company brought us the original theme song to “The Brady Bunch.” Having never watched the TV show (I was in college when it came on the tube; it was aimed at the generation a decade younger than mine), I wasn’t inclined to appreciate this album from yet-another psychedelic 60s band. After listening to them, I am still not inclined to appreciate them. Not bad, just run-of-the-mill stuff in the shadow of the real thing. That I never heard of them at the time (as I say, I was in college, and like everyone I knew, an avid music fan) is pretty telling. I have this vision of some middle-aged record executive puffing on his cigar and saying "That's what the kids like nowadays so let's throw it against the wall and see if it sticks." This one didn't.

The Rising Sons is early work—1971—by, most notably, Ry Cooder and Taj Mahal. Definitely of historical value and perfectly listenable. 

Foxy Shazam: See above where I say that often you can dismiss something immediately. For me, this group fits that bill perfectly. Contemporary heavy metal, I guess. I didn’t listen to enough of it to pin it down. The Skip to the Next Song button was invented for a reason. Skip. Skip. Skip. Skip...

Moving right along. Next up was Shelby Lynne, the “Restless” album. Again with the country music slash rock music. I am a BIG fan of Lynne, especially her Dusty Springfield album, but most everything else too. “Restless” is among her best. (Not that you care, but Lynne is the former sister-in-law of the artist Steve Earle, also a favorite of mine. Steve Earle has been married 6 or 7 times, depending on how you count a rematch.) (Another curiosity: Lynne won a Best New Artist 1999 Grammy for her sixth album.)

The next thing that popped up in the queue was a single song from a group called Sand. I have no idea why. In a word, not my cup of chamomile. 

Finally, the group Grapefruit. I wanted to dismiss this quickly but I decided that, as noted above, sometimes you have to give music another chance. The stuff was catchy enough, but didn’t resonate. Given its Apple Publishing roots, I figure I’ll try again with their compilation album “Yesterday’s Sunshine.” It can’t hurt.

In which YOU get to decide

 

Hey, kids! Now you can play our game at home, starting with that old favorite: WHAT WOULD YOU DO?

Early in the day I had eyes on a student judge who I could tell was, to be gentle about it, ill-prepared for her inaugural adventures at the back of the room. Sure enough, she didn’t acknowledge her ballot for round one—the most important thing I tell people they have to do when I conduct an opening judge meeting, which some people actually hear and pay attention to—but I had just seen her in the tab room and then heading up toward the debate room, so I knew things were at least going to happen, if not exactly according to Hoyle. Since it was a tight tournament, she got another ballot for round 2. Lo and B, she didn’t acknowledge that ballot either. And this time she didn’t show up. Before long one of the teams she should have been judging, and their coach, came into tab to set things aright. I got the message and told the team to go back up to the room and wait for me to find a solution. Then I went out into the hall where I know there was an available judge lounging about, and sent him up to the room to take over. And then, back in tab I slotted him in and removed the prodigal missing judge. 

Keep in mind that some time had passed. Up went the substitute judge to the third floor, and shortly thereafter down came the substitute judge from the third floor. Not only had the prodigal missing first judge finally showed up, despite no longer being listed as the judge, but the other team—not the ones who were in tab with me and their coach—was asserting that the first team needed to forfeit because they had showed up late for the round. (One never did find out where the other team was through all of this before now.) The prodigal judge, happy, I guess, to be relieved of duty, accepted this and sent the teams on their way. What, the substitute judge asked, happens now? We were more than a half hour away from start time, and both teams had dispersed into the ether, thinking that the round was a forfeit. 

WHAT WOULD YOU DO?

Well, here’s what I did. First, I swallowed my inclination to find and throttle the delinquent judge—I simply removed her from the pool for the rest of the day—and then subsequently I swallowed my inclination to find and throttle the other team that had unacceptably asserted that a forfeit was demanded. For the record, we tell the judges that only tab can declare a forfeit. But a team declaring one? Jeesh. For one reason or another by now it was too late to simply hold the round, even if I could find the missing teams in the labyrinth that is Bronx Science. 

There was no question that the first team was not late for the round, because they were in tab telling me about their missing judge, who I then replaced, so you might say they had a really good excuse for their so-called tardiness, if you wish to call it that. But on the other hand, say what you will, the other team was right in that the first team had been AWOL way after forfeit time. 

