The Explorers Club
No. CCX - Major John André (1750-1780), man about town in Redcoat-occupied Philadelphia & New York, hanged as a spy for conspiring in Benedict Arnold's treason.







Master Debating
Continued from Tuesday…

Adelphi & the Oracle
As soon as Too Sly & I saw the draw for our semifinal round, we knew a certainty that we would not be advancing to the finals. It was not the competition at which we blanched, but of the the three-member judges' panel. We'd seen her before & we knew what to expect. She judged us at Claremont, & while I cannot recall precisely what ranks & scores she gave us, she did not look favorably upon our arguments. She was also the judging chairman in the fifth round at Adelphi, a round in which we though we'd earned the 1, or at worst the 2, but she gave us the 3, and atrocious speaker points to boot. I could say that she just doesn't like us, but that would be unfair as I have no idea what her personal feelings are. What I will say, though, is that she has very different ideas about what constitutes a laudable performance in a Worlds round. And I do not mean different ideas from Too Sly, The M.A.P., & I, but also very different ideas from the chairman of our semifinal round, a highly respected coach who had a team advance to the finals (from the other semifinal round, the one he didn't judge), who came up to us after the announcement & claimed that he'd fought for us in the adjudication, all for naught. Too Sly & I need to work harder to figure out exactly what she's looking for in a round, & we need to do those things the next time she's our judge, but we also need to ignore completely her critiques, because the things about our performance that she criticizes are exactly those things that other judges praise, the things that earned us one 1, three 2's, & no 4's in the six prelim. rounds at Adelphi. Of our two 3's, we solidly earned one by the one-two punch of being totally psyched out by the resolution & totally psyched out by being in a round against two of the teams that advanced to the finals, including the eventually tournament champions; we choked under the pressure of that round, there's nothing for it now but not to do so again in a similar circumstance. She, the judge in question, gave us the other 3, the only one of our scores—including our failure to advance out of the semifinal round—with which we flatly disagree.

She also gave me my lowest speaking score of the tournament; speaking scores aren't as important as ranks, but they act as the tiebreaker when it comes time to break, & individual speaker awards are handed out prior to the final round. My scores through the other five prelim' rounds were 76, 77, 77, 77, 76. She gave me a 74. She also gave a kid we saw in at least three of our rounds, from a partnership that also broke, with the eighth seed, losing in the other semifinal, a 78. And his team got the 1, while we got the 3. When speaker awards were awarded, he was in a two-man tie for tenth place. I finished twelfth, three points behind him, 457 to his 460. That 74 killed my chances, just as that 78 saved his. His highest score, my lowest score. Like I said, she's ranking & scoring by different criteria than the other judges. Neither Too Sly nor I got a 78 in the round in which we "one'd," though to his credit he did earn a 78 in one of our numerous 2 rounds. Too Sly finished in a three-way tie for seventh, with 461; good for him, we didn't walk away empty-handed. (Of course, we earned a framed certificate from our semifinal round; so, even without Too Sly's speaker plaque we wouldn't have walked away "empty-handed," but he truly deserved that plaque, soon to go into the trophy case The M.A.P. is setting up to show off our "hardware.")

The Horror of Hart House
The organizers of the Hart House Invitational proudly call their event the H.H.Iv., though of course in the modern fashion they render it without the necessary periods as "HHIV." I could not look at this without wondering what exactly the extra H in "H. H.I.V." stood for. "Hyper H.I.V."?

That bit of careless blundering aside, there is some question as to which part of the Horror of Hart House was most offensive: the not-quite-naked-but-hardly-subtle bias against Americans or the piss-poor organization. My apologies, that's not quite fair. The vast, vast majority of the Horror was dreadfully disorganized, but a few portions were superbly planned & executed. The rounds themselves were a shambles. The organizers had booked rooms that were entirely unsuitable to holding a Worlds-style debate, especially the rooms within Hart House itself; this was especially irksome as the organizing body was the Hart House Debating Club. Was it really too much to ask for the Hart House Debating Club to be familiar with the premises of Hart House? The rooms outside the architecturally charming Hart House were universally quite sufficient, but for the trifling detail that they were located halfway across the vast University of Toronto campus. Worlds works like so: all the competitors gather in a single room, some manner of auditorium be preferable, for topic announcement. After the round's resolution has been read aloud several times for everyone to jot down, a fifteen-minute countdown begins. Once that period has elapsed, the Prime Minister must make his proposal in support of the resolution, "in a speech not to exceed seven minutes." Partnerships disperse to prepare away from the prying ears of all their rival partnerships. Those fifteen minutes of preparation are rather more difficult when you must schlep across the U. of T. campus for ten minutes to find your room. Why did we return to Hart House after even round when the majority of debaters would just have to take the long walk again at the beginning of the next round? Why wasn't topic announcement over in that faraway building, where most of the competition took place?

The wait between rounds was interminable. Over the course of Friday & Saturday, five rounds were held. For comparison, eight rounds were held in an equivalent span of time at Claremont, & Claremont was organized by Californian hippies; last weekend at Adelphi, we did five rounds in a single day. There was no reason for the Horror's elongated schedule, especially as it left us spending an inordinate amount of time just sitting in the Debates Room, the quasi-auditorium that hosted topic announcement. In his poem "If—," Rudyard Kipling counsels, "If you can wait and not be tired by waiting…." I strove mightily, but fighting the fatigue imposed by boredom left me vulnerable to creeping bitterness over the injustice being visited upon Too Sly & me by the Canadian judges. I could fight boredom or bitterness, but not both; so, by the end of the third round I had entirely ceased caring about the outcome of our debates. I continued to strive mightily, but only out of self-respect. I had resigned myself to the inevitability of low scores, regardless of how well or how poorly I debated. My fatalistic attitude was shared by Too Sly, normally the soul of cockeyed optimism & boundless positivity. His discouragement shook me far more than did mine own.

The resolutions, also, were awful. The rooms were insufficient or ludicrously distant; the wait between rounds was so atrociously long that the organizers felt it necessary to take attendance before each topic announcement, just in case, I suppose, someone had given up in frustration & gone back to their hotel; and the resolutions were laughable. But what of the superb organization cited above? The tournament was indefensible rubbish, but the "extracurricular" social activities were planned to the last detail. They didn't know the layout of any of the rooms in Hart House, rooms right around the corner from the Debates Room, I must add, but the first announcement after welcome on Friday was which campus bar would be playing host to the official unofficial H.H.Iv. bacchanalia that evening. Saturday night featured a rubber chicken dinner in the ornate Great Hall of Hart House. All were invited to "dress to the nines;" I went in a T-shirt & blue jeans. Spite! Some of you may be thinking that the night's drinking should be the most important part of any debate tournament, right? Let me suggest that such an attitude would have served you well during rush at your frat. A garbage tournament with well-coordinated nightly drinking is much like having an automobile with neither an engine nor seats, but a bitchin' sound system.

There is, even after all this, yet one more thing to detest about not just the Horror of Hart House, but the horror of Hart House. On the exterior of the building, hanging over the main entrance, is a large neon sign of a heart. The elevators inside are etched with harts, a delightful play on the name of Hart Massey, after whom Hart House is named, but the exterior sports not a hart, but an insipid heart. Education & the cultivation of intelligence must lie rather far from the University of Toronto's core mission.

As long as I live, I hope never again to suffer the insult that is inherent in crossing into the wretched, despicable Canadas.

The Rebel Black Dot Song of Thanksgiving Day
Susan Egan, "The Turkey and the Stuffing" from Winter Tracks (T.L.A.M.)

Commentary: If our laws permitted such unions, I'd marry Susan Egan's voice tomorrow.