Luckily for me there was a reason to come to school my junior year;
debate. Our drama teacher restarted the long dead debate team that
year and I was elated, you know, because I am a massive nerd? I had
had always felt like my super powers were bull crapping and
smartassery which are the twin daggers of ultimate victory for a
debater. Clearly, based on that last metaphor, clear and concise
imagery is not as vital to semi-amateur obfuscator. We received
terribly outdated advice from our debate coach who was having us
manufacture copious quantities of "evidence" which
consisted of quotes from philosophers and other great thinkers. After
we found a likely piece of drivel we were to write it on a 3x5 card
with a header that we could read and retrieve easily in the heart of
trivial verbal combat. I cannot remember any specific quotes but I do
remember writing the heading, 'good and evil as emotive terms' -
that's top shelf stuff, maybe private reserve. We didn't practice
much in class and that was probably a good thing because our well indentioned coach was massively misguided as far as the current state
of Lincoln Douglas debate was concerned. We went to our first
tournament woefully under-prepared and no one but us had boxes of
evidence, they just had prepared statements for the Pro and the
against positions which had obviously been written by an adult in the
know. I got creamed in my first round against a congested kid with
adenoidal issues. I had had to speak first and I had never seen a
debate round so I was just winging it, pathetically. After I plowed
through my card driven speech which was evidently as painful for the
judge as it was for me my opponent got up to ask me some questions
with a condescending smirk in his voice. The first question he had
was weather I had even ever done this before, I said no. He scored
easy jerk points asking me questions about the "case(that is
what they called their devil brief)" I so obviously didn't have.
I wanted to smash him good but under the unified high school rules of
debate smashing is strictly forbidden, had been for years. We muddled
through his rebuttals and disemboweling of my argument from my
accused evidence cards. We wrapped it up and he left confident in his
victory. The judge, a girl a year out of high school, asked me to
stay after for a second. She told me I lost and I told her I figured
that much out but she said I was a much better speaker and debater
then that kid and she hated his attitude so she gave me a perfect
score on speaker points, a secondary tie breaking rating that follows
the win loss decision. She took the next thirty minutes giving me a
crash course in L-D debate and and more importantly explained the
jargon and gave me a case to use for the rest of the tournament. She
was a good girl to have hand me my first loss and she gave me her
number and told me to call her if I needed more help. I didn't.
