2001-04-20 - 3:50 p.m.

Happy Memories 1

Life has been going tolerably smoothly this week. Such times make life easier and writing diary entries harder. Rather than pretend that the story of my day contains aught to interest other sentient life-forms, I shall reminisce about days gone by.

I've mentioned in prior entries that I was a member of my high school's debate team and enjoyed it rather a lot. Some aspects of the activity I could have done without, of course. My research skills suck, in that I have a short attention span and poor book-on-shelf karma. As a former opponent told me a couple years ago when I ran into him, my partner Mike basically carried the team through all the grunt work.

Inside a debate round, though, my genius would shine through. I came up with an argument against Detroit Catholic Central's eletronic tethering case that defeated all three of their varsity teams in the same day. The second two times they tried to prepare for it, but to no avail. I was, as I so love to say, too good for them.

I also came up with two of the deadliest counterplans ever contrived. I should probably explain what that means before I go on. In this sort of debate, one team (called the "affirmative") argues that we should enact a plan, which in turn must be an example of a broader resolution. The negative demonstrates that the plan is a bad idea. In my senior year, the resolution was "Resolved: That the federal government should adopt a policy to decrease prison overcrowding." One defensive technique, considered somewhat risky by more conservative debaters, is to argue that we shouldn't adopt the plan presented by the affirmative, we should do something *else*. Various rules specify what the something else can be- for example, it must not be topical, that is, it must *not* be an example of the resolution. In this case, the counterplan must not decrease prison overcrowding, or it must not be done by the federal government.

Anyway, on to the show. One popular plan was to revoke the driver's licenses of people convicted of drunk driving, rather than sentencing them to prison. The affirmative team argues that sending them to prison increased overcrowding, and that license revocation did a better job of stopping drunk driving anyway.

I got up and argued that we should give them electical shocks and use the freed-up prison cells to stop early release. Amazingly, I actually had a good body of evidence suggesting that corporal punishment worked. My research karma isn't *always* bad.

Anyway, we lost that round, not least because one of the judges was a recoving alcoholic and didn't think our idea was funny in the least. The look on the other team's faces when the heard the argument for the first time *was* funny, and make no mistake. Ironically, that team later beat my team in the final round of the state championship. I bet we would have won if we'd had the cojones to use the corporal punishment bit.

The second brilliant counterplan came into play against a plan to ban the death penalty. The affirmative argued that the death penalty increased our social acceptance of violence, leading to increased crime and prison overcrowding. They had evidence that for each execution they stopped, two lives would be saved by decreases in crime down the road.

I got up for cross-examination and got them to sum their argument the way I wanted it. We all agreed that regarding the death penalty, the best policy was the one that saved the most lives.

My partner ran out some stock arguments suggesting that overcrowded prisons actually had less violence. Then he played the kicker: A card from Jack Kevorkian, before he became famous, claiming that if we harvested the organs of executed criminals for transplants, each criminal could save eight lives. We suggested, as a counterplan, increasing executions to keep the prisons full and solve the organ shortage problem. We showed a clear savings of six lives per execution, net. Plus sundry prison violence avoided.

The best part was that our judge for the round was a notorious hater of counterplans. He wanted the negative team to run a straightforward, conservative, "your plan sucks because we don't need it and it has serious drawbacks" sort of argument. But in this round, with this counterplan, he couldn't help it. His entire ballot, normally filled with indididual criticism of each debater and each speed, read as follows.

"Unbelievable. I vote on the counterplan. Negative."

The other team never really had a chance. They spent the entire round looking stunned.

I think that to some degree, I've spent my life since then trying to recreate that sense of unchallenged dominance. Obviously I failed dismally.

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