Solvency, Harms, Inherency, Topicality

Extemporaneous, or "Extemp", is where participants don't know the subject prior to the debate's start. Participants generally come into the debate with the last few years' issues of Newsweek and Time to use as evidence, in order to cover the broadest range of topics possible. I never actually watched one of these, as it wasn't offered at most meets. But from the nature of the evidence I can only assume it's primarily concerned with new advances in the science of fertility, fascinating revelations about the life of Jesus, and misconceptions about menopause.

Lincoln Douglas, or LD, involves competitors writing essays and then reading them to each other. It's also pretty stupid. No factual evidence can be used, but if you want to hear a lot of half-formed ontological arguments from sixteen year old aspiring poets, peppered liberally with the same five quotes from Mark Twain, you might get a kick out of it.

Finally, there's Policy debate. This is the classic affirmative/negative type. It's got the most participants, and it's what I did. But it, too, bears no relation to the presidential format.

There's only one topic for the year -- it's always something godawful. I remember one was "Resolve: The United States should permanently extend Most Favored Nation Status to China". Seriously, c'mon. Who gives a fuck?

Well, the affirmative team presents a plan explaining how the resolution would be implemented and all the benefits that would result -- cheaper plastic shit at Wal-Mart, in this case, although usually expressed in slightly more Utopian terms. Then the negative team explains how no, actually this would make plastic lawn furniture slightly more expensive. And, by the way, also cause global thermonuclear war. That much you could count on: regardless of whether you were debating seat belts, immigration or food additives, the negative team would always, always argue that the affirmative case would result in western civilization being consumed by a ball of radioactive fire. This was great from the affirmative standpoint, because it meant you just had to have some evidence arguing that really, getting vaporized wouldn't be nearly as bad as the consequences of failing to normalize trade relations with China. And so on.

See, in policy, there are no points for style -- it's all about the evidence, which consists of clippings from editorials and news articles. Each piece of evidence goes on a sheet of paper -- a "card" -- that makes a specific, and usually misleading, point by interspersing silly little declarations between out-of-context clips of evidence. If you were debating immigration, for example, you might say "FENCES ARE AN INHERENTLY FLAWED TECHNOLOGY", then read a clip about poor quality control in the chain-link industry, a paragraph about Palestinians throwing rocks, and maybe a brief mention of how that one in Berlin only lasted a few measly decades.

Getting the most evidence in is important, as time is strictly limited for each speech. So you have to read your cards as quickly as you possibly can. The resulting spectacle can be pretty hilarious -- the fiercest debater I ever faced was a skinny little guy who read at pace so fast that every time he stopped to breathe he would emit a very loud squeaking noise. My partner and I couldn't stop laughing. When we finally did, we quickly realized we were about to get beaten very, very badly, and instead elected to run a critique -- a kind of meta-argument, in this case making the case that awarding him a win simply because he was much better than us would be bad on some obviously bullshit utilitarian grounds. It didn't work, but by virtue of unintentionally slighting his partner by not including her in our critique, we did manage to make her cry.

Egos are pretty fragile at debate tournaments. Most folks wheel around trolley carts carrying big plastic tubs -- the bigger the better. Inside these prosthetic debate cocks are mountains of carefully assembled cards. The outside is invariably covered in infuriatingly smug Republican bumper stickers.

My partner and I were too lazy to spend our weekends assembling evidence, so we just bought packets of evidence from other sources and did the best we could -- which in the even-nerdier version of Magic: the Gathering that is policy debate, was not very well. Lucky for us, we managed to stay in the JV division much longer than we should have, and had a reasonably good time beating up on freshmen and the rare veteran team whose apathy approached our own.

Very little of this will be occurring tonight in Miami, which makes all the talk of Kerry's debate team experience and Bush's "unorthodox style" a bit silly. There won't any plastic tubs, or even much evidence. And, sorry to say, probably not any crying. Two things will be very familiar, though: specious arguments, and the looming destruction of western civilization.