Breathing Room

Shameless Plug for My Favorite Book #5 - Clumsiness

Of all the thousands of books I have read, Chuck Amuck is my favorite. It is by Chuck Jones, one of the geniuses behind the Golden Age of Warner Brothers cartoons (that would be Daffy Duck, Bugs Bunny, and Elmer Fudd, not Minnie Mickey and a Duck with a speech impediment).

My favorite part of my favorite book is a description of where Wile E. Coyote (one of the author’s creations) came from. I think these are the two best-written and most entertaining paragraphs I have ever read.

“The Coyote is a history of my own frustration and war with all tools, multiplied only slightly. I can remember that my wife and daughter would start to weep bitterly and seek hiding places whenever they saw  me head towards the tool drawer, if only to hang a picture. I have never reached into that devilish drawer without starting a chain of errors and disasters of various but inevitable proportions. Like any other man, I would rather succeed in what I can’t do than do what I have successfully done before. I have never reached into that drawer without encountering one of those spiny things you stick flowers in. We don’t keep that thing in that drawer, but it is always there. I consider it a good day when I get only one spine under a fingernail. I tried to get the spiny thing out of the drawer once, but found out that the last time, when it had stuck to four fingers at once and been in fact lifted a few inches out of its nest in the resulting shriek, it had fallen on a tube of glue, puncturing the tube and affixing itself to the drawer for all time.
I have tried lackadaisically from time to time to remove it and have succeeded in breaking: a rattail file, a kitchen knife, three fingernails, a pair of manicure scissors, an eggbeater (in one of my more fanciful efforts), and a window, when the tail of the rattail file separated from the rattail file.”

Shameless Plug for My Favorite Book #4 - Stupidity

The man, Ray Katz, in the story is a “business manager” at an animation studio. Having encountered other individuals with similar titles, I am in no way surprised that he is a complete idiot.

“Anyone but Ray Katz would gather then that flipping a sheaf of drawings is the classic test for the animator. Having completed a series of drawings for a given piece of action, before the in-between drawings are added, the animator becomes his own test camera by flipping his drawings, just as he did in grammar school. However, this constant and repetitive flipping by every member of every unit, sixty or seventy people, continued to be a mystery, a puzzlement, an enigma to Mr. Katz.
Eighteen years of observation eventually bore fruit: Mr. Katz decided to avoid licking this whole matter of flipping by joining it. He too, would flip.
No sooner said than done. One fine memorable morning, with the enormous confidence born of sheer ignorance, he strode into our music room, where two directors and story men had joined our composer Carl Stalling to go over the score of a soon-to-be-recorded film. The music of this film, thirty or forty pages of bar sheets, rested comfortably on the desk top as Ray Katz walked in, determined to become one of the boys: if they could flip, he could flip. Casually, he picked up the unoffending music score and, under the fascinated and glazed gaze of those present, moved to the window for better light and carefully flipped the music score two or three times. Then, nodding and grunting his appreciation of the artistry therein, he departed, clucking to the group on his way out. The term “dumbfounded” found new meaning that day, as did “delight.”
And that is how it came about that every succeeding music score was presented to Mr. Katz to be flipped for his endorsement and his professional and artistic approval.”

Shameless Plug for My Favorite Book #3 - On Failure

When (not if) you fail, you are in good company - Charlie Chaplin, Peter Sellers, Jack Benny, Wile E. Coyote, Sylvester the Cat, Elmer Fudd, and (my favorite) Daffy Duck are loved precisely for the universality of their failures. Failure is the most human and humanizing of experiences.
“Father loved his children but hated having a family. He became belatedly aware one dismal rain-struck morning of the painful reality of his fatherhood: that he was up to his hips in children, and unless he wanted to blame those selfsame hips which were, after all, responsible, he must do something to rectify matters. In short, get out.
Now, all that remained for him was the technical difficulty of how to do so. We were far from a wealthy family. Indeed, a history of Father’s fiscal meanderings would make a valuable contribution to the “What to Avoid” chapter of any “How to Succeed” textbook. In short, he didn’t have enough bread to supply bread for his family for the next 12 to 15 years, much less provide all the gear, from garter belts to saddle shoes, necessary to see the self-respecting child through high school and perhaps, college.
The only solution seemed to be to strike it rich. Then he could run for the hills, secure in the knowledge that his family was fiscally secure…
Opportunities for immediate wealth were a dime a dozen [in 1920’s California] - and worth approximately that. Father tried them all, plus some introductory ideas of his own: he formed companies that attempted to sell avocados when people called them Alligator Pears and thought of them as either poisonous or Communistic, or both; he offered vineyards for sale when Prohibition was in full astringent swing; he took a short option on a place called Signal Hill and tried frustratingly to grow geraniums there for the Eastern market, only to discover that his floral non-fecundity was caused by crude oil saturating the soil. Where flowers should have blossomed, crude-oil rigs sprouted instead, long after Father’s geraniums and options had withered away.”

