Bending reality in high policy debate

Policy debate is the only high school activity I can think of where every characteristic is completely insane.

It is also the only one where you have to wear business professional attire. Here is a bare minimum description of high school policy debate: two teams enter, one team leaves. JK both teams leave.

But first they spend 45 minutes to an hour arguing about a topic decided at the beginning of the year by a national committee.

This topic can be anything from the amount of funding we should give Americorps, to whether or not gay people should be in the military. One team argues for this “resolution” and the other argues against it, over the course of 4 8 minute rounds. At the end, the judge, either a mid twenties former debater consumed by their glory days, or someone’s well-meaning but overwhelmed mom ranks each debater from 1 to 4.

Whichever team gets the fewest points wins. Policy Debate is different even from other insane forms of high school debate. Policy debate is characterized by esoteric abbreviations, arguments that basically require a LSAT logic puzzle rubric to solve, and “flow,” eight pieces of paper (at least in 2007) where you track each argument. additionally, there are specific types of tactics that you run, templates for specific arguments. Usually these templates are referred to by weird spellings of normal words. Like kritquk. We’ll come back to that in a second.

Finally: everyone is trying to cram in as many arguments as possible in their eight minutes, they talk really fast.

not like “anxious person fast.”

like “auctioneer fast.” So that’s policy debate. I’ve been carrying around that knowledge uselessly for over a decade. Thank you for your time.

What I wanna talk about today is a very specific part of this very specific high school activity. They’re called Kritquiks.

There is no satisfactory explanation for why kritque is spelled with a K, or sometimes 2 Ks and an i, so… let’s keep moving. 

Here’s what a Kritiquk is:

Whatever your affirmative opponent ran a solution for the “resolution”, any sort of proposal to the problems posed by the yearly debate question — you could run a kritquk of their solution. you could argue their idea wouldn’t work because all of the rules in policy debate, all of them, are made up.

it’s almost like the “whose line is it anyway” Drew Carey monologue (“welcome to the show where points don’t matter and the rules are made up”) —

but in a room full of very anxious sweaty closeted adolescence, this idea is a lot more fraught.

This tactic is often used on the National circuit (frankly, knowing literally nothing about high school debate today, I would be shocked if zoomers don’t do critiques more than any other type of argument). but because it was advanced, a tactic that didn’t get used much on our less competitive Midwest circuit, a kritquk seemed like a parody.

It was a joke: a high school student storming into the middle of the room and throwing Foucault everywhere.

Literally, since we all had to bring boxes and boxes of paper research to make our arguments. —

so, in Kansas, every time I saw a kritiquk done it was exclusively a tactic of avoidance.

By critiquing the very existence of the other team, the whole of policy debate as a sport (yes, sport, I had a letterman jacket from debate, babyyyy) you could avoid the fact that your arguments weren’t very good. 

So that’swhat I assumed this tactic always was, how it was used. And as a smug high school student with an intense sense of competition and a limited tolerance for things I didn’t understand, I didn’t have a lot of respect for people who used the tactic.

I found out later that in Kansas City, something else was going on with the kritquk.

A debate team in segregated Kansas City from a school without adequate funding, deeply impacted by made up racist rules, used kritiques in a different way. 

In context it was not a way to obfuscate, but to illuminate. To show how everyone in the room was playing a game where the deck was stacked. 

It wasn’t a fatalistic, nilhistic tactic, a type of performance art where you’ve already judged everything as hopeless, a self fulfilling prophecy. ALL THE RULES ARE MADE UP BRO, SO WHAT’S THE POINT?

Instead, when this team ran kritiquks, it was a reminder that even when everything is broken, when we are trapped in systems of oppression, racism, capitalism, generational trauma, structural poverty, when it feels like nothing we do or could do will ever possibly make a difference:

We still have a choice. 

We can still bend reality, imagine a different future, even if that world is a high school classroom on a Saturday morning for less than 45 minutes.

A good kritiquk was not run to rail against the absurdity of the universe, or stop solutions from moving forward. It was instead a way to transform the room into a space where people could actually talk about the context, the things happening in the room that no one otherwise would acknowledge. Because, you know… policy debate is made up. And the exercise at hand, a problem that we, five people in a room with no influence over national policy, could not solve, was equally made up. So… what was true?

What DID we have the power to do?

Kritiquks asked the room to focus on that. To focus on what we can actually choose.

—

In retrospect, there may have been a reason at the white upwardly mobile high school that I went to, the myriad closeted anxious, uptight teens on our debate team were so derisive of kritquks.

Daniel Lavery said in an interview with Calvin Kalsulke about his essay collection “Something That May Shock and Disturb You,” that so much of fraudulence, of deception, particularly when the pretense isn’t convincing to anyone in the room, is a kind of desperation.

His main example is fictional con artist Lionel Hutz, a sweaty, fast talking guy in an ill fitting business suit, in a scene from The Simpsons with Apu, a character played with lots of racism for decades by white actor Hank Azaria. (this is the subject of Hari Kondabolu’s documentary The Problem With Apu, which Lavery also mentions).

Lavery says “there is the sort of sense of how uncomfortable this is, with men falling apart, pretending, whiteness falling apart, witness pretending, and ways that I think I really uncomfortable. So the scene sticks with me years on.”

Calvin is all smart, so he uses Danny’s mentioning of thus to transition to a different idea, the idea that when we give up pretense, we are finally free, which is why that desperation is maybe not entirely convincing, even if we can’t help but maintain it in ways that are deeply harmful for others, in the meantime.

What sticks out to me when I remember making fun of kritquks, in contrast to what I learned about the use of kritquks as a tactic is avoidance.

Kritquks were used to force a conversation about what actually mattered in the room: race, power, who brought what to the room, and how that actually impacted our ability to change things.

But ultimately, for all of us, sweaty badly fitting suit wearing white kids, ones who had deep dark secrets we were running from, ones we kept even from ourselves —

What a lazy tactic. What a horrible idea.

The rules do matter, they aren’t made up.

Because otherwise, then, we’d be free.