|
|
May 18, 2013
|
|
|
|
 The Thanksgiving Wars? No ThanksPosted on Nov 25, 2010Happy Thanksgiving. That is not a political sentiment. Yet this year, everything seems partisan and even this most unifying of national holidays has become an occasion for ideological warfare. The idea now popular in conservative circles is that all past interpretations of Thanksgiving are tainted either by malign forms of multiculturalism—did those white colonists really need help from the Indians to get their act together?—or by dangerous inclinations to socialism. Some of our friends on the ascending right wing insist that it’s a big lie to use Thanksgiving to celebrate how the Pilgrims pulled together and, with the help of God, prospered through communal assistance and a little help from their new neighbors. They buy the part about the Almighty but insist this holiday is primarily about the virtues of American capitalism and how free enterprise saved those folks at Plymouth. The historian Rush Limbaugh has been pushing this view since 1993 when he published the definitive account in his book “See, I Told You So.” Year after year, he’s used his talk show to teach us that the settlers suffered because, at the outset, their land and their homes “belonged to the community.” As Limbaugh exclaimed on a 2007 show, “They were collectivists!” The colony’s governor, William Bradford, saw that this destructive nonsense was failing, Limbaugh instructs us, took “bold action” and “assigned a plot of land to each family to work and manage, thus turning loose the power of the marketplace.” The moral of the story: “Long before Karl Marx was even born, the Pilgrims had discovered and experimented with what could only be described as socialism. And what happened? It didn’t work!” Advertisement But the rise of the tea party movement has forced everyone to pay attention to such dissident notions, and thus did The New York Times’ Kate Zernike helpfully chronicle the Thanksgiving thinking of the Limbaugh School and the much earlier right-wing accounts on which it is based. She also pointed out that the actual story of the Pilgrims was, well, a bit more complicated than Limbaugh and his philosophical forebears would like it to be. This led him to sniff on his Tuesday broadcast that Zernike’s point was that “hey, socialism wasn’t that bad for the Pilgrims.” That’s not what she said, but never mind. Now I want to be honest: Given what I do for a living and my own inclinations, I’m perfectly capable of politicizing all manner of issues, too. It’s also true that national holidays almost necessarily invite this sort of debate. We are, after all, celebrating something, and it shouldn’t surprise us that we’d tangle over exactly what that something is. Besides, having grown up in a politically diverse extended family, I have fond memories of Thanksgiving dinners being the staging ground for many a raucous debate. Why not argue about the holiday itself? Yet putting aside the dangers of allowing ideology to distort the facts of our present and our past, we seem to have lost our sense of balance as a country. This argument over Thanksgiving strikes me as a symptom of our failure to acknowledge that the American story is not all one thing or all another. It is, instead, a tale of a healthy and ongoing tension between our love of individualism and our reverence for community. Capitalism is part of our story, but so is solidarity and the idea that no one ever really “goes it alone.” Our rights are embedded in a web of social bonds and obligations that enrich us. We have a responsibility to take care of ourselves and our families, but also to look out for one another. And we hope that if we run into trouble, someone, maybe even the entire community, will look out for us. Such homely sentiments, edited down a bit, could be stitched on a holiday sampler. These are the values not of an angry and radical individualism but of a tempered individualism that is truer to the Pilgrims’ faith and our national experience. I’ll grant the tea party historians the virtues of those industrious farmers if they’ll grant me that these early Americans believed passionately in a common good and the promise of mutual assistance. Then we can sit down together, enjoy our turkey or leftovers, and argue about everything else. E.J. Dionne’s e-mail address is ejdionne(at)washpost.com.  TAGS:
|
Letter From Birmingham Jail
Email 
Print
Share
Email to a friend
Newsletter 
Like Us
Follow Us
Get Our Feed
Tags|Bazaar|Podcast|About Us|Contact Us|User Agreement|Privacy Policy|FAQ: Comments and Moderation | Google+
© 2013 Truthdig, LLC. All rights reserved.
By Inherit The Wind, November 30, 2010 at 3:52 pm Link to this comment
Gotta admire Ron Popeil. He sold crap, you knew it was crap. He knew you knew it was crap. He sold it anyway. I never bought any of it.
I don’t remember all the crap, but I do remember the Popeil Pocket Fisherman “...and BOY! Does it catch fish!”. There was a food dehydrator, But that’s all I remember. My housemate and I had a “Christmas List” of all his crap on the wall for the 1979 season.
“Makes a GREAT Christmas gift!”
