Cinerant

Forensics Finale

So I think I took my final Forensics trip this past weekend.  I flew to Chicago to meet the students for the National Catholic Forensics League Tournament.  

The tournament was very poorly run to the point of having to ship the Extempers off to the middle of nowhere Chicago.  They also made judges judge the same thing all day long on the first day of prelims, so I got on the bus with the Extempers, trudged over the river and through the ghetto to listen to students answer questions about “current events.”  

The rounds were horrible.  Not only because the students weren’t very good, but also because the questions were even worse.  The first round was about contemporary culture.  Literally, one girl was given the question, “To what extent, if any, should actors use their celebrity to advocate for a cause?”  We had taken a Senior who hadn’t qualified for Nationals with us and she decided to join me as my timekeeper for the morning.  As soon as the competitor read that question, our student turned and looked at me and tried not to break out into laughter.  I tried not to completely tell the competitor she was the stupidest thing in the world, but I don’t think I succeeded.  But in my defense, she did say that Brokeback Mountain was a controversial movie—lie—and that Jake Gyllenhaal and Heath Ledger took those parts because they were advocating for gay rights.  I had to set her straight and I didn’t have a lot of time to focus on being “nice” to do it.  Frankly, a comment as stupid as that doesn’t deserve “nice” behavior.  

Thankfully, I had the second round off, though the tab staff got upset with the judges in the judges’ lounge who started eating the food they brought in.  Apparently, even though it was in the judges’ lounge, it wasn’t for the judges.  Go figure!  But be sure and do so without any signage.  

Third round, the questions were about legal cases.  These weren’t as sucky.  Sure, they were outdated.  I mean, they asked a question about Rehnquist’s lasting legacy.  Um….hasn’t he been dead for a few months?  What’s the point of the event?  To cover anything that’s happened in the last year?  Who knows.  Anyway, the first student comes in, gives us his question about whether justice was done for Moussaui.  He then starts talking about Rehnquist in his intro.  I have to say, I was really intrigued.  I wanted to see how he was going to pull these two things together.  But in a second, it becomes clear that this kid is talking about a question other than what he’s given us.  So, I already mentally start ranking the kid last in the round.  Not that he was that bad, but they made a HUGE deal during the judges’ meeting that the students HAD to speak to the question they were given.  And if the kid couldn’t get his act together enough to get everything in order, why am I gonna help him?

Because the two other judges in the room are pansies!  That’s why.  The female judges starts looking around at me, wondering what in the world is going on.  I just ignore her, instead, focusing on the competitor.  She starts looking at the other judge.  He looks at her.  Their eyes meet.  They assume their destiny.  Then, they run to the kid, hold his hand, give him a pacifier to suck on, telling the little one that it will be okay.  Mommy and daddy will let him start all over.  Meanwhile, I’m sitting in the back, rolling my eyes—waiting for the whole thing to get over with.  So the child take the question back to the Extemp prep room, comes back, and starts all over!  And the other judges thought that was fair!  Clearly, somebody thinks that because most of these kids go to private school means they shouldn’t be introduced to the degree of hard knocks.  

Then, the last speaker comes in.  Starts talking about the military recruiting lawsuit, admits he doesn’t know enough to really do a speech on it, but he does know why military recruiting is down:  because the army doesn’t want to give anybody cool guns.  He then proceeds to talk for three minutes about guns—in great detail.  I’ll admit, I quickly tuned him out, but I did see the timekeeper’s eyes go big more than once because of the amount of detailed information he shared.  

Finally, I got to the final round of prelims and had to listen to questions about religion.  I’d dreaded this round all day.  I judged this religion round last year at Nationals and remember it being painful.  I wasn’t wrong.  Kids talked about condoms in Africa (by far the best speech), how Evangelicals agree with The DaVinci Code (um, what evangelicals are you talking about?), the Gospel of Judas (you don’t even want to see what I wrote on that ballot) and some other crap that I’ve tried to purge from my mind.  

Thankfully, I only had to judge one out-round:  Prose quarter-finals.  There were a couple of really bad pieces, one piece that I lodged a protest against in an effort to get it disqualified (sorry, but 700 Sundays is a DI, not prose), and then there was one amazing piece about being the “ugly friend.”  After the round, our students that went with me to observe all commented that it was very obvious I thought the ugly piece was the best since I was laughing the entire time.  Well, duh!  And it was far better than the most racist presentation of The Wiz in DI finals I could ever imagine.  If I were a black man, I would have stood up during the middle of that round, walked up to the front, taken that competitor over my knee, and spanked him for selling out our people like that.  But since I’m not black, I just sat in awe at the most spectacular and blatant presentation of stereotypes I’ve seen in years.  

Unfortunately, only one of our kids made it to out-rounds, but the rest of the students had a great time.  In fact one of them learned to “Build a bear.”  (That’s a whole different story for a different blog.)

posted by cinegod @ 7:29 AM