I get no kick from sham pain

I have always found it curious that much of what I don’t like about debate is totally ass backwards. The article on performative college debate referenced on ROTC points out that this style of competition arose from the need for undersized teams to level the playing field against the big combines. Usually these funky new teams were less well-endowed financially than the old, established teams. The running of kritiks in high school policy has a comparable history: small teams unable to compete with big teams’ research-cutting abilities resorted to different tactics that would eliminate the size differential. But here’s the rub: in LD, there is no reliance on quantity of evidence. With some minor demurral, you’d have to admit that in LD a small team has exactly the same access to physical resources as a big team. Add to this the curious twist that it tends to be the $ircuit teams that more often gravitate to theory and critical debate than regional teams. That is, the teams with more money—which not only translates into more ability to travel but also a greater likelihood of assistant coaches, who in my mind are often akin to the Miltonian minor demons—are using the tactics devised by the teams with less money, substituting parlor tricks for resolutional analysis despite the fact that they have equal access to resolutional material insofar as there is no quantitative advantage to having “more” material in LD, as compared to having more research in the tubs in Policy. It’s a bizarre situation. Thank goodness it’s better to have a handful of clever upperclassmen win rounds by whatever means available than to ground a dozen novices in elementary ideas concerning morality and ethics and the various issues of the resolutions! At least I know where my priorities ought to lie.

Last night we did a demo round, and while I like doing these, I’m a little wary of the vulture mentality that seems to strike afterwards, where everyone in the room wants to have at the poor demonstrators with their own unique criticisms. “Hey, Menick, I didn’t get to tell them yet which particular idiots I think they are in my own special fashion.” While the upperclassmen bring experience and good advice, the underclassmen—I hate to say it—don’t know their patoots from their bezoots, otherwise they’d already all be qualified for States, TOC and early admission to at least 3 Ivy League universities. So I do try to limit critiques to the captains and the novice coordinators, who have earned the right to give their opinions. Oh, yeah, and me. Although mostly the others do the job well enough before me, and I just bat cleanup.

Anyhow, all this thinking about morality arising from the next topic is pointing me to adding a good unit on the subject to the Hillary Duff. Ditto the previous topics’ pointers at justice, another gap in the Duff. One must evolve with the times, although how I left these out in the first place is beyond me. At some point I should also port over the Foucault from Caveman, but as I was saying to OC over the weekend, what I need to do is decide what book to recommend to the Sailors as their Foucault intro (fooko intrault?). Ah, the joys of reading Frenchmen for pleasure! Absent Flaubert, Gide, Zola and, I’ll admit it, Robbe-Grillet, I hardly ever do that. I mean I read them, but I get no pleasure from it. Oh, well…