Report thisBy garth, November 30, 2010 at 3:29 pm Link to this comment
“Ah, for the days of Ron Popeil selling his “Ronco” crap like the inside-the-egg-scrambler and record vacuum. And, at the end the announcer would say “Makes a GREAT Christmas gift”, a cheesy, tinny cut of a few bars of “Deck the Halls” would play….Who can forget those halcyon years? “
For social commentary, I think there’s none better.
I am in the Holiday Season.
But “inside-the-egg-scrambler” I’m still laughing.
Report thisBy Inherit The Wind, November 29, 2010 at 11:17 pm Link to this comment
sharonsj, November 29 at 4:42 pm Link to this comment
I’ll tell you what I’m sick of: that our national holiday of Thanksgiving has been turned into just the opening volley for Xmas. No sooner have you put down your forkful of mashed potatoes than you are expected to run out to the nearest store sales, all to the tune of 24-hr-a-day Xmas music. It makes me want to regurgitate my turkey dinner.
******************
Ah, for the days of Ron Popeil selling his “Ronco” crap like the inside-the-egg-scrambler and record vacuum. And, at the end the announcer would say “Makes a GREAT Christmas gift”, a cheesy, tinny cut of a few bars of “Deck the Halls” would play….Who can forget those halcyon years?
Report thisBy garth, November 29, 2010 at 6:00 pm Link to this comment
I think ‘leshuo’ is a term from the Kenyan dialect which means one from the Luo tribe, tall, lanky and lazy.
Am I wrong here?
And all this talk about WikiLeaks? Why don’t they dig into the Bush Family, The Hit Squad.
Macabre is the word that first comes to mind.
Report thisBy sharonsj, November 29, 2010 at 11:42 am Link to this comment
I’ll tell you what I’m sick of: that our national holiday of Thanksgiving has been turned into just the opening volley for Xmas. No sooner have you put down your forkful of mashed potatoes than you are expected to run out to the nearest store sales, all to the tune of 24-hr-a-day Xmas music. It makes me want to regurgitate my turkey dinner.
Report thisBy Inherit The Wind, November 27, 2010 at 9:11 am Link to this comment
The Pilgrims had freedom of religion in the Netherlands.
But they didn’t want that. They wanted their own Taliban-like society, where one religion rules and rules every aspect of life. That is why they left Holland.
Being “exiled” was a BS excuse as they were even more exiled in Massachusetts.
Report thisBy Fat Freddy, November 27, 2010 at 8:38 am Link to this comment
kqkx
You are confusing the Plymouth settlement with the Puritans. The Plymouth Pilgrims were Separatists, not Puritans. The Jamestown settlement were entrepreneurs.
Report thisBy Fat Freddy, November 27, 2010 at 8:29 am Link to this comment
Why oh why when people go back 300 years to make points that they think are relevant today…
Oh, I don’t know. Why do we need to study Isaac Newton? F=ma is so outdated. We now have Relativity to solve motion problems.
It’s called a foundation. We strayed from private property rights when we passed the National Bank Act, and The Federal Reserve Act.
Report thisBy Fat Freddy, November 26, 2010 at 9:25 pm Link to this comment
Donald Lazere
You think I care about the churches? I am an agnostic Objectivist, anarchist, Agorist, anarcho-capitalist, and/or Voluntarist. Churches have nothing to do with it, in my mind.
Report thisBy garth, November 26, 2010 at 3:21 pm Link to this comment
There’s nothing new to what Dr. Dionne is saying. I recently heard a Business Professor from the Universtiy of Georgia state at an AEI speech covered by C-SPAN that African Americans today are better off than Thomaa Jefferson was. He didn’t stress that TJ strode the boards some 200 years ago.
The comparison is mind-numbing.
Bradford Fitch, the author of some Martian traveler’s guide to the US Congress conflated the price of gas 20 or 30 years ago with the way that the members of Congress respond to their consttuents.
Again, it all mind-numbing, and it’s meant to be.
You don’t have to search your files for facts or think about a rebuttal. It’s all out-and-out bullshit.
You are trying to argue with a pre- (or is it post-) lingual co-habitor of this planet. They have yet to prove that they have attained the basic identifiers of humanity: The ability to make sense out of chaos through reasoning (Indeed, they want to return to chaos); a sense of community, brotherhood, responsibility, courage, compassion, etc.
What gets me is the ABCCBSNBC covrage of Thanksgiving Dinner in the outworks of the war. The NBC bozo in Afghanistan walking through the mess hall with a microphone in hand and a camera crew, listening through his earphones for the next thing to say.
The one NBC bozo, I don’t want to remember his name, started to exclaim how much that shindig cost, when he stopped short and segued into an interview with two brothers from Maine and a lone star cowboy sitting with them. The ear piece no doubt screamed, “Don’t go there!”
My question is simple and should have a simple answer: When is this shit going to end?