Shameless Plug for My Favorite Book #2 - Mother's.Uncle's Advice

My mother says this to me all the time. It is both absurd, and insightful.

“A dear uncle told me once, when I was deep in despair at some injustice by some bureaucrat, scholastic or familial, “Chuck, they can kill you, but they’re not allowed to eat you.” Exactly why this statement has since stood as the cornerpost of my determination to live my life as a life and not as an apology, only Ralph Waldo Emerson could have explained. And I hadn’t read much Emerson when I was eleven.”

Shameless Plug for My Favorite Book #1 - Selfishness and Honesty

This is a description of the author’s 6th birthday. Since I pulled a nearly identical move at the same kind of party and our birthdays are one day apart, I empathize:

“I was immensely proud – it seems to me that all my life I have taken the most pride in things over which I have little or no control. Even though I had older sisters, it never occurred to me that anyone had ever become six years old before, and the splendid cake, candles bravely ablaze in salute to my maturity, was ample evidence that I had entered into manhood.

Having blown out the candles, and, as a side benefit, managing to send most of the smoke up my little brother’s nostrils, I was handed the knife, my first baton of any kind of authority in six misspent years, and was told to cut as large a piece as I liked. At this point Daffy Duck must have had, for me, his earliest beginnings, because I found to my surprise and pleasure that I had no desire to share my cake with anyone. I courteously returned the knife to my mother. I had no need for it, I explained; I would simplify the whole matter by taking the entire cake for myself. Not knowing she had an incipient duck on her hands, she laughed gently and tried to return the knife to my reluctant grasp. I again explained that the knife was superfluous. It was impossible, I pointed out, with incontrovertible logic, to cut a cake and still leave it entire for its rightful owner. I had no need and no desire to share.

My father thereupon mounted the hustings (he was nine feet tall and looked like a moose without antlers to me) and escorted me to my room to contemplate in cakeless solitude the meaning of a new word: “selfish.” To me then, and to Daffy Duck now, “selfish” means “honest but antisocial”; “unselfish” means “socially acceptable but often dishonest.” We all want the whole cake, but unlike Daffy, and at least one six-year old boy, the coward in the rest of us keeps the Daffy Duck, the small boy in us, under control.

“You may cut as large a piece as you want” is a dangerous euphemism. There is a prescribed wedge on every birthday cake that is completely and exactly surrounded by corporal punishment. Exceeding these limits by even a thousandth o fan inch brands one as “selfish.” From my seventh birthday on, I learned to approach with judgement sharper than a razor’s edge this line, without cutting the “un” from “unselfish” to “selfish.” I learned very little about social morality, but a great deal about survival, and this, after all, is what Daffy Duck is all about.”

Ladies and gentlemen, we have a split decision...

At debate tournaments, there are preliminary debates and elimination debates. By long-standing tradition at most tournaments, elimination debates are judged by at least 3 judges. Greater redundancy, in theory, ensures higher-quality decisions in debates that are, in theory, closer and harder-fought than preliminary rounds. Panels of judges always have odd numbers of judges - 3,5,7, even the occasional and disastrous 9 or 11. When I was in high school, some “round robin” tournaments had two-person panels in every debate. That worked out, because in a round robin there are no elimination rounds, instead everyone debates everyone else one time and the team with the most wins, wins. Sometimes, it would happen that two judges disagreed, and this is referred to as “splitting a decision.”

At the moment, doctors evaluating me have split.

My oncologists at Georgetown want to do either three weeks of radiation therapy or two more cycles (two months) of chemotherapy. They are convinced that if I do not do radiation therapy, I “will have a recurrence within 6 years.” My mother, in a typical feat that only my mother could accomplish, got an appointment for a second opinion with the lymphoma clinical team at the National Institutes of Health. While not deviating from standards of professional courtesy, the NIH team basically called my Georgetown doctors crazy.

