A policy debate is fast
Speakers are lightning quick
They blaze through words upon the page
The spit is flying thick
The shiny words all highlighted
They say they’re argument
But words I see in blue and green
Aren’t any meanings lent
The colored page is beautiful
Splattered in colors bright
But when you read unhighlighted
Something just isn’t right
The things authors are said to say
They really kind of don’t
But said at auctioneer’s high speed
Catch all the flaws you won’t
And if your friend from Tennessee
Who’s rather smart and bright
Decides to listen in on you
He’ll ask, “are you alright?”
“I didn’t understand a word,
Well, all except for one
I caught a bit or two about
A human extinction”
“But what was the debate about?
What was your cool topic?
How do you win with a tough judge?
What args are strategic?”
And with those words you’ll have to say
The truth and nothing less
And so you’ll say what the plan was
The source of that whole mess
“The aff team said the US must
Adopt a policy
To change the place that we would plant
A single redwood tree”
“And if they did, we argued that
It’d start great power war
Then nukes would fly and all would die
In blood and guts and gore”
Now this is news to your dear friend
‘Cause he caught not a thing
While you were busy talking fast
In oddly named spreading
The jargon quick he did not get
Perms are a mystery
The warrants that were dropped on case
Were very hard to see
And if he knew the authors quals
He’d have a heart attack
The reason for strange points was that
Our author was a quack
In every round it is the same
With death for all contrived
There is no fix for the huge mess
Smarter people have tried
Cause that’s the way that tourney’s go
Good teams and bad equate
There’s nothing we can do ‘bout it
It’s policy debate