Postcards from the edge

WHEN we first learnt that The Irish Times was sending us on a debating tour of Texas, Oregon and Alaska we anticipated the trip of a lifetime. But no amount of time spent watching re runs of Dallas or standing in the ice box of our refrigerators could have fully prepared us for the adventure that lay ahead.

Our first stop was Houston, a giant sprawling city where you can literally smell the wealth in the blanket of oil fumes that settles over the suburbs on still days. It soon became apparent where most of that wealth was being spent when we visited the Galleria, an upmarket shopping mall the size of a small town where even the ugly people were beautiful and the beautiful people were out of this world.

Shopping in Texas is a constant battle against the small army of boutique assistants. Each one wants to be your personal friend and feels compelled by some unknown corporate force to ask you what kind of a day you are having every 30 seconds or so.

Tired of shopping, we trekked on to the Alamo in San Antonio, the site of America's most famous battle where in a bootleg version of our own 1916 Rising, a handful of Texans gained immortality, along with an early death, by standing up to the might of the Mexican army.

The hyperbole of our tour guide reached skyscraper heights as he explained how Davy Crockett's men had held off the entire population of Mexico. From what I could gather, nobody had paid much attention to the Alamo until its defenders were massacred and someone realised its potential as an altar upon which to whip up enough nationalism to finally defeat Mexico. Now, in an unintentional mood of detente, the Alamo shrine is surrounded by Mexican restaurants and does a busy trade in "Remember the Alamo" tea towels that are made in Spain. Still in search of the elusive spirit of Texas we moved on to Austin, the state capital, where the studious atmosphere of quiet paperwork and policymaking was somewhat spoiled by the large lightbulbs on the ceiling of the Senate which spelt out "TEXAS".

Back to Houston and the NASA Space Centre, where the futuristic images of giant space stations seemed only slightly more outlandish than downtown Houston where an underground city has been constructed below the skyscrapers for their workers to shop and recreate in, thereby leaving the streets above all but abandoned to the alien inhabitants of the inner city who precariously survive on another planet to Houston's rich.

Houston's Rice University consists of a series of petite Oxbridgestyle colleges between which the limousines of its millionaire benefactors can sometimes be heard purring.

Rice has a reputation as a top academic hothouse and its resources, which included a 70,000 seater stadium, seemed almost unbelievable for a campus of 6,000 people. However, it is an investment which Rice's ambitious students repay with interest, managing to squeeze in a theatre festival and an impressive array of extra curricular activities, in between sitting exams and cashing donors' cheques.

Yet I was left with the uneasy feeling that despite its impressive facilities, something was missing from Rice compared to an Irish campus.

In our two debates in Houston we beat the American team and the Rice team by, respectively, proposing censorship of the internet and an end to violence as a means of combating political oppression, relying mainly on our carefully tuned Irish accents to sway the crowd.

A stopover in St Louis gave us an opportunity to see the flip side of life in the land of the silver dollar.

Within a few minutes of our arrival there, a street hustler tried to talk us out of the few dollars we had escaped Texas with. But as soon as he discovered that we were Irish students, he apologised for trying to con us, introduced himself as "Geoff" and gave us an impromptu tour of the city.

We invited him out to dinner and during the meal he explained that as an African American who, along with so many of his contemporaries, had lost his job when his company downsized he had little to look forward to except a life on the streets.

Geoff explained that his dream in life was to visit Europe as he believed it to be a place where his colour would not matter. We decided not to query his illusion as it did not seem probable that he would ever have the air fare to find out the hard way. Geoff's sobering image was still in our minds as we climbed up the St Louis Arch which towers up beside the Mississippi and is the national monument to America's Expansion.

One of the products of that expansion was Oregon State, which today is a psychedelic mix of redneck Republican strongholds uneasily coexisting with hippy satellite towns that are still orbiting planet Woodstock in soft drug induced circles.

Oregon was founded the hard way, by pioneers dragging their belongings along the Oregon trail and today Oregonians rightly carry their pride in their state with just as much determination.

Oregon's breathtakingly beautiful landscape was copied from the same post card as Ireland's, consisting, as it does, of lush countryside and rolling hills. But it conceals some serious social problems and, in a microcosm of America as a whole they are ill dealt with by Oregon's politicians who, appropriately enough, speak in postcard greeting style sound bytes.

Many of the students we spoke to were worried about crime and had personal experiences to relate. At night, students in Oregon's Willamette College are given an escort to walk them home. They were also concerned about the increasing profile of the militia movement. In one television interview, I saw a militia leader who was convinced that Dutch United Nations peacekeeping troops were about to invade his farm.

Most militia members are genuinely patriotic, but tend to be poorly educated - and sometimes just plain poor - leaving them susceptible to claims that the Inland Revenue Service is leading a global conspiracy against them.

