Revenge of the Nerds
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ALL TEAMS MUST BE READY to advance or debunk both liberal and conservative arguments, but, Rove notwithstanding, policy debate leans to the left, largely because many coaches are college students. This can sometimes give rise to intellectual grotesquerie when high schoolers, in thrall to college kids obsessed with Foucault or Agamben, embrace outlandish post-structuralist arguments.
Edgemont reliably comes out against such arguments. Kreisberg is particularly good at staring them down. In Edgemont's final round at Albany, two kids from Monticello High tried to use Agamben to argue that giving rights to immigrants is bad. The argument led to the following exchange during cross-x:
EDGEMONT: Let's go through a few examples. The United States removes slavery. That gave rights to a specific group of people. Good or bad?
MONTICELLO: We'll just advocate that it's a bad advocacy in the round.
EDGEMONT: It was bad that the United States ended slavery?
MONTICELLO: Agamben's argument is that the people who were being enslaved were being exploited because they didn't have rights. Once they were given rights, the exploitation shifted to another group.
EDGEMONT: And then the United States passed the Civil Rights Act. I don't understand why…
MONTICELLO: Right, and then it keeps on shifting to other groups.
EDGEMONT: And the status quo is worse than slavery?
MONTICELLO: Agamben argues…
EDGEMONT: Are you honestly saying this right now?
The exchange highlights a key difference between debate and mainstream sports. Football is physically dangerous but intellectually safe. With debate, it's the reverse. The issues are real, and sometimes their subordination to the exigencies of the game are faintly objectionable. Employing the bare calculus of which argument is the most winnable, debaters will not hesitate to advance positions that they'd never suggest outside of a debate round. The very structure of debate encourages this dissociation—complete accountability within the round, but zero outside of it. "People have won debate rounds arguing that human extinction is good," Kreisberg says, "because humans are 'a cancer upon the earth.'"
But Jeremy Sklaroff, another member of the Edgemont team, says post-structuralist arguments—critiques of power, language, hegemony—have their place: "What about our structure of government or systems of power has created the crisis we're in right now, where we're trying to choose between civil liberties and security? Why is there a dichotomy between those two ideas? And since there is, what role do we play in creating that sort of system, and what can we do to get rid of it?"
But Baum and Kreisberg remain unrepentant literalists. "Agamben is just dumb," Kreisberg IM'd me. "I'm sorry, but ending slavery, although maybe politically convenient, was a good thing. Even Foucault admits there's no way out of power relations."
The tournament of champions is held every year, as it has been since 1972, at the University of Kentucky-Lexington, within days of the Kentucky Derby. Unlike the Derby, there are no spectators, since no one could possibly follow the action. The atmosphere can only be described as grim, like the last days of school, when exams have reduced the students to pale, muttering versions of their former selves. Clutches of debaters and coaches gather in the hushed halls to discuss strategy. The classrooms are littered with empty cans of Red Bull.
"I love this," Baum says. "You don't sleep. You don't eat. And your brain is basically being, like, raped the entire weekend."
Edgemont is staying at a local Ramada, where, in the dim, carpeted banquet hall, the final rounds will be held. Their room is a disaster area, the floor blanketed by highlighted evidence cards, bath towels, and luggage. Rubbermaid tubs—by now there are six of them—disgorge reams of research while four laptops busily suck down more data from the hotel's wireless connection and two printers struggle to keep up. "We've already gone through three print cartridges," Baum says happily. "Well, we've gone through—how many—like, two and a half for this printer, and that printer we've gone through two."
Though the tournament doesn't begin until tomorrow morning, Edgemont has been encamped since yesterday. "Our biggest rival this year is probably this school Greenhill, near Dallas," Baum says. "They knocked us out of the Glenbrooks, which is this tournament in Chicago. They knocked us out of Montgomery Bell Academy, in Tennessee, and they knocked us out at Harvard."
When morning comes Kreisberg and Baum discover they've been assigned to debate Greenhill in the first round, at 8 a.m. Greenhill is composed of Matt Andrews, a junior with pushed-up sleeves and hunched shoulders, and Stephen Polley, a tall, poky kid wearing a baseball hat that, in the course of the entire tournament, he never once removes. The debate takes place in a small lecture hall with four tiers of concentric desks. Besides the two teams, myself, and the judge, there is no one else in the room, which could easily accommodate 200.
Kreisberg stacks two tubs on the dais. Greenhill has just delivered its 1AC, a well-muscled attack on unwarranted searches of library records, and Kreisberg has eight minutes to parry. Tapping his cards straight on the top of the tub, he glances at the judge, sitting high in the fourth tier, and then at Greenhill, to his right. In the next room over, another debate has also begun, and the muffled rant beyond the blackboard sounds like a case of domestic abuse. Kreisberg checks his timer.
"Everybody good?"
The day is grueling, even for an observer. As on a campaign trail, stamina is essential. Each debate lasts about an hour and a half, and it becomes increasingly difficult to understand what the debaters are saying, much less process their arguments and formulate strategies in response. The halls are aswirl with rumors about who's running what, and who beat whom. By mid-afternoon, Edgemont has won one debate and lost two, including the first one, to Greenhill.
The team's final match of the day pits it against Christopher Columbus High, from Florida. If Edgemont loses this debate, it's out. In the hallway, Sklaroff offers Baum a few words of encouragement. "Zach, you're going to poop on this team," he says.
Alas, it is not to be. The judge finds against Edgemont, on the grounds that it has no answer for Columbus' "hollow hope" argument, which essentially says that designating the Supreme Court as an agent of change creates a hollow hope that change will in fact happen, when there is no guarantee that it actually will. ("After Brown v. Board of Ed," coach Glass later explains, "they were like, 'Okay, everything is solved.' But of course it wasn't—until the Civil Rights Act, which was legislative.")
Kreisberg suggests I give Baum some room. "He takes it pretty hard," he says. "This is his life." And Edgemont still has to debate—at least until elimination rounds begin on day three. By 8 p.m. on the third day, only two teams are left: Glenbrook-South, two-time TOC winner, and the dreaded Greenhill. At precisely midnight, before an audience of 60 vanquished debaters sitting scattered beneath the enormous chandeliers of the Ramada's banquet hall, Greenhill is declared the victor in a 3-0 decision.
The news comes as a blow to Edgemont. Still, Baum and Kreisberg remain upbeat. From my first interactions with them back in Albany, it was clear that they took the long view.
"I want to be elected to very high office," Baum told me.
"Zach's going to be the president," Kreisberg clarified, and, squinting, one could easily see Kreisberg as Baum's VP—although, with his easy charm, he might make a better press secretary.
In that case, I offered, Baum should keep his record clean.
"No more drinking," he agreed. "If some of those pictures get out I'm…"?
"Screwed," Kreisberg put in.
"Career is over before it started."
"Well," Kreisberg observed, "it didn't hurt Bush. Actually, it probably worked in his favor."
To hear audio of an Edgemont debate, visit motherjones.com/debate.
Photo: Peter Yang
