Thanksgiving is an old tradition, older than most people realize. While the word "thanksgiving" has come to mean something very specific for Americans and Canadians, the act of giving thanks was once a common resort of the pious. A thanksgiving ceremony might not commemorate a harvest, or occur in fall. The Christian citizens of a small German town in the 1400s might hold a thanksgiving ceremony to express their gratitude to god that a local river did not overflow its banks. It was not at all uncommon for there to be several thanksgiving ceremonies held each year.
The thanksgiving tradition fell out of practice in most of Europe, but was maintained in the New World, probably because of the provincialization of culture. New World thanksgiving ceremonies initially celebrated all manner of fortune, in alignment with Europe. Eventually, thanksgiving ceremonies became exclusively associated with harvest festivals circa the late 16th century.
The reasons for this are not entirely clear, but it seems to me that since life in the New World was harsh and uncertain, and because resources were scarce among the settlers, squandering resources on the celebration of minor incidents of good fortune might have struck the pilgrims as a bad idea.
The alignment of harvest festivals and thanksgiving was cemented by legends emanating from the colonies. The most famous of these stories comes from Plymouth in present-day Massachusetts. Historians believe Amerindians taught the English pilgrims to prepare for the cold months in 1621-22. And just in time -- a particularly harsh winter rewarded the pilgrims' preparation. The pilgrims, however, did not celebrate their survival in the spring, since stores were low. Nor did they celebrate the next year's harvest of corn and dried fish, which by accounts seems to have been unimpressive.
Nothing much happened, actually, until the following fall, in 1623, after an especially bounteous harvest. The pilgrims gathered the extra food, invited Amerindians to partake (and contribute meat), and had a party. No doubt the pilgrims used the occasion to preach Christianity to the Amerindians, for this thanksgiving was a celebration of their god's favor.
The stories spread, often with ridiculous embellishment. But the short of it is that Thanksgiving, capital T, would become a tradition in the New World; a symbolic celebration of the previous year's prosperity -- and a prayer for prosperity in later days. But while Thanksgiving was widely celebrated in the colonies, it was not yet an official holiday of any sort.
George Washington, a devout deist and America's first president, thought it good and right to declare Thanksgiving a national holiday, and urge all Americans to thank god for their success -- but only on Nov. 26, 1789. That was an auspicious year, to be sure. Eleven of the 13 colonies had ratified the Enlightenment's greatest gift to humanity -- the U.S. Constitution -- and the federal government had begun operations in New York. Interestingly, many members of Congress opposed Washington's resolution, saying they thought it improper to tell American citizens what and when to worship. Whether for that reason or others, Washington's elevation of Thanksgiving seems to have had no lasting effects. Many presidents ignored Washington's precedent. Pointedly. Unenthused by the spirit of Thanksgiving, John Adams in 1798 and 1799 proclaimed instead "A Day of Fasting and Humiliation (Not Thanksgiving!)" ... In May.
Thanksgiving continued to be an informal holiday until 1863, at which time Abraham Lincoln resumed the presidential practice. Thenceforth every American president made a similar proclamation each year, that the fourth or fifth Thursday in November be set aside for thanking god. George W. Bush made such a pronouncement last year, and Barack Obama will likely deliver his first Thanksgiving pronouncement this week.
It was around the turn of the century (1900) that Thanksgiving became a ubiquitous, harvest-themed holiday in the United States. Canada's Thanksgiving followed a unique but parallel path.
The particularities of how Thanksgiving is celebrated have stayed essentially the same for a century. Families gather. They eat turkey, sweet potatoes, and squash.
Thanksgiving's meaning, on the other hand, has changed quite a bit. It is no longer recognizable as a religious holiday. And in the United States and Canada, where citizens can feed themselves by shelling out a couple dollars at a gas station vending machine, the notion of celebrating a harvest is as foreign a concept as a wheel-lock musket. Thanksgiving is more likely to be associated with overeating, football, and brooding siblings than with the father, the son, and the holy ghost. And of course, Thanksgiving has also come to serve as a retail marker -- the day before the Christmas shopping season begins.
Whether or not it's mere coincidence, Michael Moore's Capitalism: A Love Story appears to have capped the resurgence of socialism in America. (Thank Smith!) That is a superficial irony, though, as Moore's toothless movie is a merely critique of capitalism, and does not actually posit another system of economic organization as superior.
That is where the entire world finds itself now -- shrugging.
Capitalism, which accompanied a rise in political liberalism in western Europe in the mid-19th century, has proven itself as an efficient engine of innovation, but capitalism's rough edges (corporate corruption, income disparities) are an irresistible target for compassionate people, which has led to regulations that have ruined the whole point of laissez faire.
Whereas capitalism has been a mitigated failure, socialism's failure is unmitigated. The Soviet Union is an anomaly whose collapse can be credited to its geopolitical aspirations and oppressive domestic policies, rather than to the inherent problems with socialism. But even those surviving socialisms -- China and Cuba -- are clearly relics. Obsolete. The former is transitioning to a form of managed capitalism; the latter continues to be an impoverished morass, many of whose citizens flee. The leaders of neither China nor Cuba even bother to denigrate capitalism anymore, or ballyhoo the merits of socialism. Even they know who lost this contest of ideas.