The militias are also armed to the teeth and I suddenly felt relieved that our own farmers have limited their battle against tax to herding a few sheep into the lobby of the Department of Agriculture.

PORTLAND is a city with an outstanding nightlife and we soon stumbled across the world's only 24 hour Church of Elvis, a building which conveniently opened from noon to 3.00 a.m.

After paying our respects at the altar, we were presented with an official identity card by the officiating priestess which bore the legend: "The bearer of this card is a saint of the Church of Elvis. He or she may even be Elvis. Please treat them accordingly." Whether viewed as a genuine religious experience or merely as a means of removing tourists from their dollars, the shrine clearly possessed miraculous powers. I know that I for one will treasure my $18 glow in the dark, fluorescent pink, 24 hour Church of Elvis T shirt for the rest of my life.

As for the debate, we managed to convince the audience in Portland College that "American culture is an oxymoron" by exposing it as no more than a cliche driven, fast food style culture, of a kind that we Europeans would never stand for.

We proceeded to celebrate our win by downing a few Coca Colas in McDonalds.

So to Seattle, a city where the skyscrapers and Space Needle Tower reach crazily towards the heavens and Bill Gates is busy building a palace for his family to live in which will, allegedly, includes a garage for 40 cars.

Seattle offered us beer so weak, if it were served in Ireland fluoride would be added and it would be used as tap water, and a business district where every transaction was performed with an almost reverential hush, including the bank robbery we walked right into the middle of and yet managed not to notice until the police arrived to congratulate us for keeping our nerve. On discovering what had happened, I panicked and fled out of the building.

Where better to flee to than Alaska, the final step of our tour. Alaska is a state founded on Yukon gold and is now prospering on its black equivalent - oil.

As a result, it still possesses a certain get rich quick frontier mentality, which may one day endanger its unspoilt landscape even more seriously than the Exon Valdez did a few short years ago.

Alaska is the land of the reindeer sausage, a tasty morsel just as long as you remember to spit out the antlers before swallowing. It also retains an interesting collection of state laws, my own personal favourite being the one that requires prisons to provide 12 frisbees per 100 inmates.

As if all the frisbees you can throw were not enough, originally Alaska was regarded by its inhabitants as an untrammelled paradise of freedom where even growing marijuana was legal. But recently, soft drugs have been banned and Alaskans have woken up to the threat to their environment that a feeling of inviolability poses.

Anchorage looks like a Christmas card come to life, an image carefully fostered by the City, which encourages residents to keep their external Christmas decorations up until March.

The state pays each Alaskan $2,000 a year just for living there - a somewhat unnecessary gesture given Alaskans love of their native state, but the only way it can think of to dispose of the huge premiums it receives from oil companies for drilling rights.

Most of Alaska's inhabitants are not natives but "outsiders" who have moved up from the "lower 48" states, as they are called. It attracts two main types of people - both of whom are trying to escape in their own way.

IRST, those who, in the spirit of the original pioneers, want to live their lives with as little interference as possible from the government or anyone else, and who feel that Alaska is the best place to hide from any invading Dutch peacekeepers.

Second, there are the temporary workers and eco tourists who, having once set eyes on Alaska, fall in love with it and can never bring themselves to leave. A third category that almost came into being was that of Irish debaters running short on dollars and high on gift lists from people back home who wanted a souvenir from Alaska and who were unlikely to accept the explanation that their packet of snow had melted.

The highlight of our trip was an unexpected invitation to go cross country dog sleding with a competitor from the sleding World Cup. It was an exhilarating experience and a terrifying one too as the dogs could accelerate the sled as if it were a jet engine and bring it around corners tighter than any Formula One car.

The Alaskan debaters were confident brilliant orators who gave us our closest call of the tour and we were left with the impression that Alaskans were more than capable of using their isolation and uniqueness as an advantage rather than a liability.

Our reception from the Alaskan crowd was overwhelming and we somewhat embarrassingly found ourselves having to sign autographs for some of the school children who had turned up. When you leave Alaska, only one question remains unanswered - how soon can you return?

So how does Irish and American debating compare? In America's West Coast universities, debating is an academic subject which usually forms part of a faculty called Speech and Communications, replete with professors of debating and debating coaches.

Students can attain grades by attending a certain number of tournaments a year. In America there is no real concept of debates as public entertainment. Only debaters attend debating meetings, or what are really private practice sessions.

The Irish experience of 400 to 500 students in a lecture theatre being entertained by debaters is alien to the States. You cannot compare the two. A hobby here versus an academic programme there. But one factor is common to both, a love of getting up on your feet and debating issues, along with all of the thought, teamwork and adrenaline that accompanies it.