Originally Published on: Nov 25, 2011 @ 0:59
In the August 1942 Paramount movie, “Holiday Inn”, Bing Crosby’s character Jim is at his absolute low point of the year at Thanksgiving. I completely concur. Not even Irving Berlin could write a memorable song about this holiday, and now that I think about it, I know of no Thanksgiving songs at all—I suppose no one can really sing when stuffed to the gills with Turkey. Eucharistic hymns of Thanksgiving in Church, to be sure, are songs of Thanksgiving, but not AMERICAN (United States Holiday) Thanksgiving.
As it happens, in 1942, Thanksgiving had just been set by Franklin D. Roosevelt on its modern date by proclamation signed on November 26, 1941, a little over a week before Pearl Harbor (the attack on which Roosevelt may well have been planning and of whose imminent occurrence evidence now shows, at the very least, Roosevelt to have been perfectly well informed and aware).
So THIS YEAR 2o12 is the 71st Anniversary of the “New Deal” Thanksgiving, and I think it’s high time to wipe this wretched artificial off the Calendar entirely. The general concept of Thanksgiving may go back to George Washington, the Continental Congress, and the Pilgrims in 1621 some historically esoteric and metaphysical senses, but the Pilgrim association itself is one of English treachery. How few Americans on Thanksgiving Day recall King Philip’s (the Wampanoag Grand Sachem Metacom’s) War of 1675-1676) and the resulting Genocide of the Wampanoag Tribe celebrated in that First Fabled William Bradford Thanksgiving in 1621. The Wampanoag was the Nation of Squanto and Massasoit who did so much to facilitate English Colonization “New England.” All other subsequent associations, and the very timing of the holiday, are an insult to deeper values, including not just 500 years of Native American subjugation and genocide but the subjugation and (near) genocide of the American South, and the progressive secularization of the United States from a Christian into a purely materialist and grotesquely indulgent and commercial nation, culture, and society.
It had been not until 1863, four days after the Gettysburg Address, when President Abraham Lincoln declared Thanksgiving to fall on the last Thursday of November, that the modern holiday was celebrated “nationally” (meaning, of course, in the Northern States). With a few deviations, Lincoln’s precedent was followed annually by every subsequent president–until 1939. In 1939, Franklin D. Roosevelt departed from tradition by declaring November 23, the next to last Thursday that year, as Thanksgiving Day. Considerable controversy surrounded this deviation, and some Americans refused to honor Roosevelt’s declaration. For the next two years, Roosevelt repeated the unpopular proclamation, but on November 26, 1941, he admitted his mistake and signed a bill into law officially making the fourth Thursday in November the national holiday of Thanksgiving Day. Supposedly, Roosevelt had considered making Thanksgiving earlier in November but this was “booed down.”
Once it’s all over, and the sales of Alka-Selzer and Gaviscon at the all-night pharmacies have gone sky high, and are guaranteed to remain there during the consumption of leftovers for the next week: someone else needs to second the motion and go on record as saying that of all our American Holidays, Thanksgiving is the absolute worst. Thanksgiving not only epitomizes but stands as a worldwide symbol of corruption, oppression, gluttonous commercialism, materialist secularism, arrogant conquest, and a general depravity of state of mind. ”Thanksgiving” as celebrated in this Country obscures our heritage and confuses our history, celebrates the absolute worst in the human soul, and was created in relationship and in lock-step with two key wars leading to the abolition of freedom and the constitution, and the coincidental economic centralization and falsification which took place during those wars, namely the War Between the States and World War II.
Thanksgiving isn’t so bad for me. I have a wonderful dinner with a wonderfully energetic young blonde overlooking the Pacific planned in Santa Monica, and next week I go to Hawaii.
But I wonder what Thanksgiving is like this year for those several million Americans who were either recently or earlier this year, or even last year, evicted from their homes. I wonder how Thanksgiving is like this year for the millions more among those who are facing foreclosure and eviction who have no hope, no certainty that they will still be in their homes next year.