That’s what gets me. The real disaster. The real war.
Report thisBy Major Domo, November 26, 2010 at 2:30 pm Link to this comment
One other thing that is purposefully neglected is when the pilgrims floundered upon the shores of America they found vast areas of wilderness uninhabited. The truth is the first colonist…Columbus and the Spaniards that followed…brought with them diseases they native populations had no immunity from. It’s estimated 80% of all tribes from Alaska to the southern tip of South America had already died off by the time the pilgrims landed at Plymouth rock.
Report thisBy Major Domo, November 26, 2010 at 2:01 pm Link to this comment
Thanksgiving in the US has nothing to do with pilgrims or indians.
If you doubt me then red this…
Lincoln’s Thanksgiving Proclamation
Report thisWashington, DC—October 3, 1863
url: http://www.infoplease.com/spot/tgproclamation.html
So any pilgrim claim to the holiday is fraud.
By Donald Lazere, November 26, 2010 at 11:00 am Link to this comment
(Unregistered commenter)
To Fat Freddy:
Rush Limbaugh and you quote a 1623 passage from Governor William
Bradford’s History of Plymouth Plantation that seems to favor privatization of
property and farming, but you ignore the later passage about 1632, titled
“Prosperity Brings Dispersal of Populations.”
Corn and cattle rose to a great price, by which many were much enriched and
commodities grew plentiful. And yet in other regards this benefit turned to
their hurt, and this accession of strength to their weakness. . . . No man
thought he could live except he had cattle and a great deal of ground to keep
them, all striving to increase their stocks. By which means they were scattered
all over the Bay quickly and the town in which they live compactly till now was
left very thin and in a short time almost desolate. . . .
But the Church must also be divided, and those that had lived so long together
Report thisin Christian and comfortable fellowship must now part and suffer many
divisions. . . . And this I fear will be the ruin of New England, at least of the
churches of God there, and will provoke the Lord’s displeasure against them.
By Thomas Billis, November 26, 2010 at 4:02 am Link to this comment
(Unregistered commenter)
Why oh why when people go back 300 years to make points that they think are relevant today in a world of theiving corporations malicious wall street firms and a totally corrupt government making sure that the the well to do do much better than the rest of us.Why oh why do they hate their own middle class so much.How can we make them understand that they are not living three hundred years ago but in today’s reality.By the way what did the Pigrims say about the massive mega corporations who if they were in being back then would have robbed the corn first and then the property.Ask middle America’s family farmers.
Report thisBy Inherit The Wind, November 25, 2010 at 11:00 pm Link to this comment
There’s nothing now the right-wing-nuts won’t taint and bend to their purpose of creating a “Christian” taliban here in the USA.
Report thisBy Thomas Billis, November 25, 2010 at 6:47 pm Link to this comment
(Unregistered commenter)
Why has stupid become the God of this era?When we are discussing what the noted historical scholar Rush Limbaugh thinks about anything have we not descended to the one of the rings of hell.The stupid ring.
Report thisBy kqkx, November 25, 2010 at 1:10 pm Link to this comment
(Unregistered commenter)
Let’s all take our political ideology from witch-burners, because Christian kooks know what system is best
Report thisBy Fat Freddy, November 25, 2010 at 10:22 am Link to this comment
...if they’ll grant me that these early Americans believed passionately in a common good and the promise of mutual assistance
Mutual assistance? Of course, they did. But is it voluntary, or coerced, EJ? That’s the difference between individualism, and collectivism. Get it? If private individuals voluntarily contribute to the community, there’s no problem. It is when the community takes, without permission, from the individual. Taking something without permission, regardless of intent or justification, is theft. Why is that so hard for some people to understand?
Report thisBy Fat Freddy, November 25, 2010 at 10:13 am Link to this comment
After a quick read at Wikipedia:
The Pilgrims held an even greater Thanksgiving celebration in 1623, after a switch from communal farming to privatized farming…
By 1623, facing starvation Plymouth Plantation’s leaders took another course. Upon allotting private land plots it is evident that productivity increased. Again, according to William Bradford in his account:
# ^ Bradford, Of Plymouth Plantation, 1620-1647, pp. 120-121.
Report this# ^ Bradford, History of Plymouth Plantation, pp. 135-136.
By dihey, November 25, 2010 at 10:08 am Link to this comment
(Unregistered commenter)
This is another stunning falsification of history. The “Pilgrims” were a bunch of intolerant misfits who falsely claimed to have been religiously persecuted in Holland. After they landed in the New World they did what all conquistadors did. They became armed robbers.
Report thisP.S. They left Holland because they held that the Dutch were much too tolerant religiously. Imagine, the Dutch allowed their children to play their games outside after the morning service!