And now Joanna stands to deliver the first affirmative speech. For a few seconds it sounds more or less like oratory, but soon she accelerates to nearly unintelligible speed, pitch and volume rising; she gasps like a swimmer surfacing, or maybe drowning; she is attempting to “spread” their opponents, as her opponents will attempt to spread them in turn—that is, to make more arguments, marshal more evidence than the other team can respond to within the allotted time, the rule among serious debaters being that a “dropped argument,” no matter its quality, its content, is conceded. (Competitive debaters spend hours doing speed drills—holding a pen in the teeth while reading, which forces the tongue to work harder, the mouth to over-enunciate; they practice reading evidence backward so as to uncouple the physical act of vocalization from the effort to comprehend, which slows one down.) The judges hunch over their legal pads, producing a flow sheet of the round along with the competitors, recording argument and counterargument in shorthand, making little or no eye contact with the speakers. During the brief intervals wherein their pens are idle, they twirl them around their thumbs, a signature habit of debaters.
To an anthropologist or ghost wandering the halls of Russell High School, interscholastic debate would appear less competitive speech than glossolalic ritual. See the cystic acned first negative speaker from Shawnee Mission—his dress more casual, typical of the rich kids from Kansas City—reading evidence at 340 words per minute to support his claim that the affirmative plan will overburden family courts, setting off a catastrophic chain of events. He lets each page fall to the floor when he’s finished, along with drops of sweat. He inhales sharply, shouts out another tagline—“Overburdened courts lead to civil collapse”—then reads more evidence, getting briefly entangled in a stutter that, at such volume and such speed, makes it sound as though he’s having a seizure or a stroke. As time runs out, he sums up his arguments, although few of the uninitiated could understand him: Gregor evidence points to back-backlogged courts as result of increased child support enforcement judicial overload leads to civil collapse collapse leads to nuclear conflict China or North Korea nuclear strike in ensuing power vacuum out-out-outweighs whatever benefits affirmative plan offers and and and and Stevenson proves affirmative plan no solvency regardless because resistance from from internal agencies blocks imple-implementation must vote no on disadvantage impact alone but but even if you you consider plan as plan no solvency 1AC key source for Georgia courts not not applicable to fed program only state level so there is no way to vote but negative.
The spread was controversial; if it happened in front of lay judges, there was shock, complaints. More than one highly ranked team had misjudged its judges and been eliminated in early rounds for speaking drivel. Old-timer coaches longed for the days when debate was debate. The most common criticism of the spread was that it detached policy debate from the real world, that nobody used language the way that these debaters did, save perhaps for auctioneers. But even the adolescents knew this wasn’t true, that corporate persons deployed a version of the spread all the time: for they heard the spoken warnings at the end of the increasingly common television commercials for prescription drugs, when risk information was disclosed at a speed designed to make it difficult to comprehend; they heard the list of rules and caveats read rapid-fire at the end of promotions on the radio; they were at least vaguely familiar with the “fine print” one received from financial institutions and health-insurance companies; the last thing one was supposed to do with those thousands of words was comprehend them. These types of disclosure were designed to conceal; they exposed you to information that, should you challenge the institution in question, would be treated like a “dropped argument” in a fast round of debate—you have already conceded the validity of the point by failing to address it when it was presented. It’s no excuse that you didn’t have the time. Even before the twenty-four-hour news cycle, Twitter storms, algorithmic trading, spreadsheets, the DDoS attack, Americans were getting “spread” in their daily lives; meanwhile, their politicians went on speaking slowly, slowly about values utterly disconnected from their policies.
Joanna was too fast for the Shawnee Mission kids; Adam spent most of the semifinal round pointing out which of her arguments his opponents had dropped. In the finals, when they were back on the negative side, they hit rivals from Lawrence High. When they’d lost to Rohan and Vinay in the past, it had been Adam’s fault; they were as well prepared as Joanna. But that day, for whatever reason, his mind was particularly swift.
And that day at Russell High as he enumerated in accelerating succession the various unpredictable ways implementation of his opponents’ plan would lead to nuclear holocaust (almost every plan, no matter how minor, would lead to nuclear holocaust), he passed, as he often passed, a mysterious threshold. He began to feel less like he was delivering a speech and more like a speech was delivering him, that the rhythm and intonation of his presentation were beginning to dictate its content, that he no longer had to organize his arguments so much as let them flow through him. Suddenly the physical tension he carried was all focused energy, a transformation that made the event slightly erotic. If the language coursing through him was about the supposedly catastrophic effects of ending the government’s Stingray surveillance program or the affirmative speaker’s failure to prove solvency, he was nevertheless more in the realm of poetry than of prose, his speech stretched by speed and intensity until he felt its referential meaning dissolve into pure form. In a public school closed to the public, in a suit that felt like a costume, while pretending to argue about policy, he was seized, however briefly, by an experience of prosody.
Then he was back in the cafeteria for the award ceremony, eating Peanut M&M’s a freshman had fetched him from the machine, half listening as Coach Spears tried to convince him that professional wrestling was real: I’ve seen the blood; I’ve been close to the cage. Adam nodded as he chewed. Everyone fell quiet when the host coaches arrived to announce the final results and hand out medals.
But there was a commotion around the cafeteria doors. They swung open and several reporters hurried in; a cameraman quickly set up a bright light on a tripod, shouldered his camera. Then, to the growing surprise of the assembled debaters, men who were unmistakably bodyguards entered the room, looked around, coiled tubes dangling from earpieces. He glanced at Coach Mulroney, who displayed a knowing smile. Finally, Senator Bob Dole appeared, the seventy-three-year-old Russell native who was less than a month away from being crushed by Bill Clinton, a landslide victory for the Democrat that would confirm that cultural conservatism was giving, had all but given, way to the reign of more liberal baby boomers. It would confirm that history had ended.
A few gasps of recognition, some applause. Dole, as ever, held a pen in his largely paralyzed right arm and waved his awkward wave with the left. He walked, flanked by aides, to the front of the cafeteria and shook the left hand of the host coach, who said, beaming, that the next president of the United States would be handing out the medals to the winners of this year’s Russell High School Invitational. Before the medalists were recognized, Senator Dole wanted to say a few words.
“I’m not much of a debater myself,” he said, maybe expecting laughter, which didn’t come, “but I place great value on the skills that you are all developing here today.” Even for a politician, Dole spoke haltingly. (From his chair in the audience, Adam involuntarily pictured Dole holding the pen between his teeth, reading backward; he pictured Dole trying and failing to do the debater’s twirl with the cold, incapable hand. Then he pictured his grandfather’s paralyzed left arm in Rolling Hills.) “You are the future leaders of America and I am very glad that you are all here improving your ability to communicate, to persuade. That’s so important. In our democracy. Crucial. And learning so much about government and policy. Wonderful. I’m honored to get to be here and to let you know you’re all winners in my book for the hard work you’re doing. It will carry you far. Will be seeing some of you on Capitol Hill.”