4月1号起中国将对现行消费税进行调整,高尔夫球及球具、高档手表、游艇和大排量汽车等高档消费品将被征以重税。  不过，这奢侈品的概念，到底由谁来界定？下面这个List好像反映的更大众一些，看来，“奢侈”这样东西，还是仁者见仁，智者见智了。

 

 《福布斯》顶级奢侈品牌排行榜

— the Liberty University debate team. The most interesting thing about modern Lynchburg，Virginia is that Liberty consistently produces one of the nation's great collegiate debate programs. This season Liberty is closing in on an unprecedented sweep — first place in the rankings in all three national college debate groups: the American Debate Association, the Cross Examination Debate Association and the National Debate Tournament.

 

Two men are responsible for this improbable success. One is Liberty's founder, the Rev. Jerry Falwell, who has spared no effort to make his school into a national debate power. The other is the team's head coach, Brett O'Donnell.

 

"We expect to double our size in the next 15 years," Falwell told me. Falwell, at 72, has a taste for expansion that seems undiminished. We were sitting in his wood-paneled office on the Liberty campus. He swiveled to a desktop computer and, with surprising dexterity, called up next year's enrollment numbers — 21,678 applicants for 3,200 places in the freshman class. "If I had the money and the staff, we could enroll 200,000," he said with a beatific smile.

 

This enthusiasm is expressed in practical ways. Liberty's program has five full-time coaches and a budget of half a million dollars. And in college debate, money talks. Since its inception in 1980, the Liberty program has won 15 national-rankings championships.

 

O'Donnell has a budget for scholarships, but his recruiting is severely circumscribed by the school's requirement that students be professing Christians.

"The coaching staff here looks at tapes of the best prep-school debaters in the country," he says. "A lot of them, unfortunately from our point of view, wouldn't fit in here." A few years ago, O'Donnell tried to sign up a debater he met while coaching at a summer camp in Michigan, only to discover that the kid was Jewish.

 

By senior year, only three or four are left, competing at the varsity level.The survivors see themselves as an intellectual elite. "Reverend Falwell says, 'We're No. 1, and Harvard is like No. 4 or something,' "

 

The rules of college debate require teams to argue at each tournament both sides of an annual, nationally chosen topic. This year's is "Resolved: The United States federal government should substantially increase diplomatic and economic pressure on the People's Republic of China in one or more of the following areas: trade, human rights, weapons nonproliferation, Taiwan."

This is not a topic that presents ideological or religious problems to the Liberty squad, but that has not always been the case. "A few years ago," O'Donnell recalls, "the topic dealt with the right of privacy. That means, among other things, abortion. The question arose, can we let our students argue the pro side of the case? Some conservative Christian schools decided that they couldn't argue both sides of certain issues. Bob Jones University wound up dropping policy debating."

 

O'Donnell and his coaches scout the other teams. Liberty knew that one of its opponents in Annapolis would probably argue that the Chinese should be pressured because they discriminate against their Muslim minority. In the van on the four-hour drive there, debaters rehearsed responses, using a special lingo.

"They pull the genocide card," one said, "we come back with Heidegger."

"Then blam, Erich Fromm."

"Right. Setting up an accusation of Holocaust triv."

"Holocaust what?" asked O'Donnell.

"Triv. Trivialization."

"Don't use shorthand," O'Donnell said. "Judges don't like it."

He said this gently; O'Donnell has an easy, first-name relationship with his debaters ("I hate being called coach"), and he is not much of a disciplinarian, at least by Liberty standards. Team members, like all students, are obliged to follow the Liberty Way. No alcohol, tobacco or drugs are permitted. (Students are subject to random testing.) On the road the team stays in hotels that have cable TV, but students aren't permitted to watch movies rated R, NC-17 or X. There are romantic couples on the squad, but they are forbidden to do more than hold hands.

 

For tournaments, O'Donnell maintains a strict dress code: men must wear neckties, women must wear dresses or skirts with stockings, or slacks. All debaters are required to keep up a 3.0 grade average — a standard that has cost him at least one good prospect this season. And, of course, no dairy products are allowed on game days. "Milk loosens the mucus in the throat, and that makes it harder to speak quickly," he explains.

