Pre-Bump

Pre-Bump is pre-er than usual this year. We've already filled up policy, and LD is tracking over 100, and it's another week till the so-called deadline. Most of pre-Bump is spent worrying: is there enough housing/food/ballots/trophies/runners/handcuffs? It ought to be more relaxed every year because we've proven that we can do all of these things pretty effortlessly, but I challenge anyone to toss a shindig for over 400 people and not get a little wrapped up in it.

No one needs to identify the present wav file, since it identifies itself. I couldn't resist it.

So, if anyone cares (and I know YOU do, if no one else does), here's the thing about Nov-Dec. As it turns out, Aff has a fairly easy time proving that a gov has a moral obligation to folks outside its boundaries. What aff hardly ever does is show that it's an obligation to promo DI. The ob (which has nothing to do with democracy but with humanity) is simply to value other people, nothing more, and certainly nothing more specific. Sure, if there's a natural disaster, national boundaries are meaningless. The best example of that was the Iranian earthquakes, which killed something like 30,000 people. We were there in a blink, and the Iranis accepted our help with open arms. This was as it should be. A couple of weeks later, they were the axis of evil again. My point is, negs should look for a pretty solid explanation of what, exactly, the MO is and why it applies to DI. That's the core of the aff burden, and that's the hard part. On the other hand, negs have to be a little careful about sounding as if they're anti-democracy. The thing is, and from the start I've thought that this is the good neg position, the US promotion of DI comes with all the baggage of its being from the US. Is US democracy extricable from US capitalism? It's a question of cultural imperialism, which may be a hard concept either to understand or to sell. To wit: "culture" is a term that sums up all the values of a group. It is the combination of their religion and their politics and their food and their housing and their literature and their schools and their clothes—the full banana. It is the well from which individuals in the group draw the cores of their selves, i.e., their personalities, their identities. Individuals do not exist aside from their cultures; individuals are a part of slash a result of their cultures. If we value individuals, we must explicitly value this wellspring of their individuality as much as they do implicitly. What we have to do is look at what happens when two cultures "clash." We obviously see culture clash in today's world on a daily basis in all cultures: no one is immune from, say, the internet. Each culture does whatever it does to maintain itself in a positive way from what it might see as the negatives resulting from the clash. That's always been the way, since time began. Sometimes cultures take from other cultures, sometimes they don't. The Pennsylvania Amish don't drive Harleys; students at Penn State don't drive in horse-drawn carriages. The problem with the US culture vs other cultures is somewhat analogous to the situation of the US military vs other militaries: it's not a fair fight. Just as we can outshoot pretty much everybody with our guns, we can outculture them with our brand of capitalism. US culture works in other countries the way heroin works in the bloodstream, replacing the natural with the artificial. It can be seen as just as heinous. Why do you think it was such a big deal when Pepsi (not Coke) was the first to be sold in the Soviet Union? Or why is the Coke bottle among the universal icons on the planet? Does Mickey Mouse a mere cartoon, or is it a symbol of the cultural poison seeping through the veins of every potential consumer in every country on earth? God, even the French were worried about the effect of Euro-Disney (now called, by the way, Disneyland Paris). The phrase was, "a cultural Chernobyl." The US specifically promotes its democracy through its pervasive capitalism, and by so doing overwhelms the existing cultures. And the next thing you know, they're wearing Nike t-shirts in Afghanistan and the women are not wearing veils and the children don't listen to their parents anymore to honor the old ways... This is an extreme way of putting it, of course, but it does sort of sum it up.