Speech and Debate: Clackamas Tournament

Today was the Clackamas Speech/Debate Tournament, and the first tournament which I have ever been to. Colin and I debated in the Junior division of Public Debate, and although there were many points that I was rather displeased with, we came out 1-1-(1) (win-loss-bye). We are now officially "speechies" that have tasted the joys of getting to school at 6:00 AM on a Saturday and the delays of tournament schedules.

It took about 30 minutes to drive to Clackamas High School--the newest nicest school I have ever been to. The school was apparently built just this year, and they have so much money to spend that they can afford abundant wood paneling and large expanses of totally useless empty open space in their building. It's disgusting, absolutely disgusting... It's those people out in the burbs... Anyway, for our event there were an odd number of debate teams, so a team during each round received a "bye" meaning that they wouldn't debate. Although the bye counts as an automatic win, the team doesn't get any speaker points. We had the unlucky displeasure of getting a bye on our first round, thus completely screwing up any chance that we ever had of placing. So we sat in on some rounds of dual and ADS, and we listened to the most vulgar and repulsive piece that I have ever listened to. I shall not elaborate, but it involved killing people and a chaotic assortment of character changes that confused me. We watched Beth's ADS, Beth and Jaime's dual, and Clara and Joe's dual, all (Σ∞ "very") good (my statements are lauded by their awards). Finally, after long delays, our first round of debate ever in a tournament began.

Colin and I represented the proposition in a debate with the topic "Resolved: The US should promote democracy abroad" which we defined as "The United States government should (taken at face value) encourage the adoption of democratic forms of government (republicanism included) in countries that do not have this form of government." We defined the value as "human liberties". Therefore if we proved that the US promoting democratic forms of representation in undemocratic nations was pursuant to the goal of having "human liberties", then we would win the debate. By all standards it was an excellent debate. I was delivered the opening and rebuttal speeches and I really felt that my structure (especially of my rebuttal) could have been much better, but considering that it was our first debate, I was not displeased. Colin gave one of his best speeches as te second propositional speaker that I've ever heard from him. And we were well matched with the opposition too. I thought that this was a hard topic for them to argue, and they did a worthy and highly respectable job. Now let me digress... into the judge. The judge was, in a word, "awful". He had absolutely no idea about the format of Public Debate and little experience in speech or debate tournaments. It is my opinion that he failed to understand the imperative relevance of the value to the debate. At the end of the tournament when we received the scoring sheets that informed us that we lost the debate, this became even more clear. His sole reason for favoring the opposition was because of a reletively moot point that the brought up about why specifically it should be the US promoting democracy abroad. That wasn't really the point of the debate at all (in my understanding of it) in the context of our definition of the topic and the value. My personal feeling on the debate before I actually knew the judges vote was that it could have very easily gone either way. Quite frankly, losing bothers me very little compared to the judge's seemingly nonexistant experience and knowledge of public debate. I would have been quite content to lose with a decent judge. My one consolation is that the team we debated was the team that won 1st for junior debate in tournament, and we at least cam close to beating them (Colin thinks we should have, but I'm not as convinced as him).

After that debate I ate some food, talked some more, drank some water, and then watched Jaime's Interp piece, which was very, very good (awards laud my claims). Then, after a lot of time talking to Leeor Schweitzer (the greatest person of today's events, for which I shall describe later) the information for round 3 (the final round; this tournament did not have finals because it was phenomenally lame) was posted. I hesitate to call what followed a "debate" because it really didn't even come close to what the word embodies, and our slaughtering of our opponents was particularly unsatisfying.

We debated in this school's drama room. There was a play that evening. This was the last round of the tournament. It was getting late: almost the evening. Plays occur in the evening. Need I say more? There were phones ringing and people poking their heads through multiple doors all throughout the "debate". It was an inhumane atmosphere in which to debate. But then the topics came, and they were the most inhumane of all. The topics were: 1) The US needs an enemy, 2) The women's rights movement has gone too far, and 3) Sports are the opiate of men. We were the opposition, thus the proposition struck first, eliminating topic 2. Then we struck topic 3 because it afforded them more flexibility of definition. Topic 1 is a good topic... an interesting topic if considered literally. They skewed it to a degree that was about 10 times worse than anything Colin and I had expected. They defined "Resolved: the US needs an enemy" as "The Bush administration requires a military opponent to distract the public from the fact that George W. Bush is incompetant". Despite the fact that this definition is far to liberal in its bending of the actual topic, they did a worse than imaginable job fulfilling the "burden of proof" of the proposition. They had two (2) points. Contention 1: the Bush administration is using war as a means to raise Bush's popular opinion, thus distracting the public from his incompetance; Contention 2: Bush is incompetant because he is a poor public speaker: subpoint A: (merely consisting of this phrase, which I quote) "'strategery' need I say any more". This warrents the phrase "crap beyond the pale". Aside from the fact that their arguments had ZERO (0) facts and were essentially 100% unsupported opinion (they did bring up the point that wartime presidents do have high approval ratings, but they failed to identify why this is), their speeches were beyond bad. The first propositional speech (all speeches have 30 second grace periods) is supposed to be 7 minutes, the second 8, and the rebuttal 5. Their 1st speech was 1:20, their second was certainly no more than 3 or 4, and their rebuttal was probably under 2. One of the propositional speakers kept firing off questions that had little relevance to the debate. My two favorites were "Which apology would you personally be more inclined to accept: one from FDR or Andrew Jackson?" and "What do you personally, you yourself personally think of George W. Bush's speaking?" In the first, I'm guessing that he was trying to create some kind of connection between public trust and presidents during wartime. This is incredibly stupid because anyone with a fraction of sanity would trust FDR over Jackson because Jackson was obsessed with power, executed more vetoes than any other American president, and killed a man in a duel. Gee, I wonder who I'd trust more? The second question is completely and utterly irrelevant because in a debate, you're not arguing your opinion, you're arguing for or against the topic. I personally don't like George W. Bush's speaking and I don't think it's that great, but I will commend him for making enormous strides in his speaking abilities since he entered the presidency. Their arguments were so full of contradictions and irrelevancies that I could go on for a long time. But I won't. I'll just say: we won. I'm also a little annoyed that they squandered a perfectly good round on this worthless tripe. I would have rather lost another good debate than been given this one.

And that was it. The awards were given, and as a school we did okay. I think people were expecting better because of last year's fifth in state performance. We didn't place as a team, but we had a good number of people win awards. I'm tired so I'm going to stop now, but all I can say is: "I'm psyched for next Saturday!" And I shall tell the saga of Leeor at a better time.