As I mentioned in a previous post, new research (a lot of it by the NIH) suggests that the long-term side-effects of radiation therapy are very bad. This research is just now getting done in quantity, so it’s hard to know what the implications are. These NIH doctors think that: a) radiation is too risky given that I’ve had such a good response to chemotherapy b) my tumor was 8.5 centimeters in diameter. When radiotherapy was the industry standard, it was used when tumors exceeded 10 centimeters, so my disease is undersized for radiation - or rather, it was, even when it was at its worst. c) if I don’t do radiation, there’s no point in giving me two more cycles of chemotherapy. That’s because after two cycles of chemo, my PET was negative, and then I had four more cycles on top of that, followed by a second negative PET scan. A third set of chemo treatments would be redundant and would do more damage to my body.

Frankly, it would have been a lot more comforting if my doctors agreed that I am a borderline case subject to a judgement call. In most split decisions, the debate is very close and the judges simply evaluate the subjective variables differently. In other cases, a judge splits from his colleague because he/she is inept, asleep, drunk or otherwise impaired. I have no way to know what the cause for the split here is.

This situation is frustrating because I am not competent to read the studies or evaluate the evidence that drive the disagreement between the doctors. It is a bit like judging a debate I can’t follow, involving incomprehensible evidence. I’ve judged hundreds of fairly meaningless debates, and this has never happened to me before. In those debates, trophies and bragging rights were on the line - now my life is at stake. It’s very… disconcerting.

Now I’m looking for a third opinion. Anyone know a hematologist-oncologist with a bunch of spare time in the next week or so?

More Speechifying, Courtesy of Harvard Law School and Berkeley SS

My debate alumni e-mail list was recently treated to one of the speeches given at this year’s Harvard Law School graduation. The speaker was my former debate partner, Tejinder Singh. It’s easier to comprehend the content if you have seen a picture of us debating together (and guess which debater is named Tejinder):

Under normal circumstances, I would feel obligated to ask Tejinder’s permission before posting this for all and sundry to see, but these are not normal times. In what I can only describe as a feat of stunningly uncharacterstic modesty, he neglected to mention giving this speech when we spoke two weeks ago. In retaliation, I am posting it without forewarning him.

“On this solemn day, I want to talk … about tipping in restaurants.  I could write a law-review-length article about the subtleties … whether the wine counts toward the baseline, whether you calculate tip based on the bill before or after tax, whether you adjust the tip with the Federal reserve rate … you get the idea.  But at the end of the day, I find that how much one tips is largely considered a personal matter.  Personal in the sense that everybody does what they want, but also in the sense that how much you tip maybe says something about the kind of person you are.  Me? I tip somewhere north of twenty percent, and sometimes as high as a third, and I understand that this is higher than the norm.  But I have a reason, and I would like to share it with you today.

I have “overtipped” ever since I was young, when a friend reminded me that because I wear a turban, which is a symbol of belonging to the Sikh faith, people tend to see me not just as me, but as a representative for all people of my religion.  He told me that when I tip big, I make life that much easier for the next person who looks like me and walks into that restaurant.  And he told me the rest of the story too: when I do a good job, my people look competent; when I lose my temper, we look like hotheads; when I smile, we look agreeable, and so on.  And when any man in a turban does any of those things, that conduct is imputed onto me, at least a little bit.

I protested.  If I recall correctly, I stood up!  “That’s not fair!” I exclaimed.  A little dramatic for the Olive Garden?  Maybe.  But then I gave a brilliant speech about how this is America, where people are not judged based on how they look.  I went on and on about our venerable freedoms and about our just society, and if you listened really hard, you could hear the faint, but distinct tones of the national anthem as I built up to the climax of it all—that we must be free to tip as little as we please.  My friend sighed, shrugged, and left twenty percent for our server.  As I reflect now, lurking behind my high-minded and patriotic rhetoric was quite a healthy dose of selfishness.  I resented the idea that I owed a duty to anybody, and I wanted to be free to behave in whatever foolish way felt good at the moment.

But as sure as I stand here today, my friend was right.  I’ve seen it play out enough times to know for a fact that I am not alone, and I never will be.  And over time, I have come to understand that I shouldn’t think about my ties to my religion as a burden, but instead as a form of power.  By living the good life, I get to serve my community.  And every day, I am the beneficiary of all of the hard work and good decisions that my people make.  That’s a pretty good deal.  So I tip big, and I try to be fair, and I try to be smart, and I don’t always pull it off, but I have a lot of motivation to be my best at every moment.