It is time to get back to that “Old Time Religion” of Truth and Honesty and Virtue—and the Fourth Thursday of November Thanksgiving we have celebrated since 1941, or 1863, depending on which starting date you want to call “the beginning” is nothing but an accursed day of the Calendar.
Proclaimed and first set as a National Holiday by President Abraham Lincoln only fours days after the elegant but totally fraudulent, duplicitous rhetoric of the “Gettysburg Address”, meant to disguise his true Marxist purposes in going to war with the “better half” of the nation for the primary benefit of a few industrial oligarchs up north, and for the ultimate purpose of subverting the original American Constitution, Thanksgiving has become a source of degradation to three sets of “Native Americans”: those descended from the First Inhabitants of these Western Hemisphere Continents we call North and South America (aka “The Indians”) and those who fought to preserve the Constitution of 1787 against usurpation in 1861-65, and to all Traditional Christians who would celebrate Adventide as a proper time of fasting.
I wonder how many people (black or white) in Richmond, Charleston, Columbia, Atlanta, Memphis, Natchez, Vicksburg, or Savannah were stuffed to the gills after great feasts on the final Thursday in November 1865-1875? I wonder how many Americans (northern or southern) felt Thankful to live in America in November of 1876, when the sitting President, Ulysses S. Grant, had announced that the man who received the majority of the popular and electoral vote, Governor Samuel J. Tilden of New York, would never be allowed to enter the White House without a renewal of open warfare between the States.
That same year, 1876, I wonder how many Sioux Lakota, Northern Cheyenne, and Arapaho warriors knew by late November 1876 that their victory over Presidential Aspirant George Armstrong Custer at Little Bighorn, June 24-25, 1876, had been turned into a rallying cry for the Republicans who needed a major distraction from the misery of post-”Civil War” Reconstruction America, and turned Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse into the scapegoats or major distraction for their own tyranny and failures back east. Never did any victory have more devastating consequences for any race of people than the Battle of the Little Bighorn had for the Native Americans. The remnant of that same coalition that defeated Custer was effectively wiped out within 15 years. And what did November 1891, the first Thanksgiving after the Massacre at Wounded Knee, feel like in the Sioux Reservation in South Dakota, where the relatives of the murdered Sitting Bull and the descendants of Crazy horse were being either forcibly educated or trained for Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show?
To my grandparents growing up in Louisiana and Texas, there was no “Thanksgiving” in the early 20th Century because it was the enemy’s holiday. The current setting of the Federal Holiday of Thanksgiving was not set until 1941—just as certain “insiders” in the government may have been planning for the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor to force the United States into World War II.
After eight years of the New Deal, in 1941, the Country was being reshaped, and Thanksgiving was part of its reshaping. Thanksgiving chronically conflicts with and distracts from the beginning of Advent (almost always the final Sunday of November) and from St. Andrew’s Day, November 30—Saint Andrew being not only one of the 12 Apostles but the Patron Saint of Scotland, Greece, (the ancient “Second Rome” known as) Constantinople, Russia, and Romania among other places—and the Cross of Saint Andrew being the central element of the flags of Alabama, Florida, and the Confederate States of America.
What’s worse than anything about Thanksgiving is the day after, “Black Friday”, the Macy’s day parade and the gunshot “sooner” start of the race to maximize the secularization and commercialism of the pre-Christmas Season. Thanksgiving has become part of the Federal Government’s conspiracy to abolish religion in America; the Federal Holiday is thoroughly despicable as an attack and infringement St. Andrew’s Day and Adventide and so on the Christmas Season, the Scottish and Greek Heritage of Western Civilization, and the real meaning of all of these things.
