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In This Issue

• First Aid Failure
• A Recipe for Delicious Choke-O Puffs
• Senior Giving '06 to Fund Expansion
• Letters to the Feditor
• When That All-Night Nominee Still Only Gets a C
• Less Well-Known Choking Placards
• Sexual Perversion in Legoland
• Drink-Or-Treat!
• Minutes from the Debate Between Yes and No
• Silly Catchphrase Spreads Like Plague
• How Fight Club Ruined My Teenhood
• The Green Bodice of My Love
• Can't You Smell That Smell?
• Not Your Average Science Fair Project
• The Adventures of Snakey the Snake
• THEY Watch
• The Staff of 21.3

Michael Bredin

Resolved: Yes.

Speaker for the Affirmative: The venerable Oxford American Dictionary defines this grand and momentous disputation’s resolution thusly: “an affirmative answer or decision.”  Shortly, my opponent will attempt to assert that the resolution is somehow flawed, that no such answer or decision is the case, that in fact, no.  I needn’t even ask you to scrutinize the argumentation that will accompany that laughable proclamation; it is dismissible on its face.

    Let us examine the idea that “yes.”  It is, of course, supremely natural.  The Sun rises, the Earth rotates, the sky remains aloft, yes.  Furthermore, who is to say anything else?  Who is my opponent to contradict flippantly this most reasonable of notions, this troika of alphabetical elements, this combination of marks chosen by, one can only guess, God to denote affirmation and all that is good?

    The issue is not a torturous one of optimism or pessimism.  It is rather nearly insulting in the simplicity of its appeal that we simply open our eyes to facts whose dispute would appear a farcical mockery of reason to even the most feeble-minded orangutan swinging slack-jawed through the jungles of Borneo.

Speaker for the Negative: It was the sui generis Mark Twain who said that “naked people have little or no influence on society.”  Similarly, people without the faculties of reason to allow them a glimpse into the fact that clearly “no” are rightly cast aside by their more numerous compatriots, left to wallow in the festering cesspit of their own contented ignorance.

    “No” is the time-honored rallying cry of the morally certain and the strong willed.  Where does that leave “yes,” that tripartite hodgepodge to which my right good adversary so feebly clings?  His position lies supplicant, begging to be spared by simple, unadorned mercy the fatal strike of ratiocination.  How fitting an end to the anthem of history’s sycophants and apologists, the shamefully acquiescent dregs of its most ignominious recesses; it pleads for an acquiescence on the part of its foe, a lapse of scruples at this supremely critical juncture.  No, no, we say, a thousand times no!

Rebuttal for the Affirmative: I am more than a little embarrassed.  Had I known the depth of my opponent’s impotence, I would have written my vindication with the kid gloves his stance deserves, to scuttle the unprecedented trouncing he has so miserably sustained.

    He offered one thousand iterations of his assertion, leaving an opening so obvious that I hesitate to step through for fear that it may be a trap.  It is with profound incredulity at how facilely the negative argument has been blown over, then, that I say one million times yes.  Nay, to tighten the noose (and with a measure of remorse over the devastating impact of my assault on his intellectual ramparts), I confidently offer infinity times yes.

Rebuttal for the Negative: Some day soon, young psychiatrists will study my opponent’s tortured prose to gain insights into the deteriorating minds of the delusional.  I won’t bother with niceties or the formalities of mercy before I drive a final stake through the rapidly cooling corpse of the only few words that he could think to lash together in his adorably naïve crack at refutation: infinity plus one thousand times no.  That is, of course, many times more than what he offered in the way of yes, and so my point stands unscathed.