Tournament: UMKC | Round: 2 | Opponent: UKans HW | Judge: Stout, Kristen
On the last day of CEDA, with the morning still grey, a solar hangover for the night before, a flock of geese had settled on the roof of the Cate Building. As I passed, some took flight, and honking filled the air.
A fitting tribute for the death of Jack Ewing.

It’s hard to make heroes of people whose shtick was an avowed love of flux. Jack couldn’t even pick a school to go to. I don’t have stories to tell about James, which is another story.
Jackie tells me about Jack’s Samaritan moment.
The Wake Forest Tournament, a van blocking the entrance, Dallas Perkins yelling. No one knows who the van belongs to, and an impasse is reached until Jack gets into the driver’s seat and drives it into a parking space. Dallas goes into the back of the van, unlocked as it was, takes two tubs, and throws the evidence out, papers fluttering to the ground, which really isn’t something you can blame Jack for.
Wake, the next year, Jack reeled out on the street. A dog, of unknown origin, licks his face.
“And James said I wasn’t getting any tonight.”

I’ve re-written this almost as many times as I’ve watched that last 2nr. Why Jack and James? Two white kids from fancy high schools who got the tech to win how they would. And then they lost. It’s not a matter of an avatar of justice but, with risk of effacement, a case study: how must one speak when one must speak? I can’t say anything. The bomb went off in the semis, and a body was attached.
Jack’s Samaritan moment was moving a van. James’ Samaritan moment was his death.
“I’m sorry.”

There isn’t much we have left behind. A faxed copy of a 1AC, an empty can of Four Loko, a wiki of words Loyola jacked from Borges, a wiki of words scouts jacked from Loyola, some skin particles. A metaphor sits between my stairs like an Aleph, a metaphor he never explained, “a cat holding stone balloons”. I’ve tried to remember them as they were, but I can’t because I didn’t know them as they were, and they didn’t know them as they were, and I don’t know if they were at all.

Jack is standing at a table telling a metaphor of Heraclitus for the second time. I’m holding a book that James read and talked about. Recordings exist. What is an apparatus? An apparition? Heraclitus, by the way, supposedly one of the most influential philosophers of the West, recorded only by fragments and pretenders to the throne. One can only trace out influence by tracing affects spanned and generated by an object with the pretensions of a subject, working backwards to an understanding of someone or ones that can never be understood. Pour out a forty for pretenders to the throne. The metaphor is about a river.

Why call them Jack and James? Ewing and Mollison don’t help much as clarifiers. Calling them Loyola EM means combing through debateresults, and I find statistics that are perfectly clear and that don’t clarify at all. Where were you when the shots rang out, three in the gut, two stray bullets back? Why call them at all? The tombstones are empty beneath the names, the names that don’t make sense but are still there, a sort of trigger, as if one could say anything at all. The tombstones are empty and I don’t know what to write. But that’s not my job. We’re not here to memorialize Jack and James. We’re here to eulogize them.
This is Fernando in 2011.
Writing Death, 44-50
How is one supposed to write… “what I have written, I have written.”

To gaze at the river made of time and water
And recall that time itself is another river,
To know we cease to be, just like the river,
And that our faces pass away, just like the water.
To feel that waking is another sleep
That dreams it does not sleep and that death,
Which our flesh dreads, is that very death
Of every night, which we call sleep.
[…]
To see in death a sleep, and in the sunset
A sad gold, of such is Poetry
Immortal and a pauper. For Poetry
Returns like the dawn and the sunset.
[…]
It is also like an endless river
That passes and remains, a mirror for one same
Inconstant Heraclitus, who is the same
And another, like an endless river.
(Ars Poetica, Jorge Luis Borges)

The coroner’s report: asphyxiation, possibly autoerotic. What is certain is that they suffocated, air choked from their lungs, smiling, like from an old Batman VCR the coroner had recently watched.
Georgetown was found holding pillows, but who could really say? Pillows, violent hermeneutics, whatever.
Stasis is death.
Here’s a card they read from Fernando in 10.
The suicide bomber, and her gift of death, 148-150
At the risk of banality…into mere dogma and orthodoxy.