Some of you may have had an experience similar to mine.  To the rest of you: Welcome to the club!  Today, as we leave this place for the various corners of the world, we find ourselves bound to one another by our new common possession: a degree from Harvard Law School.  From now on, people will think of us not just as individuals, but as members of a class, as heirs to the tradition of those who took this stage before us, and as examples for those yet to come.  And we should embrace it, because we are all lucky to find ourselves in such magnificent company.

We now have everything we need to make the world a better place.  We have always had the talent, charm, and good looks.  Today we add a degree from one of the greatest educational institutions on the planet—the type of qualification that people notice and take seriously.  In this crowd I see brilliant attorneys, executives, public servants, teachers, artists, brick-toting admissions deans, you name it, all ready to come into their own.  And as we realize our potential, our successes will have the collateral effect of lifting up our peers and augmenting this school’s great tradition of success.

And all of that is great.  But we have another opportunity in front of us—one that, in my view, means even more.  People will be watching us, and so we have a chance to show them our hearts.  Wherever we find our bliss, and whatever side of our various cases or controversies we ultimately adopt, we can conduct ourselves with grace, courage, integrity, and compassion.  We can play the game in a way that leaves the world astounded by the quality of our character.  This will probably be harder than it sounds, because it is easy to be selfish, easy to take shortcuts, and easy to forget how fortunate we are.  But we can help each other.  When life gets tricky, we can remember that we are not alone, and we have 765 classmates who are rooting for us to make the right decision.  For me, there is comfort and inspiration in that.  And as I think about the challenges ahead, I’m not too worried about how this crowd will do.  I feel nothing short of blessed to find myself in your hands.  And I promise to do my very best not to let you down.

Congratulations everybody.  And as you celebrate your successes and your friendships tonight, remember to tip big.”

Update: Medical News, Pictures, Next Steps

Sorry for taking so long to post another update. As my energy level has been declining, I have undertaken a bunch of new tasks and found new diversions, including a playstation and a trip to California. Simultaneously, I have been assigned to a series of new projects at work, so if I have neglected my correspondence with any of you, I plead distraction and weakness.

First, the medical news. I had my twelfth dose of chemotherapy during the last week in May (first week of June). That makes six months of systematic medical poisoning, and I’ve had about enough of that. Towards the end of the treatment, my body was getting very weak and my mental strength was flagging. I mentioned in previous posts my anticipatory nausea, and analogized it to having to avoid thinking about your toe, knowing that the pain will increase if you think about it, after it has been smashed with a baseball bat.

What I meant is that the chemotherapy makes the patient sick to his/her stomach - usually it gets bad starting about 24 hours after the injections. Nausea is a neurochemical reaction to stimuli in the digestive tract. Anti-nausea medications are actually anti-seizure medications that work on the brain, not the digestive system. In other words, your brain is what allows you/forces you to vomit. Your mind alone can make you sick, if it is confronted with the right stimuli - think of someone getting sick at a crime scene or battlefield. As the patient is getting injected (it takes about 6 hours in my case), if he/she thinks about how they are feeling sick, or about how they will eventually feel sick, they spontaneously get sick. So imagine sitting in a room full of people getting injected, all of them being sickened, getting injected with toxic chemicals that burn your veins - and imagine sitting through it without thinking about getting sick, knowing that if you do, you’ll have to come back again (and again) and the sickness will only get worse. The problem is that if your mind is making you sick and you actually throw up, every time you feel sick after that, the memory of having given in and thrown up will come back, and, in fact, make you feel sicker subsequently. For this reason, I avoided vomiting entirely for the last six months.

I consider myself a pretty disciplined thinker, and pretty experienced with the urge to vomit (thank you, underage drinking), but after ten or so treatments, the nausea just about outstripped my self-control. Every time, I had  pre-vomiting spasms that I was just barely able to control. Each time, the spasms were precipitated by visual stimulus - the nurse placing the drugs on the table next to me, the sight of a syringe of “the red devil,” etc. My doctors gave me steroids again, and a bunch of pretty strong anti-nausea medications - nothing worked. Eventually the only solution was for me to take such strong anti-anxiety medications that I fell asleep and snored/drooled through the injections.

