Thunder Rods and Aliens: Beginning Preparation for the Space Topic

MAX HANTEL - Georgetown/Rutgers

As the season wraps up, it is time to start turning our attention to next year's topic: SPACE, THE FINAL FRONTIER. This topic presents an area of policy and critical literature only treated in passing (and often irreverently) in any given debate year--everyone's read a few space militarization cards or some crazy article about China's outer-space assassins. This post is about preparing for the space topic in general terms, that is, how one should prepare for any topic. It goes doubly for the space topic, however, because while we might have had some popular knowledge about Afghanistan and Iraq going into last year, very few people have an intimate knowledge of United States space policy. I propose three tips in the following to guide you.


I. Stop Carding, Start Reading


Between now and debate camp, or between now and the debate year starts, you certainly need to be doing all the usual card work--make sure your impact defense files are in order, cut promising affirmative directions etc. But for that work to be good and useful as you delve into a new topic, you absolutely have to engage in deep topic reading. That means reading scholarly articles, full books (!), and immersing yourself in cutting-edge, topic-relevant blogs. A lot of this reading will not seem to have an immediate impact in terms of evidence output, but it will be absolutely invaluable once the year starts in terms of guiding further research (more on this in point III).

So for the space topic, before you start reading about thunder rods (http://www.nuclearfiles.org/menu/key-issues/space-weapons/issues/space_weapons_earth_wars.htm) and aliens, get into the nitty gritty of the birth of US space exploration and its relationship to other programs, like those of the Soviet Union and China. At the bottom of this section I've included some helpful links to begin the deep reading process so that by the time camp starts you're eating and breathing space exploration beyond the mesosphere. I might add, for the super nerds out there, it could be worth getting into some physics literature as well--the history of space exploration is a struggle between humans and the laws of physics.

I know from personal experience how important deep reading is. My senior year at Georgetown University, our entire affirmative approach was guided by the initial decision to read about the birth of the nuclear arsenal in relation to Hiroshima and Nagasaki. So even if some of that reading did not manifest in "cards," the value of knowing the ins and outs of nuclear history came into play every single round and strategy session.


The next two points are not tips on their own, exactly, but hopefully will prove to you why this approach is best.


http://phg.sagepub.com/content/31/5/592.abstract

http://www.rand.org/topics/outer-space.html

http://carnegie.org/fileadmin/Media/Publications/PDF/spaceUS.pdf

http://www.amazon.com/Heavens-Earth-Political-History-Space/dp/1597404284

http://www.amazon.com/Astropolitik-Classical-Geopolitics-Strategy-History/dp/0714681970/ref=pd_sim_b_4


II. Don't try to fit outer-space into a box


Do you hate capitalism? Duh! Do you love agenda-based politics disads? Of course! Just because you have certain pet arguments that you consider the most fun, or your strength, does not mean those have to be the arguments you read every year. The first corollary to my deep reading advice is that the topic literature will reveal the best arguments to you--you won't impose them on the topic. It's a bad idea to go into the topic thinking, "I've been really into this Emmanuel Levinas guy…so I'll just read him on the topic no matter what." If, on the other hand, you stumble across a whole bunch of stuff about Levinas, physics and outer-space (http://www.kalpakjian.com/Grandy.html), you might have the makings of an argument (another aside for the super nerds--Levinas criticized Heidegger's philosophy rather extensively, but he did so specifically in the context of outer space! The article is called "Heidegger, Gagarin, and Us," Gagarin being the first cosmonaut to go into outerspace. Now that's topic relevant).

As a judge, it is frustrating to hear generic evidence for generic arguments that are only tangentially related to the topic. Why read Zizek when you can read someone actually talking about outer-space? It is generally evident when someone has just taken a back file, cut a link card or two about space, and called it a day. The same goes for process counterplans and generic DA's. Why read politics (the Zizek of disads) when you can read space specific arguments about debris or the impending disappearance of NASA? You will never get to those argumentative areas, however, if you didn't do the work before the topic started to understand the central concerns of US space policy, the thorniest issues in its history, and the common (and not so common) projections for its future.


III. Controlling History In-Round; or, the Ben Crossan method to skull busting


Good solid analytics win debate rounds, and often win them in convincing style. And really good analytic arguments on substantive issues generally stem from a deep understanding of history. As a critique debater in college, I can say that historically grounded analytics--not just quick asides like, "that's empirically denied because China did that once," but involved re-tellings of both the history of space exploration and the affirmative's place in that history according to your theoretical framework--is the sine qua non of effective K debating. No one does it better than an UTNIF alum who currently debates at Towson, Ben Crossan. Section III is dedicated to him because he is truly an analytic samurai when it comes to wielding history. If you think a lot of debate evidence is dumb, which it is, your chance to kill it in cross-examination requires a pretty deep knowledge of a topic's history so you can frustrate the other team at each turn. A Crossan cross examination on the history of non-violent political struggles would generally end the round right there--but only because he had a control over that history from Jesus to Mandela and beyond (and yes, he once owned on the biblical question of Jesus' political tactics).


This advice does not just go for K debaters, however. While it is essential for a good K 2NC to win the specificity battle, and recontextualize the affirmative within a pernicious history (as opposed to the neutral snapshot of the world the affirmative claims to be), quality policy arguments are all about winning the specificity battle too. Good impact calculus, for instance, often incorporates strong historical basis for its claims about regional flash points or a particular space program. Doing that practically writes the ballot for the judge, instead of just saying "MAGNITUDE WAR AND STUFF."


Dominating cross-examination, winning the race to specificity every 2NR or 2AR, a year-long resource guiding research and argument strategies---that should be enough reason to start your deep topic reading right this second!