Will the stormy clouds chase / everyone from the place?

I have pulled my galoshes out of the closet for the Pups tomorrow. The weather sounds less than promising, at least for the ride up and much of Saturday. You’d think the Ivy League could do better in the meteorological department. I thought these guys were supposed to be smart, perfect SATs and all that. No doubt if I were to raise the issue they would simply blame noted alum G. W. Bush and move on. I know that’s what I would do. Anyhow, I’ve got the data on Little Elvis, although I didn’t sort out the judges yet; there’s all sorts of quibbling (“Can’t judge Round 47—appt with proctologist,” that sort of thing) that needs to be sorted out, but I figure I can do that tomorrow while registration is going on. If you’re going I would advise you to bring an umbrella.

So I was thinking about the evolution of LD, which isn’t really evolution at all, or at maybe more to the point, it’s not what you would call progress, even though it is change. Evolution isn’t progress either, of course; it too is just change. Some changes are good and lead to species prosperity, and some changes are not so good and lead to extinction. Witness the fact that most species that have existed on this planet are now extinct (well, I think it’s a fact, and it should be even if it isn’t). Teleology doesn’t seem to be the underlying operator, unless teleology includes planned obsolescence. Of course, some changes are progress neutral: they’re just changes. A lot of the changes to LD seem to be of the progress-neutral persuasion.

In the 90s we moved from the molding of arguments in what one might called Enlightenment-based philosophical constructs to a more research-based approach to resolutions. At first, one would have a card from John Locke, but then it was more likely a card from someone who was actually still alive discussing the actual topic from a real-world perspective. This was policy-influenced, of course; they had so many cards, and we had so few: Card Envy was the natural result. If policy was cool and LD wanted to be cool, it therefore should be more like policy. (I won’t comment on the logical fallacies inherent in that thinking.) More cards! More speed! A number of Sailors were notable leaders in this direction. Others bucked it. In any case, it lasted for a while, and even the topics started getting more specific and less philosophical. The market seemed to be following the consumers, an interesting idea when the consumers are students and the market is educators.

The next phase of change was the pomo-ization of content. Once again, what was cool in policy was to run kritiks and Foucault and things like that, and therefore if LD wanted to be cool… It is curious that this embracing of pomo and critical theory coincided with what seems to be the last serious gasp of this material at the university level. Academe needs to find new approaches to relatively static content: Moby-Dick doesn’t change from year to year, but the way academics teach and learn it change. (Yeah, I know, there may be a lot of assumptions in that last sentence that are intrinsically contrary to CT, but if you don’t like it, go read about Presidential politics on WTF. And I was really looking for the field report from East Westville North: “The South Will Rise Again Tuturial and Pancake Flip.”) CT and pomo came along and filled that what-do-we-do-next gap in the English departments, and the rest of us got our annual laugh reading the titles of the papers at the MLA. But all things, good or bad, come to an end, and for whatever reason (common sense?) this material isn’t so highly regarded anymore by mainstream (!) academe (which is the same as Nut City for many of us) and they’re on to newer (older) approaches, which means we won’t continue to be fed by college judges pushing this new-to-them stuff as the latest thing to the students they write cases for (or judge cases by). Another one bites the dust, in other words. And not a moment too soon.

But we are not left in the lurch. We do not have to argue the resolutions; we do not have to study the content and learn about the big issues that LD pretends to be about. Now we have “theory arguments.” Nowadays a case is constructed of, oh, 90% how to judge the round and what the burdens are and what the exceptions are. 90% of the case is devoted to explanations and more explanations, of the value and the criterion (if any, since sometimes such old-fashioned ideas are theoretic albatrosses). 90% of the way through a speech, a 1AC, you finally hear the words, “My first and only contention.” If you’re lucky, that is. Perish the thought that, in Sept-Oct, we argue the merits or lack thereof of utility or deontological beliefs. Perish the thought we consider whether we should ever in any situation allow ourselves to end the life of another human being, to question under what circumstances this may in fact not be the wrong thing to do, maybe to decide it is always wrong, or sometimes right. Perish the bloody thought that we care about right and wrong. What we need to care about is the burdens of the neg and why these burdens are unfair and therefore the neg should win not because neg argued a negative position on the content of the resolution but because neg argued that a negative position on the content, if neg had one, should win, while an affirmative position should not win. Not because of content, but because of structure. Of theory.

You know. It makes me want to read a couple of Derrida books, just to clear my head.