The last treatment was the most difficult, both because of the progressively worsening nausea issue and because I was scared. Everyone kept telling me, “it’s almost over, this is your last one, you can hang on that long” and other “victory is just around the corner” propaganda. Nice thoughts, and I don’t fault any of you for having said this, or for having otherwise put your feet in your mouths - I’m too verbally clumsy to hold grudges about that sort of stuff. Anyway, I heard “it’s almost over,” and thought “yeah, it’s almost over… for everyone else.” If it was “almost over,” then I could just throw up all over the nurse and be done with it, but it’s not. If I did that, and the cancer comes back - or fails to go away - I will face more chemo, having given in and thrown up, making it that much worse. Just thinking about chemotherapy makes me feel sick, and even in the best case, I will get scans every three months for the next five years, and annual scans every year after that. In other words, I’ll have to live at least a few days of every year looking over my shoulder for the Cancer Reaper. Other people might worry about me, they might even hold my hand while I get treated, but I have to face those moments alone (as does everyone else), and being reassured that “it’s almost over” makes me cranky and resentful.

Besides, it wasn’t the last treatment that was scaring me exactly, it was the fact that I look inside myself and can’t find a reserve of strength left over to face another dozen chemo treatments, if it comes to that.

Speaking of “best case,” after the final chemo dose, I got my last PET/CT scan. It was good - even better than the “best case” I was told about when I was first diagnosed. When my oncologist first described my situation, he told me that the large tumor was large enough that it would probably never completely go away. Even if they killed it, it would probably just shrink and turn into a big lump of scar tissue. You might recall that my first set of scans showed the tumor was still visible but that it was metabolically “dead.” This was a good prognostic sign, bolstered by the latest results. They showed that the tumor had “melted” - the lymph nodes in the area are still abnormal - there is scar tissue and some “thickening.” The PET scan also shows no abnormal cell metabolism. If my treatment concludes, and the final scan is identical to this one, my disease will be in “complete remission.”

This raises the question: what happens next?

I hesitated to post anything because the bottom line is, we don’t know. More chemotherapy seems off the table (for now). The question is whether or not to do radiation treatments. The upside of doing radiation is that it cuts the risk of a recurrence from about 15-25% to single digits. On the other hand, it increases the risk of serious side-effects, most notably coronary artery disease and “solid tumors,” including lung and breast cancer. The solid tumors in question are very, very deadly. Lung cancer, is basically a death sentence and studies show that Hodgkin’ patients who smoke are more likely to get lung cancer after radiation. I don’t smoke now, but I did in college, so it’s not clear how much that matters. These risks are not negligible, and increase over time, so that the younger you are when you are treated for Hodgkin’s, the greater the risk that you will develop a secondary malignancy (because you will probably live long enough to do so). The risks are minimized by taking precautions, like carefully targeting the radiation and reducing the dose. There is no such thing as risk-free irradiation of the chest. One school of thought argues that since Hodgkin’s Disease is among the most treatable of cancers, and the solid tumors caused by radiation are almost universally fatal, “first, do no harm” means using the minimum necessary dose of chemo and radiation to obtain a remission of the initial disease. On the other hand, since a recurrence of Hodgkin’s can be very dangerous, oncologists who prioritize aggressive treatment of the initial diagnosis argue for using both radiation and chemotherapy. Doctors are reviewing my results and records now, and I’ll let you all know what I decide to do.

2008 University of California, Berkeley Debate Reunion - Keynote Address

This month I was invited to give the keynote at the first-ever Cal-Berkeley Debate Reunion. This is the speech, with some minor modifications.

I confess that I am both honored and humbled to be here. This room is filled with exceptional and successful individuals of diverse backgrounds, spanning over half a century of joyful disagreement. Over the decades, our beloved activity has dramatically changed. The hundreds of debates today’s Cal students win every year are very different, for example, from the Joffre debates between Cal and Stanford, which annually discussed an issue of French national policy.

To find common ground, I undertook a search for the quintessence of debate – that which ties us together and transcends superficial differences of form and content. I stumbled across Prof. Alexander Meiklejohn, a university president, and philosopher who wrote that:

“when I try to single out… some one group which shall stand forth as intellectually the best - best in college work and best in promise of future intellectual achievement… it seems to me that stronger than any other group, tougher in intellectual fiber, keener in intellectual interests, better equipped to battle the coming problems are the college debaters - the students who apart from their regular studies, band together for intellectual controversy with each other and with their friends…”

This is a room full of successful, brilliant people, and the sooner I finish speaking the sooner you can get around to the business of conversing and proving me right. It makes no sense to belabor the point that team-based, labor-intensive, competitive persuasive argument strengthens the moral character and intellectual fiber of participants. So tonight I will dwell on the relationship between debate and matters of life and death. I speak from a heart filled with love and reverence for debate, and hope you will indulge my verbose nostalgia.

