BIAS: (A True Story.) CHAPTER ONE.

BIAS: (A True Story.)

Chapter One: How I Became a K Debater…

By avenue of a series of fortuitous coincidences, I managed to restore my career as a competitive debater by joining the team at Palomar Community College, under the prestigious tutelage of Brandan Whearty, a National Hero in the Forensics Community. For those who do not know: the term “Forensics” refers not exclusively to the analysts whom we hire to find criminals via indirect evidence, at greater personal risk to ourselves in case they might prove to be wrong (as in the situation wherein we have been framed deliberately because Forensics is ubiquitous to the same degree as it is popular, and it draws its popularity from its ubiquity, and to the same degree that it is ubiquitous literally ANY crook can figure out how to manipulate it, even Iago from Othello).

Forensics is all so a term for the Art of Rhetoric. The commonality between the two disciplines owes primarily to the notion of unveiling the Truth and capturing a Villain.

It is of tremendous irony therefore that I began my return to the world of competitive debate via a turning-away-from the entire concept of “Truth”.

The story begins in a High School Psychology Class. An associate (who will be referred to here by the pseudonym King Bear III) had been assigned to keep a Dream Journal, and he knew by avenue of either word-of-mouth or social networking that I was in the habit of doing so. With respect bordering on reverence he asked me to guide him through the Dimension of the Unknown this one time. I obliged. On a Wednesday I think it was that I received a phone call from him. I had no specific method for Dream Journaling. The Jungian School was hard to come by, and I had to contend with psychiatric Nazis who insisted that DESPITE the overwhelming body of anecdotal evidence in Carl Jung’s favour the old Swissman’s theories had been “disproven”. (In short: one had no reason to ACTUALLY READ Jung, even to learn his differences from Freud, whose enduring influence on a Subconscious Level [even in the minds of his contemporary critics and cynics] has created the dismal Reality that he had posited, all most as a self-fulfilling prophecy. It is all so for this reason – that Jung’s view was of a surpassing beauty to Freud’s – that Jung has historically been marginalized.)

Nonetheless I mustered what courage I had, and I withdrew my own Red Book from its position upon my bookshelf. This tome I had purchased for a slim price that year, and it would continue to hold value for me that was priceless. Its jacket was supple as snakeskin, and it was adorned on its backside by a red sticker that had been given to me by a friend named Brianna Love. The sticker, which would all ways peel somewhat from the edges, contained upon it the depiction of a young, bespectacled lady, drawn in Japanese Manga fashion and printed in white ink exclusively, upholding two peace signs with her fingers.

I cracked the tome at random and, if memory serves, read directly from the first entry I saw, the one that I had opened to. Within this dream I referenced an annual High School Debate Tournament that I recalled from my years at the same school that Bear still attended. It was one of my few dreams, if not my only one, to make specific reference to this Tournament at the time. It felt odd for me to convey it to him. There was even a brief moment, like a breath taken between runs on a wind instrument in the orchestra, that I omitted that detail, for it had aroused in me a feeling that I could classify as neither embarrassment nor fear, and if I’d had to be defensive I would have said it was embarrassing to cling to this detail from the now outdated “past”.

It was precisely this detail of course that caught the interest of King Bear III. He had been at the time the President of the Debate Team at the school. I might have known this by then, though I’d forgotten. At any rate: he did not hesitate to invite me then and there, over the phone, upon the conclusion of my recollection, to act as a volunteer judge for the same Annual Tournament that my dream had made reference to. It was being held that very same weekend.

Dm.A.A.