Oyez!

There’s a former debater from the Northeast who has, if I’m not mistaken, not one but two parents who are judges. Federal judges, that is. Judges who sit on the bench adjudicating the cases that provide the conundrums that we like to explore in debate resolutions. The problems of Kelo, or Battered Women’s Syndrome, or justifiable homicide, or culpability. People immersed in argumentation, where the outcome of these arguments may be life or death, or may be precedent for legal action for years to come. These judges, of the federal persuasion, often have judged people of the LDish persuasion. That is, these parents have quite regularly sat in the back of the room with a flow pad. Which raises a very simple question. How would you rank these judges? I mean, if you could give them an A and put them in every bubble round, would you do it? Or would you relegate them to the 0-4s and the 4-0s, where they couldn’t do any, shall we say, damage?

Interesting question.

Needless to say, I want to live in a world where a really good LDers are the debaters who want to convince these judges that their side is the correct one. That their side is true. That their case is the better one. I would propose this as a paradigm to every single LDer on the planet today: these are the people you want in the back of the room in every single round, otherwise you’re not a very good debater. If your cases are written to convince only a handful of college students of their correctness, and if you present those cases in such a fashion that only that handful will even be able to understand a word you’re saying, you have chosen a path bounded by incredible limitations, of value only insofar as the literal walking of that path has some (if any) inherent value. It is a path to nowhere. It is all in the journey, and it is a sterile journey without a destination. On the other hand, if your goal as a debater is to develop the skills necessary to win over a federal judge, those skills will serve you beyond the path, long after the journey has ended.

So, if you are a debater, ask yourself, am I spending all this time and energy to convince some yabbos who have nothing better to do in college than hang around with high school kids on the weekend, and their ilk, or am I spending all this time and energy to convince some federal judge who gives up the occasional weekend to support their son’s team, and their ilk? Given that the time and energy spent will lead to different results, and, for you, the development of your skills in different ways, even if you prefer the former, you will have to admit that you can see why so many educators are hoping that you would prefer the latter. As a group, we are hoping that someday all of our ex-debaters will be federal judges, as compared to all of our debaters having nothing better to do in college than hang out with high school kids. While I love the idea of my alums helping out once in a while, I would prefer that mostly they do college things while they’re in college. And when they do become federal judges, and I am arrested for a federal crime, I hope that they will be malfeasant enough not to recuse themselves from my case, and set me free the minute they see me.

By the way, as a general rule, the cases that will win over federal judges will also win over college yabbos. No doubt I’ll eventually explain why, but just trust me on it for now.

I mention all of this because last night, during the Babel portion of our meeting agenda, we spent a lot of time stripping down all the jargon and bull-ogna from the cases the plebes had heard at Bump. The inspiration for this was the claim, “I’ll be running recourse.” [Feel me shudder.] I think, perhaps foolishly, that our team discussions ought to be in English, conducted so that everyone in the room can understand them. I feel the same way about debate cases. On the down side, I got the impression last night that this blog has been outed by the plebes, and I can no longer freely discuss them with an expectation of their obliviousness. So it goes. You know you’ve turned the corner when one of them comes up to you after the meeting and complains that you’ve spelled her name wrong when you signed her up for the NFL. Piffle, says I. And it’s easier for you to change your name in the real world than it is for me to change it with NFL, so henceforth, you’ve got two Fs, so deal with it!

Feel me shudder.