Recently I began graduate school at Georgetown and became friends a GU graduate voted the Best Debater of the 1970’s. He took a three-decade hiatus from debate, and after thirty years that utterly transformed America and its debaters, he attended a tournament and immediately felt the love of the game surge, adrenaline-like through his veins and super-charge his brain. He said that witnessing the brilliance, wit and determination of the students reminded him of something Vince Lombardi, the legendary football coach once said about the relationship between competition and greatness.

Being a compulsive researcher, I went searching for this Lombardi-ism. I have a rather personal attachment to Lombardi. At 57, at the peak of his profession, he died ten weeks after being diagnosed with intestinal cancer, in a room at Georgetown University Hospital. Today the Georgetown Cancer Center is named after him. I visit his building every other week to get treated for the Hodgkin’s Lymphoma that is trying to kill me.

Ironically, the Lombardi-ism I found is the opening quote of Any Given Sunday, the movie that Cal debaters of my generation traditionally watched before departing for tournaments. It reads:

“any man’s finest hour, the greatest fulfillment of all that he holds dear, is that moment when he has worked his heart out in a good cause and lies exhausted on the field of battle - victorious.”

Vincent Lombardi would have been a hell of a debate coach, and told his athletes so. He said:

“The quality of a person’s life is in direct proportion to his commitment to excellence, regardless of his chosen field of endeavor.”

I would like to make three points using three of Vincent’s maxims. First, debate is life. In both games, “if you’ll not settle for anything less than your best, you will be amazed at what you can accomplish.”

Since a small group of dedicated Cal Debate alumni decided to dedicate their time and resources to rebuilding the team ten years ago, UC Berkeley has experienced the most dramatic rise to greatness in the 61-year history of the NDT. Excellence starts at the top, with Dave Arnett and Greg Achten. Just one year after arriving at Cal, Greg guided debaters to our first-ever national championship. But since I, like Greg and Dave, have a vested interest in proving that Cal Debate has achieved something momentous, I consulted a source of unimpeachable credibility – the coach whose team ended my debating career with crushing defeat.

He said that “Cal “breaking the mold” of the monster private school… will be one of the most important developments of the decade…. Now, [all other public schools must abandon the oft-repeated] argument that public schools are “screwed [by the system]. If that sentiment festered, the activity [of college debate] would have been in real trouble.” It is no exaggeration to say that we have changed the landscape of competitive debate in America: we catalyzed the rebirth of West Coast debate. We challenged the conventional wisdom that only elite private schools could sustain success in 21^st century policy debate. The coach of the reigning national champion team, agrees with this: “The return of Cal debate to the national scene has been a blessing and a curse… “Hearing” and “knowing” the Cal debaters is a blessing, he said, and our team is “a blessed exemplar for all who would aspire to debate well and successfully. Every program, extant, or dormant, can say, ‘See, this is what is possible.’ No excuses. But Cal’s rise has been a curse for all of those who thought they were ready to [place in the top 16, win the Copeland award for the top-ranked team], or win any one of a number of tournaments.”

Our debaters are leaders; they exert a multiplier effect by enabling the achievements of others – typically, each Cal debater coaches a high school team of between 4 and 20 students. As a result, even though I am a half-decade removed from college, I know over two-thirds of the current Berkeley debaters – they were my students as teenagers. Just as UC Berkeley’s flagship status raises standards and exerts centrifugal force on the entire UC system, weaker teams in our region have ridden the coattails of Cal Debate to revival.

Like a strong family, a market-leading company, or a great nation, Cal Debate is built of sweat and love. I know this because I have worked for 8 years to help strengthen it. When we began the Cal Debate renaissance, the debate community stereotyped all Cal debaters as friendly, easy-going hippie slackers with more intelligence than work ethic. Today, they know Berkeley’s friendly, easy-going hippies will, more often than not, charmingly and overwhelmingly demolish their best and brightest students with the flair for originality and sophisticated research that makes UC Berkeley a global force to be reckoned with in every academic field.

I recently read the debater orientation handbook that Dave and Greg give to new students, and I realized that it distilled the results of  all our late nights and early mornings, our shared heartbreaks, petty fights, and reconciliations, our near-death experiences with car thieves and house fires, academic and UC-bureaucratic calamities of varying but inevitable proportions, our joint backbreaking labor, our life-altering successes, and heartbreaking defeats – our shared existence as teammates and our unbreakable fellowship, reduced to a pamphlet size for our debate descendants to relearn. Everything I quote here is from the handbook – which, for the record, was written before this reunion was a glimmer in Greg’s eye:

“Research is the foundation of the Cal tradition… Our team has a long history of producing some of the highest quality [arguments] in the nation.” I should point out that words like “tradition” and “long history” should fill every heart in this room with joy: we wrote that history. We are the tradition, and it almost died out – on several occasions. Socrates, the world’s first Debate Coach of the Decade, said that “We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence is a habit.”