What I did was a double bye. If the coach of the other team had been at the tournament, we would have had a congenial little discussion (I don’t mean that sarcastically) to enlighten his students about rules and protocols, as they had veered parlously close to unacceptable arrogance in the situation. But, sadly, that team was in the hands of mere chaperones. If I had not been literally alone in the tab room at the time, maybe something else would have been decided. But it just happened that I was all on my lonesome for that particular piece of time, and perhaps running 8 divisions by oneself with all sorts of judge balancing does stifle one’s creativity a bit. 

What would you have done?

In which we stop to smell the non-roses

Saw a preview of the New York Botanical Garden's 2026 Orchid Show last night. I would say it's the best one ever, designed by someone called Mister Flower Fantastic. (There's an article about him in today's NY Times.) I can't recommend it highly enough. It goes away some time in April. If you can, catch it at night. Great lighting in the dark.

Books: Embassytown by China Mieville. Finished this one yesterday. Mieville is concerned here with the meaning of language, which might hold some interest for the odd structuralist debater out there. Along the way, his world-creating is way above average. Another one I'd definitely recommend. 

Debate: The Bronx Winter Local registration closed yesterday. Today it's all the setting up behind the scenes. One of the key things to do is to isolate the high school graduate judges in the JV/Novice pools and pull them in to judge the Varsity kids. In judging, variety is the spice of life. And just because a coach has only a couple of novices in the game tomorrow doesn't mean they shouldn't handle a varsity round or two. It's all in the pooling. When folks register their judges they're asked to identify them as either students or HS grads. With that info in hand, I can then do a bit of scraping around. I mean, there's more to tabbing a tournament than hitting the Make It So button and watching everyone immediately rush to their rounds. (Come to think of it, hardly anyone ever does immediately rush to their rounds. There are some judges especially who like to play hard to get. Which is why at tournaments I wear both good walking shoes and a grim expression. It's the perfect combination.)

In which we cast our ballot and it stays cast

Debate: It ain't over till it's over, as the saying goes. In debate, on the other hand, once it's over, it's over.

The case in point: Saturday, after an elimination round ended with the judges voting 2-1, some time passed, and one of the judges on the winning side came in to change her vote. She had decided that she had voted the wrong way. At this point, anyone involved with the teams in the debate left the room, and the rest of us were tasked with deciding what to do. 

It was not a hard decision. As one person put it, in the olden paper-ballot days, once a ballot crossed the threshold, it was etched in stone. Submitting an online ballot comprises a similar petrifaction. This has long been the rule of thumb, and short of accidentally hitting the wrong button and coming running into tab immediately thereafter, waving your offending button-hitting hand in front of you and mea culpa-ing up and down the room including from the ceiling, which I have seen happen, once it's over the line, it's over. In the case in question, the original ballot stood. There was absolutely no disagreement among us. 

And here's the thing that happened, as we learned later, which underlines the correctness of this decision. In the round, after the ballots were cast, the one voter on the losing side, the squirrel as we say, gave their reasons first. Which means that after the round was over, an experienced judge laid out why they thought the losing side should have won. The person who came into tab was an inexperienced judge, and she had heard not only the round, but all these good reasons for voting the other way. After some thought after leaving the debate room, she decided that she really should have voted the other way, and came to us to try to effect that change. 

The issue was not the rightness or wrongness of the ballot. The tabroom is not responsible for insuring that every decision is correct. If for nothing else, the reason we have three-person panels in elimination rounds is that there is often reasonable disagreement on how a round went, and subjective analysis is, well, subjective. (There are also rounds where there is no question of who won, so there are both plenty of 3-0 decisions, as well as plenty of 2-1 decisions.) There may be no such thing as a "correct" ballot. But after a round, a judge sits there and decides, by whatever criteria, how to vote. They then cast their vote on that criteria. The ballots are collected, and that is the end of it. Anything could happen after a vote is cast: a judge goes online to research something in the round, a student who was observing talks to the judge and tells them why they're wrong (my students were always disagreeing with me), or as in the situation we're discussing, another judge's analysis of the arguments in the round changes their mind. 

If this were archery, whoever hits the target closest to the center would win. But this is not archery. Some of it is objective, some of it is subjective. Because of the subjective parts, we declare a moment beyond which a decision is set and irreversible. 

Case closed. 

(By the way, if we could recast our ballots after an election, wouldn't Harris now be President?)

TV: First of all, a little Eugene Levy goes a long way. On his show on Apple, "The Reluctant Traveler," he indeed goes a long way. I tired of it long before I ran out of episodes. Alternative travelers, if such a show type appeals to you, are Conan O'Brien ("Conan Must Go") and Richard Ayoade ("Travel Man"). And for the cosiest of cosy travelers, "Great Canal Journeys" with Timothy West and Prunella Scales. Three great series.