This act is self-defeating, but that’s the point. No one can say why one debates, no one can say why they debated, and the imposition of univocal models of debate makes it impossible for those alternative energies of debate, that alternative je ne sais quoi, that makes it possible to relate to otherness.
All one can say about the dead is that they are dead. All one can say about the gone is that they are gone. To eulogize is to scrape together fragmented memories. For every interpretation I can propose there is something to thwart it, every anecdote provides a frame that crashes up against frames provided by other anecdotes. The trick is that alterity can never be understood, and respect for this unknowability is necessary to prevent violence against otherness.
Then again, every image I choose, inevitably excluding others, is a representation of myself. I don’t know in how many debates Loyola EM were mirrors, but it looks like they still are.
Narcissus stares into a pond, a corpse stares back. Terror.
Fernando 11.
Writing Death, 53-56
The question that remains with us…the testifier, and her testimony.

A Grimm fairytale:
Once upon a time there was a stubborn child who never did what his mother told him to do. The dear Lord, therefore, did not look kindly upon him, and let him become sick. No doctor could cure him and in a short time he lay on his deathbed. After he was lowered into his grave and covered over with earth, one of his little arms suddenly emerged and reached up into the air. They pushed it back down and covered the earth with fresh earth, but that did not help. The little arm kept popping out. So the child’s mother had to go to the grave herself and smack the little arm with a switch. After she had done that, the arm withdrew, and then, for the first time, the child had peace beneath the earth.
An old horror trope: the monster keeps coming back.
A question: why do we keep coming back?
Speech is a writing. Nothing I say quite works, the trap of inner experience is that it cannot be communicated but begs to be. The drive for certainty allows for a perfectly clear communication, one that refers to itself, a swarm of catchphrases and self-referential terms of art that flow together perfectly to form a decision, which is a lot easier than swirling around meaning, cringing at everything out of my mouth, being consumed by the vulnerability that constitutes standing in a room or sitting down or holding a machine or getting paper cuts. But what happens when I leave, into a world that is ugly by predictable standards? The issue of joy before death is one of internalizing death, taking pleasure from the self-laceration of the attempt of communicating the singular. Bet on the inexpressible. Death and the dead are the non-experience of which writing is impossible, yet make writing possible by establishing a limit, a black hole to circle around, a windmill to charge towards.
The 1AC, and the ballot, is a chance to write death.
Irwin 2.
Saints of the Impossible, 126-131
In a political discussion, few accusations… myself ceaselessly within myself” (BOC I, 556).

Tournament: UMKC | Round: 4 | Opponent: Texas GM | Judge: Dunn, Izak
Animality exists as radical alterity and attempts to prescribe a determinate  claim is ventriqlism- amounts to the erasure of alterity
Laycock 99 [ Stephen, Animal Otherness- Animal Otherness, pp. 276-280]
¶ Animate subjectivity is undecidable, not ineffable.. "Wonder," Burke discerns, "is¶ the originary question

Our affirmation of the movement of life allows for x centering the alt around effaces dynamism.
Shaviro ’11 Steven Shaviro prof of  literature and film at Wayne State University p 287-88 The Speculative Turn:¶ Continental Materialism and Realism http://www.re-press.org/book-files/OA_Version_Speculative_Turn_9780980668346.pdf

For Whitehead, echoing James...the absence of its direct effects upon other entities.

You efface stuff
Fernando 10 [same cite as 1ac]
Surely you don't think I have forgotten...veil as I attempt to unveil.

Tournament:  | Round:  | Opponent:  | Judge:
We've been reading the eulogy slightly differently - the eulogy itself is mostly the same, just moved around, and we read a shorter cut of one card and replaced another. Same book, same argument, but here are the cites:

I've tried to remember them as they were, but I can't, because I didn't know them as they were, and they didn't know them as they were, and I don't know if they were at all.
Fernando, Writing Death,44-45
How is one supposed to write...eulogising Alexander as the great one.

We're not here to memorialize Jack and James. We're here to eulogize them.
Fernando, Writing Death, 76-83
"Pick yourself up" - which...everything is known, everything is clear, calculable.

A fragment:
Fernando, Writing Death, 106
For this moment, though, even as I...enigmatic. -JEAN BAUDRILLARD

Here's a card they read from Fernando in 10.
Jeremy Fernando, The Suicide Bomber; and her gift of death, 148-150
At the risk of banality, we must...mere dogma and orthodoxy.