It is, perhaps, difficult to appreciate how dramatic our habit formation process has been. When I arrived at Cal, I was aware of only three traditions: getting lost on the way to tournaments, the resolution of disputes through games known as “not it,” “shotgun,” and “face in the copier,” and accidentally skipping events like celebratory banquets and preliminary rounds of tournaments.

The Cal Debate handbook contains 8 Guidelines for Success in Debate.

1. “Work is Desire. Hard work makes [the] good… great and great… transcendent…. Work almost every day. Cramming… is not a substitute to hard work… and will cost you dearly when it most matters.

2. [Have] Patience. Nothing about this is easy. If it was, [it] wouldn’t be half the game it is… it can and should be frustrating at times. The process… entails fits and starts, trial and error, and ultimately a lot of reflection. No one is born… great… It is a long process that never ends.

3. Never lose [to] the same [thing] twice.

4. Using your teammates, coaches, professors, and friends as a resource is essential.

5. We work for each other… If you take nothing else away from… college…. I hope it is this ideal.

6. It is understandable to get upset at times, [but] rudeness is unacceptable and unwise.

7. Think about your competit[ors].

8. Healthy Body, Healthy Mind.

These are rules for great debaters, but with only minimal modification, are generalizable guidelines for a life well-lived. Perhaps this is why, when other debate institutions produce champions who graduate into spectacular unemployment or worse, Dave and Greg’s students without exception go on to successful careers. Debate is life. We win at both.

My second overarching point about debate and matters of life and death is that we all need to do what we can to support debate, because our national life hangs in the balance. Lombardi said “Individual commitment to a group effort… is what makes a team work, a company work, a society work, a civilization work… The achievements of an organization are the results of the combined effort of each individual.” I ask you to consider this in light of the following two salient facts: 1) We live in a nation that chooses to fight and kill for its interests, beliefs and in defense of its homeland and 2) only 1% of society serves in the military, and only one out of seven people in uniform is a combat arms professional. In other words, less than half a million Americans daily pay the life and death costs of foreign policy mistakes.

I passionately believe that debate has a significant role to play in a society at war, but will not treat you to a harangue about the value of vigorous wartime dissent and the perils of totalitarianism – this is, after all, a meeting of Berkeley alumni. Greg and Dave did not invite a professional agitator to speak here – they invited a “strategic communication” planner, a man who works with the military to persuade foreigners not to kill Americans, help kill Americans, or kill each other in ways that threaten American interests.

One of my good friends holds a senior position in the US military. Like me, and most students of international relations, he believes that anonymous, structural forces and dynamics drove the US to war in Afghanistan and Iraq, and made both wars so intractable. We agree, however, that such explanations are somehow incomplete and unsatisfying. I asked my friend after a particularly frustrating day in Iraq how the most powerful nation in human history could have made so many catastrophic errors in judgment, at such staggering cost in blood and treasure.

He said without hesitation that “we made bad judgments because the professionals did not know how to debate.” In our system of government, when civilian politicians are convinced that war is necessary, they must rely on professional knowledge producers and action planners. Ultimate responsibility for justifying and implementing political decisions lies with these people. When dealing with al-Qaeda and Iraq, they systematically failed to correct retrospectively obvious analytical judgments and poor operational decisions.

Although my friend never debated, he understands what debate is: strategic analytical argument. Competitors are assigned to mutually-exclusive positions, and objectively evaluate all of the available evidence. Each participant is required to think through the arguments on both sides. They then identify strongest arguments and assemble them into logical cases which they deliver persuasively, and an unbiased evaluator dispassionately renders a judgment. Subsequently, arguments may be reevaluated in light of changed evidence or circumstances, and the participants may switch sides, but continue to argue with equal passion and competence.

My friend identified five failures in the professional conduct of the war on terrorism, all of which plague unskilled debaters: 1) Failure to consider plausible but unconventional interpretations of the available evidence 2) Failure to thoroughly consider alternative means of achieving an agreed-upon goal 3) Failure to re-evaluate strongly-held beliefs in light of new, discrepant evidence 4) Failure to respect and understand the adversary 5) Failure to react to intellectual intimidation and vitriolic disagreement from authority figures with moral courage and strong, evidence-based counter-argument.

