Read Online Beet by Roger Rosenblatt - Free Book Online Page A

at the back of Jethro’s head for the past thirty years, decides to blow it off, followed by his own. In this season, one recalls only one’s mistakes and wrongdoings. Large quantities of sleeping pills change hands, as do copies of Ethan Frome. Phone calls are placed to high school sweethearts of years past. Viewers are glued to C-Span.
    Driving back from Bollovate’s, Peace figured he had seven weeks to fulfill the trustees’ assignment—less than that, actually, since the Christmas holidays started on December 21, and final exams were the week before that. The board had asked for the report before the end of term. Counting backward, he calculated it had to be ready for the full faculty meeting scheduled for December 19, as Matha Polite had guessed, when it would be voted up or down. Yet in this case, down would not be acceptable. Down meant down for the ship. The new curriculum, whatever it might be, not only had to win the support of the Beet College faculty, but the support had to be all-out—a daunting task, since there were more political constituencies on the faculty than professors.
    Parents Weekend was coming up, along with Veterans Day. Then, too, there was a whole set of new college holidays that would intervene between now and the end of term, and on which no committee work, or work of any kind, could be done.
    Sensitivity Day, always scheduled for early November, was established to memorialize the community triumph in 1998, when especially sensitive college faculty, students, and Beet citizens (the number totaled eleven)—led by Professor Sensodyne—won their bitter fight against the town council to replace the Slow Children street signs with Please Be Careful As Younger People May Be Entering the Roadways signs. The group determined that the former signs conveyed a “hurtful insult” to mentally disadvantaged youngsters everywhere, and, after a five-year battle of attrition, prevailed. For the council there were two issues at stake. One was that the proposal was “horseshit,” and the other, that the extra words on the warnings would increase the size of the signs and the steel and paint used in their manufacture, and would cost the town an additional $28,000 a year. But the opposing group asked, “What price sensitivity?”
    The answer turned out to be, “Higher than you think,” since the additional $28,000 had to come out of the fund for a special wing for the mentally disadvantaged at a nearby children’s hospital.
    â€œIt’s my favorite holiday,” Manning told Peace every year. “I celebrate by torturing small animals in front of toddlers, and vice versa.”
    On Sensitivity Day some years back, Manning counted how many times Hitler’s name had been invoked. He’d reckoned it was twice more than during the Third Reich.
    There were panels on reparation payments proposed for any people ever harmed by the U.S. government. The list of injurees began with African-American descendents of slaves and was soon expanded to include Koreans, the Vietnamese, Granadans, Panamanians, Bosnians, Cubans, the French and Indians, the British, and as an afterthought, the Germans and Japanese. There were seminars on how to address older people, shorter people, taller people, and lately, poorly-thought-of people who heretofore had been overlooked, such as dentists, lawyers, airline employees, congressmen, senators, cable TV installers, building contractors, and insensitive people themselves. Journalists were on the list initially, but Professor Lipman persuaded the group that to call journalists not-well-thought-of would be “hurtful.”
    On Sensitivity Day this year, Manning once again planned to press his motion to add white Protestants from New Canaan, Connecticut, to the poorly-thought-of list, which had been tabled last year for being “frivolous.” He was delighted to learn it was expected to pass with enthusiasm. And a