 

Debaters research their own arguments, practicing once or twice a week by scrimmaging under the supervision of an assistant coach, who tapes the sessions and then reviews and critiques them to point out mistakes. Some of these are simple things — speech tics like "you know" or "I mean." But coaching also involves instilling O'Donnell's debate theory. "The trick is to persuade the audience," he explained to me. "It's psychological, and it rests in Aristotle's theory of enthymeme. Aristotle saw that pure logic can't carry a public argument. You need to make the audience go along with you. You do that by leaving out a premise the audience will add itself.

 

"For example, if you are trying to convince senior citizens to invest in something, you emphasize the stability of the investment. You don't have to convince seniors that stability is in their interest. They already know that. When they connect what you are proposing to what they already know, you have them arguing with you instead of against you. That's what we teach our kids."

Quick speaking hardly captures the velocity of collegiate debate. Varsity debaters talk at 350 to 400 words a minute — about the speed of a fast auctioneer. Only experienced judges — most of whom are coaches from neutral schools — can actually follow the argument. For this reason, debate isn't a spectator sport. Sitting in a classroom at Annapolis for the opening debate of the tournament, a match between Liberty and Trinity University, I could make out only random bursts of words: "Chinese. . .production facilities . . . economic consequences. . .freely elected. . .patient. . .consequences. . .targets. . .moratorium. . .nuclear winter. . .human rights.. . ."

O'Donnell calls debate "a game of the mind," but it is also a sport that requires strength and stamina. Contests last 92 minutes, and each debater on each two-person team speaks three times — opening arguments, cross-examination and closing arguments — for a total of 23 minutes. At some tournaments, teams have five matches a day.

Debaters gulp air like competitive swimmers. Melissa Hurter, a senior from Huntsville, Ala., talked at high speed for nine full seconds between breaths (she and her partner Lindsey Hoban, a senior from Lake Ariel, Pa., keep in shape by playing wind instruments). The Trinity debaters sucked air after only five seconds and sounded as if they were drowning. Liberty won handily.

There is a tactical logic to speed-talking. Arguments — even nonsensical or irrelevant arguments — must be rebutted. Those left unanswered count against you. The faster you talk, the more arguments you can make, and the better your chance to rack up points. Debaters carry their ammunition, files of every possible argument and rebuttal, in 14-gallon plastic tubs.

The emphasis on words per minute presents Liberty with another challenge. Debate is generally a male sport; Liberty tends to be an exception. Many of its best debaters are, like Hurter, Southerners who come from a culture that frowns on fast-talking women. They compete against self-assured, big-city Northern boys who have been arguing since the playground.

 

To safeguard his program, O'Donnell has embarked on a campaign to raise a $10 million endowment. More than 60 of Liberty's ex-debaters are now lawyers; some are doing very well. When he isn't coaching or recruiting, O'Donnell spends an increasing amount of time with them, trying to turn nostalgia and team spirit into hard cash.

 

O'Donnell also has ambitions that go beyond debate.O'Donnell's first assignment was to analyze John Kerry's previous debates from the primaries and earlier elections. He did the same with John Edwards's tapes. The results, according to Bush's chief media adviser, Mark McKinnon, were "very good." McKinnon's company, Maverick Media, put O'Donnell on the payroll.

"The guy has great chops," McKinnon told me. "He knows more about presidential debates than anyone I've ever talked to."

O'Donnell drafted a paper that served as a basis for Bush-Kerry predebate technical negotiations. He conferred with Bush's campaign manager, Ken Mehlman, in almost daily telephone conferences. O'Donnell was made part of two debate subgroups, one charged with anticipating Kerry's lines of attack, the other with devising ways of turning the tables.

 

O'Donnell has since lost his amateur standing. After the 2004 election, he founded his own consulting company, O'Donnell and Associates Ltd.

 

In the meantime, O'Donnell is focusing on more realistic possibilities. He takes his team into the National Debate Tournament in Evanston, Ill., on March 24. Then, win or lose, he has another season to prepare for. Some talented junior-varsity kids will be moving up. A couple of very promising recruits are coming from Ohio and Florida. And best of all, there will be crop of novices from nowhere, willing young Christians eager for Lynchburg's minister of debate to teach them the art of fast talking for the greater glory of God and Liberty.