When Goldman-Sachs considers an investment, analysts and economists are assigned to Blue and Red teams to debate the question out in front of the decision-makers. No comparable institutionalized process exists in the US intelligence and military communities. Fortunately, we may win these first battles in the 21st Century’s Long War without fixing these problems. But if we do not resurrect a national culture of robust debate on issues of life and death, we will eventually pay a butcher’s bill so grotesquely massive that our losses thus far will seem a bloody pittance. And unfortunately, in war, as in life, as in debate, it is the last blows in the struggle that dictate the outcome – not the first.

For my third and final point, there is no Lombardi-ism, because it deals with the opponent that he couldn’t bring himself to face, that undid all his maxims about strength and courage and made him a coward. The first thing I did when I found out I had cancer was hug my mom and cry. The second thing I did was debate.

According to my doctors and other cancer patients, even patients with treatable disease may face crippling mental obstacles to successful healing. Because of debate, I have been blessedly free of such problems as I struggle to defend my life.  By way of explanation, here is a debate I had in my head in the surgical recovery area of Georgetown University Hospital.

Resolved: I should be angry at the world because the injustice of what has happened to me

Affirmative:

1. Anger at the world over the injustice of my cancer will help provide a coherent explanation for, and emotional response to, being sick

2. Coherent explanations for unpleasant events help make them manageable

3. Attitude will not determine if I survive, but it is one of a very small number of factors under my control. I need a coherent mental response that strengthens my determination to fight

4. Anger is part of what I am feeling right now, and denying that would be counterproductive: feelings that are buried get buried alive. Sometimes they come back as zombies.

Negative:

1 a) Not everything is the result of purposive or coherent causes – some things, including bad things, are the result of random unpleasant occurrences like spontaneous  genetic mutations or freak storms – a man struck by lightning cannot reasonably complain about the unfairness of the event

1b) Attempting to provide a coherent explanation for random events is not always a good thing: superstitions and stereotypes are examples of this.

2) A coherent cause for my cancer would not necessarily improve things. If a doctor comes here to say smoking cigarettes in college caused this , I will feel worse about having made myself sick, not better.

3a) Attitude matters, but a will to fight is not as important a positive and sustainable approach that is consistent with my beliefs and personality.

3b) I am not the kind of person to prefer comfortable illusions over uncomfortable facts

4a) If anger is the difference between me wanting to live and accepting death, I don’t want to live enough to survive this

4b) Anger is just another strategy of denial – I’m actually scared and frustrated at being powerless. Accepting anger buries alive the reality of that fear and my powerlessness in the face of mortality

Just as I did hundreds if not thousands of times at Cal, I planned the debate out in my head, from beginning to end. Then I judged the outcome and decided that the benefits of anger were outweighed by its costs. No more impotent frustration at the unfair world for me - much to the frustration of the hospital social workers and psychiatrists. I had several debates with myself that night. Topics included “Resolved: I should act as if I know I am going to beat this disease,” and “Resolved: I have wasted most of my life until now.”

Vince Lombardi was so scared of cancer that even as it rotted away his gut, he refused to get tested for it. He buried his head in the sand, just as American officials did as internecine strife ripped out the heart of the Iraqi nation, and just as I am daily tempted to do. I have heard and seen a lot of responses to cancer that appear, like most bad ideas, simple and seductive. People get entrapped in these well-intentioned emotional traps, and sometimes they deprive themselves of the tools they need to survive. There but for the grace of God go I: I know that without Cal Debate, I would probably not be capable of fighting off the disease without losing my mind.

It takes hard work to stay healthy and active, engaged with the outside world, employed and sociable while sick. It takes character to face seemingly-endless bombardment with toxic chemical and radiation, nausea, baldness, sores, acne, and pain that cuts right to the bones without collapsing into self-pity and fear. Keeping a family together and sustaining a multi-state, international support system requires teamwork. And keeping up the strength required to survive with dignity requires commitment. Hard work, teamwork, character and commitment are the four pillars of greatness that the Berkeley debate team and its coaches struggle to uphold every day. These values are intrinsically laudable, but they are also effective – I am happy and increasingly healthy: after 2 rounds of radiation and 12 chemotherapy treatments, as of this week, scanners can no longer detect active cancer cells in my body.

Debate is life, debate saves lives, and debate is keeping me alive. Long live UC Berkeley Debate.