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Dear Mr. Menick:
I hope this reaches you in time. We are announcing this year, for the first time ever, a special program for debate coaches, and I thought you might be interested in attending. As you know, most coaches today know little or nothing about the content of LD debate rounds, and our mission is to bring the Legionnaires of Doom into the present. It just doesn’t seem right that debaters are arguing the merits of postmodernist French philosophers like Rognons Saucisse and Merde-Dans-Baguette and Larson E. Whipsnade while the coaches remain mired in Plato, Marx and Harlequin Romance novels. The best philosophy obviously comes from the philosophers who have been dead for the least amount of time, or are French, or at least French-Canadian. The moment has come for the coaches to see the light before it hits them in the head. That is why we created “Coachanetics: LD for the 24 ½ Century!” This course is guaranteed to turn any muddleheaded adult with ten years or more experience of shoveling Mill and Rousseau and Locke and Kant at their teams into a pomo spewing machine able to reject all resolutions on face, BECAUSE THEY CAN!
Here’s just some of the highlights of the two-week program:
- Intensive daily lecture program on French and German critical theory books no one has ever read, including their own authors, offered in the original language
- Speed-talk training from college-level debaters who’ve had their teeth extracted to shave off even more precious moments from their delivery times
- Recognizing Greatness: A son et lumiere presentation where today’s top debaters are shown in high resolution photographs and sound bites so that, if you happen to judge any of them at some future date, you’ll recognize them well enough to pick them up even though you don’t understand a word they are saying
- Foucault continuity lab: Who are you to tell students what they should learn? In Coachanetics we apply the principles of Foucault to all learning, and show you how you can have your freshman determine the math curriculum, your sophomores decide what is or isn’t relevant in Global Studies, and even how juniors and seniors, because there are more of them than there is of you, know more about physics than you do, because you’re only one person, and a member of an elite power structure to boot, you evil bastid!
All of the members of the Coachanetics program are housed in our lovely Compostia House dorm overlooking the recycling plant, and we guarantee no more than four to a room except during peak attendance periods. Fees are reasonable, and scholarships are offered to coaches considered especially dimwitted. Since you are all presumably adults, no adult supervision is offered, unlike our student program, where our underage guests are under the exacting supervision of people who just graduated high school two weeks ago and can be trusted one thousand percent to handle all contingencies with a nod, a wink and a flip of a pop top. Full internet reports are posted online every three to four minutes so that your families can see your every move on a nearly real-time basis and know that you are where you said you’d be; we even promise to post only photographs in which you look at least moderately sober. Please note that high-stakes poker-playing for money will not be tolerated; tournament quality clay chips are available from the management for a small fee. Meals are served on occasion, and even more occasionally eaten; we don’t recommend them, but we have noticed that if people get hungry enough, they’ll eat anything.
So, Mr. Menick, please think about joining us this summer. The weather prediction out here is for fine sunny tsunamis with only a chance of siroccos, so it should be a nice break from your miserable existence in bleak old New York. I look forward to seeing you.
Your buddy,
Herman Melville
Camp Counselor
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