But who won?
Despite the grousing of economic conservatives about liberals' flirtations with socialism, there isn't a single capitalism left in the world to defend. America is about as close as one may come to finding an actual capitalism, but an inexorable march of regulations since the 1930s has wrought something beastly and beyond categorization.
Pragmatism, like knowledge and food, can be a wonderful thing when consumed in small doses. But a century of pragmatic solution after pragmatic solution has poisoned the purposefulness of both capitalism and socialism. What we are left with are complex, confusing, and internally contradictory messes.
This won't change unless we encounter a compelling reason to rewrite our nations' laws. A prolonged recession isn't enough -- those are inevitable.
It's been over 100 years since an economist or philosopher proposed a serious new model for economic regulation (or self-regulation). Capitalism and socialism are old. We are overdue the next Big Idea.
As America's universal health care bill staggers through Congress like a man mortally wounded, the biggest question that remains is whether or not the bill will die before or after Barack Obama gets the chance to sign it.
One of the issues that could kill the bill is abortion.
The original health care bill made no mention of abortion, which means it and other reproductive health services would have been covered. A large number of House members -- including a couple dozen Democrats -- would not have voted for the bill's passage in this form.
Traditionally, the House (and Senate) simply add a boilerplate amendment to such bills that could conceivably involve taxpayer funding of abortion. It is called the Hyde Amendment, and it basically says federal funds may not be used to subsidize abortion.
Hyde Amendment language was intended to be a compromise between abortion rights supporters and foes, but as usual, compromise has led to... more compromise. Unsurprisingly, abortion rights foes, who are about 80 percent Republican and 95 percent male, want to go further.
On the House floor, abortion foes had the audacity to argue that any universal health care plan be extended only to those women who do not get abortions. And audacity it certainly is. Not only are abortion foes attempting an end-around attack on a civil right, but the vast majority of those House members who want abortion restrictions would not vote for a health care bill anyway.
To placate conservative Democrats, Rep. Lois Capps of Central California proposed an amendment that affirmed the spirit of the Hyde Amendment, but also promised those using federally subsidized health care (including the "public option") could get abortions with private or personal money.
Subsequently Michigan Rep. Bart Stupak, one of the aforementioned conservative Democrats, co-proposed an amendment that would go further. The Stupak Amendment would prohibit federal funds from being disbursed to any entity that offers abortion as an option -- even if that entity performs abortions with private money, or using funds coming directly out of the pockets of women seeking abortions.
A major problem here is that as a result of health care reform, most insurance companies -- including the private ones -- would no longer be able to cover abortion. That's most of them now, by the way, since many of them work in collaboration with Medicare and Medicaid.
The bill would likely force younger women to purchase a second health care insurer, in anticipation of one day needing to get an abortion. And those are the women who think ahead. The others, who get pregnant unintentionally but don't have the foresight to buy abortion insurance beforehand, might get zero help, and have to pay the considerable doctors' fees in toto. And who are the women most likely to find themselves in these circumstances? Yeah, that's right. Poor women who can't afford the fees.
It deserves repeating: abortion is a federally protected right.
The Stupak Amendment actually failed the first time it went before a House advisory committee. But the amendment was added to the health care bill anyway, presumably in preparation for this weekend's vote. The bill passed the House, albeit barely, with many conservative Democrats voting against it.
As a version of the health care bill now approaches the Senate, many moderates are wondering whether it should contain similar language with regard to abortion for the purposes of ensuring passage. pro-choice Claire McCaskill, a.k.a. Senator Mom, is among them.
This thing is going to move forward unless the left locates its testosterone and starts bullying the moderates into upholding the law of the land.
If Christians really wanted to make their Jesus myth more believable, they should have made Jesus a doctor or a lawyer... or even a comedian! But a carpenter? A Jewish carpenter? Ridiculous. Jews can't do carpentry. They might as well have made Jesus a Jewish race car driver or a Jewish quarterback.
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The popular culture has sort of forgotten about Pancho Villa, a man whose life poignantly straddled the modern era and a time before it. (This despite a film biopic starring Antonio "Nasonex" Banderas a few years ago.) But what good is the popular culture, anyway? For every single good thing it shows us, it misses nine great things.
Despite a perpetually rough chin, the ladies found him handsome. He inspired a common sexual fantasy among Turn of the Century gringas -- the usual bullshit of distress and rescue in a strange land. That fantasy was eventually supplanted by a different distress-and-rescue fantasy, in which a person afflicted with Montezuma's Revenge fantasized about finding antibiotics somewhere in Mexico.
Villa was also the first political personality to use motion picture cameras as his primary marketing tool. His military campaigns in the northern parts of Mexico were partially supported with money from Hollywood.
Thankfully, a few Mestizo Ph.D.s are somehow finding money to continue studying Villa's legend. I am thankful!