Digging back into the 90s archives (thank you, Amazon) there's "The Thin Blue Line" starring Rowan Atkinson. Need I say more? Sadly only two seasons, but I'll take what I can get.

And finally, we just finished watching "Dept. Q" on Netflix. It's one of those shows where you immediately are taken by the detecting team or, I guess, you're not. I was. And now we eagerly await season 2 in God knows how many years from now. 

In which we go bananeras

Debate: Normally I let the resolutions wash over me, since I don’t have to work with anyone on them anymore. And normally I don’t find them particularly problematic. However, with March-April LD, I’m glad I’m not in it.

Resolved: The United States military ought to abide by the principle of non-intervention.

There is certainly an accepted principle of non-interventionism, which goes into all sorts of areas like sovereignty and R2P—Responsibility to Protect—and the like. The Enlightenment philosopher in me likes all that. I even like arguing isolationism…maybe. What I wonder about is how this resolution will actually play out in the front of the room. If one simply thinks only or intervention and realpolitik in 2026 in the USA, one might prefer to do Model UN instead for these two months. And if one were thinking historically, one might look up military intervention on Wikipedia to be met with the opening warning “Not to be confused with United States military deployments or United States involvement in regime changes," followed by a list of about seventeen and a half gazillion examples of military intervention going back to the Mayflower. My personal favorite is the so-called Banana Wars, which has its own ring to it, but which sounds even better in Spanish, Guerras bananeras. I could go around saying Guerras bananeras until the cows come home. 

Obviously the point of this resolution was its theoretical side. But in today’s LD, and in today’s America, good luck with that. I mean, I would go so far as to worry that although non-intervention is a recognized term of art that implies the word foreign, in these ICE-y times… Fortunately there isn’t much debate at this point in the year, at least around here, aside from the odd qualifier. Oh, yeah, and also our State Finals. Note to LDers at NY States: there’s a lot of lay judges sitting in the back of the room. If you don’t debate for them, your Sunday in the Bronx is going to be very, very peaceful, without the interruption of elimination rounds to disturb your solace. 

Listening (audit division): I am not big on cover versions of songs that do little more than imitate the original. If I want the original, I'll go listen to it. A cover version needs to be in some way a reimagining. Which isn't always easy.

Reimagining certain artists is especially difficult. In the age of artists who compose and perform the songs and are knee-deep in their arranging and production, the end result, as much as is humanly possible, is exactly what they wanted. This is very much true of the Beatles, who were, with their guru George Martin, pioneers in the recording studio (see "The Beatles Anthology" on Disney+). Recorded Beatles music was the apotheosis of Beatle music. What more could be said? So good covers of Beatles music is rare. After Joe Cocker, name two. So it becomes interesting to hear versions of Beatle songs that are reinterpretations or reimaginings or deconstructions or whatever that successfully break from the original recordings stuck in one's brain, and that challenge the canon. Different rhythms, different harmonies, radically different voicings—yes, please. I'll listen to that, out of curiosity if nothing else, but normally I would expect to be disappointed. Which brings us to the subject at hand, the album "This Bird Has Flown," from Reimagine Music in 2005. (Reimagine Music was the brainchild of a man named Jim Sampas. Jack Kerouac was his uncle. I'm sure we'll be dealing more with Sampas in the future.) this album is all of the US version of "Rubber Soul" by different artists in different ways, and I really like it. One or two of the songs I'm not a fan of, but most of it is not only  enjoyable but revelatory. The takes on the music are different from the originals, thus bringing out highly different aspects of the originals that you might not have thought of previously. At the same time, you hear how amazingly good these songs are simply as songs to begin with. I mean, yeah, sure, "Rubber Soul" is on my GOAT list, but at some point one may only be listening and not hearing. Now on this album I'm hearing these songs again fresh, both in the new interpretations and the recollection of the originals that inform them. As it turns out, most of the artists on this album are new to me, and I've captured them on the queue for the future, so we'll deal with them separately when the time comes. In the meanwhile, you can do worse than checking this particular album out now.

By the way, there's apparently at least a 50th or 60th anniversary tribute album as well. Much more to look forward to!

(I was going to write something very long and tedious about this one, but after much thought, I decided against it. It was either too obvious, or too complicated. And hell, it's long and tedious enough as it is!)