Revenge of the Nerds
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BY 11:30 A.M., Edgemont has eaten two teams for breakfast and is gearing up for round three, against a Brooklyn school set up by the ACORN community activist group. Compared to Edgemont, the ACORN team is casually dressed: a girl in a pink T-shirt, suede boots, and library specs; her male partner in jeans and a blue hoodie. As ACORN prepares its evidence, it's clear that the girl calls all the shots. This does not bode well. A solid working relationship, with both partners contributing equally, is essential for any team's success.
Eventually the judge arrives. ACORN is arguing affirmative—that is, in favor of the resolution. Each team is randomly assigned a position in the tournament's first round, and thereafter the teams alternate. The affirmative team has the advantage of deciding what aspect of the topic to focus on. Most teams specialize in two or three arguments—extraordinary rendition, for instance, or border searches—which they run over and over again, improving them each time.
Kreisberg, his visored crew cut looking just licked, settles down behind his laptop, ready to note the key points of ACORN's argument in a specially formatted Excel document. This is called "flowing," and is employed mainly to make sure none of the opposing team's arguments get "dropped," or go unanswered. Baum sits to his left, rummaging through one of the Rubbermaid bins. The girl in pink claims a bin from her own evidence cache and staggers with it to the front of the room, where she drops it on a desk serving as a podium.
Having seen a RealVideo clip of policy debate, I thought myself—erroneously—ready for the real thing. The "aff"—the argument of the affirmative team—hits like a hurricane. It goes on for eight minutes, at times approaching the pure whine of a vacuum cleaner, sheer tone stripped of fricatives. Experienced debaters can reach speeds of 300 words per minute. Occasionally, the girl's pace slows near the end of a passage, and a phrase emerges: "to prevent terrorism" or "crackdowns against political dissidents." Then she revs up again, and the words blur like the fins of a plane prop. It's like listening to a language poorly known, Spanish, say, in which an occasional familiar phrase slips through (trabajo, por supuesto), and you briefly feel on top of things, and then a moment later everything reverts to gibberish. Everyone else in the room appears unfazed: idly flipping through papers, scrolling through screens on their laptops, as if only a quarter of their attention is required.
Then, at the end of minute eight, the girl in pink subsides like a teakettle and returns to her seat. The fit has passed. From what I later gather, ACORN's 1AC (first affirmative constructive) argued that the president should issue an executive order saying that detaining people without charge at Guantanamo violates the Geneva Conventions. The team mustered three main arguments in support of this plan: (1) Torture is inhumane and devalues all human life; (2) torture diminishes the United States in the eyes of potential allies in the war on terror; (3) failure to check Bush's powers could lead to tyranny.
After a three-minute cross-x, in which Baum presses ACORN on why, if Bush did close Guantanamo, he wouldn't just open another detention facility elsewhere, Kreisberg rises to deliver the counterattack.
"It'll be one, two, three, four…four off," he says, meaning off-case—that is, arguments unrelated to material presented in the 1AC. "Then tyranny. Torture. And then solvency." This rough road map of the evidence he will read makes it easier for ACORN, and the judge, to flow his 1NC (first negative constructive).
Glancing at the other team, and then at the judge, Kreisberg sets his timer for eight minutes.
"Ready?"
And with that he storms into the 1NC, countering each of ACORN's arguments and adding a few of his own, including the objection that passing the plan would constitute such a violent reversal of Bush's existing policy that it would sap the president's political capital and prevent him from passing the nuclear deal with India. The nuclear deal, he argues, would cement relations with India and guarantee U.S. influence in south Asia, which, in turn, would help prevent nuclear war between India and Pakistan. Therefore, his reasoning goes, endorsing ACORN's plan basically opens the way for nuclear war. Sure, torture is bad, Kreisberg says, but nuclear war is worse.
By the end of the 1NC, the debate has divided, like the sorcerer's broom, into a half-dozen sub-debates. On torture, Edgemont argues that the ends justify the means. Regarding detainees, it premises that if the Geneva Conventions were applied to Guantanamo, Bush would move the prisoners elsewhere. As for fueling anti-Americanism, the trend easily predates Guantanamo, and its origins are diverse. As for tyranny, Edgemont argues that endorsing an executive order would only reinforce presidential powers.
ACORN is strongest on the torture debate, but in cross-x it's unable to dislodge Edgemont.
"If your mother was rendered somewhere," the girl in pink challenges Baum, "would you rather fight the war on terror or would you try to save her?"
"Well, if it was my mom…"
"If it was anyone in particular, not just your mom, anyone…"
"The thing is," Baum points out, "we're not, like, rendering people's moms."
By the end, ACORN has tacitly conceded that torture is morally permissible if it saves lives, and this proves the team's undoing. After awarding the win to Edgemont, the judge indulges in 10 minutes of pedagogy. To ACORN, he suggests that its 1AC could have benefited from more analysis, particularly the team's assumptions about torture: "Are there things that should always be wrong?" he asks. "Are there things that we should never, ever allow? Because you have those arguments built into the 1AC and you're not using them, like the slippery slope argument. Once we say we can torture one person, can we torture their family to get information? Can we torture the community? How about, to save 2 million people, can we kill 1 million?"
Untroubled by these weighty questions, Edgemont goes on to rack up one win after another, finishing with a 6-0 record. Later, in the raucous gymnasium, after the color guard has marched around itself a few times and "The Star-Spangled Banner" has been sung, Kreisberg and Baum are summoned from the bleachers to retrieve their trophy, a wooden plaque in the shape of New York state.
"This is nothing," Kreisberg says with a shrug as we make for the doors. The real challenge, he says, will come in a month, at the "TOC," or Tournament of Champions, where, over three days, the best teams in the country will slug it out.
Photo: Peter Yang