To traditional Christians all over the world, the Season of Advent is a “Little Lent” as my mother called it—the second longest “purple time” at Church in the entire year. How many people remember to buy Advent Calendars or to keep the solemnity of Mary’s time before giving birth? No, the grotesque overeating of Thanksgiving followed by the mad orgiastic commercial rush to shop for Christmas presents is a creature of the past 70 years only, fed by Television and contributing to the general secularization of America. It is a very sad thing. To my mind, Thanksgiving as celebrated in the United States of America is an insult and a curse to all that is holy, whether one is a Native American of “First American” origins… a Native American of “Southern Anglo” origins, or a Christian with origins anywhere in the world. Luckily, the personality of “Scrooge” will forever be associated with Christmas, but I say “BAH HUMBUG!” to Thanksgiving. It is time to do away with Thanksgiving as invented by the 16th and 32nd Presidents (did you ever notice that the 32nd President was Twice as bad as the 16th, but continued all the same basis processes and policies?)???
Obama, if legitimately he belongs in the “King List” at all, is the 44th President, but maybe by the time of the 48th President *(3 x 16), there will be a recovery in America, a REAL and GENUINE “NEW BIRTH OF FREEDOM” which will truthfully realize the promise of the RHETORIC of the Gettysburg Address by wiping out the centralized banks, income tax, and other institutional baggage of the 16th and restoring the Constitution of 1787, and the Bill of Rights.
Much like the Gettysburg Address, the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments contain only noble sentiments, but have been misused and wrongly applied to destroy rather than guarantee Freedom and Equality. I have often commented that the greatest irony of all is that the modern “Prison Planet” state of existence in America owes its origins to the 13th Amendment, wherein “slavery and involuntary servitude” are abolished “except as a punishment for crime.” They started building prisons during the war of 1861-1865, and the “criminal justice industry” has been growing by leaps and bounds ever since. I say to the American People: “let’s tear down the prison walls.”
But even worse than the perversion of the 13th Amendment and most pernicious of all of these perversions is the use that has been made of the 14th Amendment: turn the quest for equality of a perpetual war of all against all in the United States, guaranteeing that equality will only ever be achieved once we are all perfectly enslaved……
This is one of those points where I think the “right” meets the “left”—Thanksgiving is a testimonial to the corruption of all that is good. I want to thank Dr. John Hoopes of the Department of Anthropology at the University of Kansas (“ku.edu”) a co-author of papers on the Early Classic Period in the Maya Lowlands from our Harvard Graduate Seminar Days with Gordon R. Willey for pointing out to me how close my position is to that of the “AdBusters” group which sponsored “Occupy Wall-Street” (which I confess I have mostly just been ignoring). They call it “Buy Nothing Day” and it’s been going on for 20 years (originally organized in Mexico City and Vancouver, two of my favorite places):
http://www.adbusters.org/campaigns/bnd
The Thanksgiving of 2009, after I had just lost my two primary residences, homes in Texas and California, within several months of each other, I spent in a seaside suite in San Clemente overlooking the Pacific with my son Charlie and my assistant Peyton. But not everyone has that kind of luck in life. I am Thankful to say this and every day that I have led something of a charmed life. And for that reason, and because it is customary, I always wish everyone a Happy Thanksgiving. But “enough is enough”. This custom has got to stop. Thanksgiving is like a gigantic perversion of the Calendar year, a gigantic dead skunk in the road of life every year in the same place—it is way too late in the year to be a Harvest Celebration except in places like Southern Florida and Southern Texas where winter crops can be planted and harvested.
I personally live to fight for “corny old values” like Truth, Justice, and the American Way, for Family, Home, and Freedom, and to add one Senator for the Bill of Rights and against Indefinite Detention, against the PATRIOT ACT, and against the use of United States Troops in this Country against its own citizens.
I give Thanks for the Beauty of the Earth, for the Splendor of the Skies, and for the Love which from our Birth, over and around us lies.
But I do not give thanks for the election, re-election or even the existence of Barack Hussein Obama or the 93 Senators who voted for the NDAA this time last year—almost all of them (of those up for re-election) were reelected, including California’s own despicable hypocrite Dianne Feinstein, and there are some new Senators who would surely vote the same easy “pro-administration” way.
I do not give thanks that we live in a corporate-communist country where the boundary between corporate entities and the government is blurred beyond recognition in the unconstitutional “phony money” Federal Reserve Credit-Note economy.
