Gonzo betrayed — a review of Cross-X by Joe Miller

For Marcus Leach, his team mates, and his coach and in memory of Eugene Parks, my old debate team mate…

…and for Joe Miller, whose work I respect and to whom I wish nothing but the best.

AND, GENTLE READER, IF I WERE YOU I WOULD BUY THIS BOOK AS A CHRISTMAS PRESENT FOR SOMEONE WHO IS INTO DEBATE, FORENSICS, EDUCATIONAL POLICY OR PROGRESSIVE POLITICS…

Joe,

My tardy but honest and mixed review is here:

I enjoyed Cross-X but it was a difficult read for someone like me who is more comfortable with Robert Parker and Carl Hiaasen than I am with Jonathan Kozol. I felt quite emotional while I was putting the review together and the Joni Mitchell YouTube bit may be a little over the top, but “Both Sides Now” and the two sides to every story nature of debate made sense to me while I was composing the post.

Part of the emotion was borne from the nagging feeling I had throughout the narrative that American adversarial bullshit is not going to get any of us where we need to go. The discovery of Paulo Freire at the end of the book redeemed it all for me somehow.

Anyway, I’ve called it “Gonzo Betrayed” because I was expecting a new journalism piece and ended up reading more of a social science case study a la Kozol. Indeed, i think you are a strong voice in the heartland and I think that your book won’t sell very well because it lacks the requisite occasional glimpse of cleavage, creamy thigh, and macho posturing. There are no spy satellites, no aircraft carriers, no dogs, drugs or narrow escapes at the border. Nobody even pukes much on the debate bus.

It is still a good book and I look forward to your next one.

Frank

Protagoras suggested that “in every question there were two sides to the argument exactly opposite to one another.” The dude was a Sophist, and sophistry is the foundation of competitive debate. The young debaters in Miller’s book are at times ambivalent about “the game,” about the need to be able to argue pro or con on any proposition, but they wade through that swamp and as time goes by they emerge with a creative solution that works for them. On the way, Miller abandons entirely the trope of journalistic objectivity. The way he wrote himself into the story, he put me in mind of a nerdy Hunter Thompson, or perhaps the early Tom Wolfe. But Miller is earnest and neither of those gonzo new journalists could be labeled earnest, so perhaps he is in a category by himself.

It takes balls for a white writer to tackle the subjects of race and power. In Cross-X Miller demonstrates some cultural competence, but the white-liberal-supporting-the-inner-city-black-kids thing is always present. The subject matter is hugely complex as well: the lives of the students in the context of debate schedules, debate strategies, debate rules, Kansas City politics, school board politics, and federal court rulings. The new journalism classics of the 1960s such as Hells Angels – a Strange and Terrible Saga and Radical Chic and Mau Mauing the Flak Catchers could have informed Miller’s style. Sadly, they did not. By abandoning journalistic distance the book becomes a personalization of the inner city minority student debate experience by a white middle class man.

Miller was not writing to the beat of Thompson and Wolfe. His intentions and focus are more informed by Jonathan Kozol. Kozol asks, “How can our society expect to survive when under-privileged urban children are not even being given the chance to compete on an equal footing with their suburban counterparts?” Miller does something about that. The Kansas City Central High School debate team, under-privileged on many levels and victims of American racism, have been supported and empowered by their coach, Jane Rinehart, and their chronicler, Joe Miller. And in that context, Cross-X has found a genre. Gonzo journalism is characterized by intensity, strong voice, and humor. Miller brings intensity to the work and a strong voice that ebbs and flows, but none of the deflective humor of the gonzo journalist. He has written more of a social science case study populated by real people with real lives, and in the end he goes all Heisenberg on us and becomes part of the story. But that doesn’t detract from the objectivity of his narrative vis a vis topics such as policy decisions by the MSHSAA or the nature of judging and competition at white bastions of secondary educational privilege such as Billy Frist’s alma mater, Montgomery Bell Academy and New Trier High School.

Paulo Freire provides the capstone for the narrative when some of Ms. Rinehart’s debaters discover the Brazilian educationalist and take his message to heart. Freire’s “Pedagogy of the Oppressed” informs these debaters and raises the stakes for them from the mundane adversarial bullshit that dominates American oligarchic racist culture to the humble dialogic that Freire espouses.

Cross-X is a compelling book on many levels. Anybody with an interest in competitive debate, national competition and how the State of Missouri’s school systems fit into that structure will enjoy this book. The book reveals the emotional and the structural issues facing the debate coach at Kansas City Central High School and the effect of the bureaucracy on the debaters themselves. I think it would have been improved by some narrative distance, by the writer sharing the story regardless of his part in the story. I think that by reading it I improved myself a little in the elusive area of cultural competence. But, like Joe Miller, I’m just another white guy.

“Cross-X is one of the most original and compelling narratives about race, class and education that I have ever read. Herein, Joe Miller proves himself both a first-rate storyteller, and a keen observer of the way in which urban communities (and the people who live there) have been decimated by racism and economic apartheid. The young men and women at the heart of this volume, who show their resolve in struggling against a culture of intellectual elitism within the world of competitive debate, and the society at large, are heroes in every sense of the word; and Miller, by telling their story, has done a great service to us all.”
—Tim Wise, author of White Like Me: Reflections on Race from a Privileged Son and Affirmative Action: Racial Preference in Black and White