At Dominican U in RF last night, Robert Hanning from Columbia U. on confession in the middle ages.  Title led me to expect a socio-cultural explication but he was about close reading of Bocaccio and Chaucer. 

I found the former heavy-handed in his slashing attack on church practice, producing cartoon characters — opera boffo? — none of them credible or noteworthy.  The latter — dear Geoffrey — produced memorable people and made same points with relative understatement.  Subtlety, thy name is not an Italian one.

Considered a q. during post-lecture q&a, where was holy mother church during all this?  Besides indexing Bocaccio.  But H. was not attuned to that, or seemed not to be, or had simply ruled that out a la monograph-style, not to mention journal-ready text with references and attributions right and left.

Appropriate, in that he was keynoting a joint meeting of the Illinois Medieval Assn. and the Midwest body of medievalists, this in DU’s near spanking-new Parmer Hall on west side of burgeoned if not still burgeoning campus. 

From which I exited on Thatcher, by the way, using the easement much disputed by tree-huggers and forest preservers.  The trees did not cry out at me as I hung a left and headed south.

A nice evening, for $10 that included a sip of wine and bite of something beforehand, sitting and watching medievalists chatter in clumps.  A look at the ivory tower, you might say, without prejudice. 

But I had to think about what Ezra Pound would say, he who moved ever in the mainstream of (literary and other) life and preferred jumping to (fascinating, engaging) conclusions.  Takes all kinds.

Oak and Forest Leaves longtime columnist Paul Sassone

needs a lesson in patience, humanity and environmentalism. Perhaps the next time he’s in the checkout line behind a responsible person who brought reusable bags to the store, he should worry less about his melting ice cream and more about the melting polar ice caps.

Says letter writer Carolyn James, complaining about his column [not available on-line] in which he makes fun of people bringing their own bags to the checkout counter for environmental reasons and making him wait.

Yahoo! Melting ice cream vs. melting polar caps!  No contest!

Very cautious Chi Trib story here, about second-graders at Beye School, Oak Park. 

The kids

spent two school days aboard a faux Mayflower ship in their auditorium, braving simulated storms, seasickness and even the birth of a baby.

The pretend Pilgrims . . . kept journals to explore their fears of moving to a new land. . . . .

Before the mock journey, they role-played and kept journals in a similar fashion as American Indians while studying different tribes.

The students also learned how some of the English settlers’ choices harmed indigenous people, examining both bright and tragic aspects of American history.

Many educators are striving to celebrate a more historically accurate Thanksgiving, ditching [sic] the stereotypical Pilgrim-and-Indian stories in favor of true [accurate?] social studies lessons. [Truly s.s. lessons, not faux ones?]

Teachers say a nuanced approach helps debunk popular myths and can add cultural awareness to the holiday. [Cliche hat trick there, dying for expansion and particularization]

“This makes history more real,” said Amber Schweigert, a second-grade teacher at Beye. [Italics added throughout]

Cautious because it tip-toes through minefields of cultural warfare, dropping hints.  The aim may have been to produce “a nice story,” as I heard a city editor speak approvingly many years ago and this writer may have heard a few days ago.  It ends up soft soap, tantalizing and deceptive.

Ron Grossman’s hard-copy, same-page [not web-site]companion piece produces something quite different.  It’s about

a number of Chicagoans who have discovered they are Pilgrim descendants and who gather on the weekend before Thanksgiving for a luncheon (yes, turkey). Someone reads the Mayflower Compact, a kind of mini-constitution the Pilgrims wrote just before landing at Plymouth Rock in 1620. Then the list of its signers is recited:

William Bradford, Myles Standish, John Alden …

As each Pilgrim’s name is called out, his descendants rise.

The experience

“. . . sends shivers up the back of my neck, every time,” [Don] Sherman said. “Hearing the compact reminds me why it’s the first great historical document of our country.”

Grossman:

With only two sentences, the compact expressed a world-shaking idea: Ordinary people can govern themselves. In the 17th century, kings and nobles made the rules; others were to silently follow.

Not so among these settlers. A history lesson follows:

Originally called the Dissenters, [Pilgrims] were known and reviled for thinking outside the box, so to speak. [G. knows what he’s doing; semi-apologizes for radio-speak.]  They disliked what they considered the pompous Church of England and wanted to be ministered to by like-thinking preachers in simple churches. [Clean copy]

So the Dissenters went on a series of wanderings that would give them the name Pilgrims. They went first to what is now the Netherlands, even then an open-minded country. [A long-ago Dutch friend: French get ideas, Dutch have to try them.] Yet toleration presented another problem confronted by every immigrant group in whatever new homeland it chooses.

“Their children were becoming Dutch,” Morony said. “The Dissenters thought of themselves as English.”

They did not howl for bilingualism, whose day had not yet come, but like Huck Finn headed for the territory.

Fearing assimilation, a group of Dissenters planned a second exile: to a place far enough away from England that they could be free of the Church of England and yet still be English. Strangely, that agenda meshed with the thinking of London’s movers-and-shakers.

Late to colonizing, England wanted to catch up. So a scheme was hatched whereby the Pilgrims would be sent to New York as part of a commercial enterprise organized by English investors with the crown’s OK.

And off they went.  The rest is . . . [deleted as cliche] . . .

This from the redoubtable Heather Mac Donald in City Journal tells us what “even playing field” means to some people — equal results, across the board:

As part of its plan to comply with a federal desegregation order now decades old, Tucson’s school district adopted racial quotas in school discipline this summer.

Schools that suspend or expel Hispanic and black students at higher rates than white students will now get a visit from a district “Equity Team” and will be expected to remedy those disparities by reducing their minority discipline rates.

In Oak Park discipline rates are regularly discussed with a view to disparity of punishment.  Objectors to how more often blacks are punished even brought in elected officials from outside Oak Park.  But nothing like this has happened.  No one has called from a quota that I know of.

As for the language abuse embodied in that “playing field” stuff, it’s been lambasted best by George Orwell in his “Politics and the English Language,” in which he notes the role of language in stultifying our processes:

[Our language] becomes ugly and inaccurate because our thoughts are foolish, but the slovenliness of our language makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts.

The ebullient, even bombastic Ezra Pound was even more condemnatory in “A Problem of (Specifically) Style” in 1934:

[A] tolerance for slipshod expression in whatever department of writing gradually leads to chaos . . . and a progressive rottenness of spirit.

In Tucson the pattern seems clear enough:

Tucson’s administrators explain their disciplinary quota pressure on the ground that students removed from class lose valuable learning time, exacerbating the already great ethnic academic achievement gap.

Such thinking ignores the students who are not disrupting class or threatening teachers and who also lose valuable learning time when unruly or violent students remain in the classroom.

Mac Donald adds:

Surely those students have a greater claim to “equity” in school resources than gang members do.

Schools are to look for “root causes” in bad behavior.  Mac Donald:

I can save them some time: the root cause of disparate rates of suspension is disparate rates of bad behavior.

“Single parenting” is the biggest one.

If the Tucson school board wants to publicize the essential role of fathers in raising law-abiding children, it might start solving the problem of disciplinary imbalance.

But until then, it should let schools resolve their discipline problems in a color-blind fashion, without worrying about a visit from an “Equity Team.”

It’s “the content of their character,” as Martin Luther King said in his “I have a dream” speech.

Rev. Jesse Jackson wants no part of that.  He calls invoking King in this context is “intellectual terrorism.”  Orwellian, right?