Why It’s High Time We Listen to Reason
Something about Thanksgiving always has made me slightly uneasy.
Perhaps it’s simply that this day is the most American of the holidays we observe and is also the most contradictory. In many ways, Thanksgiving is the mirror of our communal life: Its conception is high-minded, but its execution often is rather squalid. It seems to be about one thing--gratitude to beneficent divinity--when, in fact, it is about another--the glories of material consumption.
It fervently celebrates the place of faith and family in our national life, while the real force of those things seems to wane with each passing year.
On the other hand, Thanksgiving--like the nation that celebrates it--always is in the process of reinventing itself. We Americans like to think our aptitude for that undertaking reflects our optimism. In fact, it has just as much to do with a willingness to forget.
That’s where my own problems with Thanksgiving begin. I never can force myself to forget that it all began in 1621 with the Puritans.
Frankly, that bunch always has given me the willies.
Grim, self-righteous and self-satisfied, their little society embodied all the defects that have marked theocracies right down to this very day. Governments that believe their covenant is with God rather than with their people always end up sending more than a few of those people to the wall.
Religious dissenters and supposed witches soon would suffer at the hands of the Puritan authorities, but before them would come the American Indians, whose presence at that first Thanksgiving always is depicted in sentimental paintings of the occasion.
A little more than a decade after that first feast and a short way down the coast, English soldiers and settlers--the Puritans’ co-religionists--would attack and burn the great settlement in which lived the Pequot tribe of Indians.
In a recent essay on that event, the British writer David Spanier quoted from the account of one of the English officers who participated: “The fire burnt their very bowstrings. . . . Down fell men, women and children. . . . Great and doleful was the bloody sight.” Nightfall threatened to abort the assault but, as the writer triumphantly noted, “We had sufficient light from the word of God for our proceedings.”
The Pequots’ destruction was so total that, a century later, when Herman Melville conferred their name on Ahab’s doomed whaling ship in “Moby Dick,” he described them as “now extinct as the ancient Medes.”
As it turns out, he was wrong. Today, the 250 descendants of the surviving Pequots prosper in a fashion that would have horrified the Puritans: They run the most profitable gambling casino in the United States.
On such delicious ironies are history’s students fed.
Time diluted the fervor of Puritan piety but not their sense of exceptionalism and divine favor, their notion that doing good would guarantee that they would do well. By the mid-19th Century, the poet John Greenleaf Whittier would describe his fellow Yankees thus:
Church-goers, fearful of the Unseen Powers
But grumbling over pulpit tax and pew-rent
Saving, as shrewd economists, their souls
And winter pork with the least possible outlay
Of salt and sanctity
It was during that period that the observance of Thanksgiving attained wide popularity among those people attracted to the politics of the nativist and other anti-immigrant movements. It was, after all, the one “American holiday.”
Abraham Lincoln, a firm opponent of nativism in all its guises, was the first President to proclaim a national day of thanksgiving. But in the hands of his successors, including Ulysses S. Grant--in his younger days an enthusiastic nativist--Thanksgiving became something of an emblem of Protestant triumphalism over the immigrant creeds.
In fact, when Cardinal James Gibbons, Baltimore’s progressive Roman Catholic prelate, took the daring step of endorsing President Grover Cleveland’s proclamation of Thanksgiving, he was attacked by New York’s archconservative archbishop, Michael Corrigan. Thanksgiving, Corrigan fumed, was a “damnably Puritanical substitute for Christmas.”
Gibbons understood what Corrigan did not--that America’s festivals, like its spirit, always are in flux. Thus, by the time Congress set the day of Thanksgiving as a national holiday in 1941, it had become a festival not of sectarianism but of the very secular American belief in this nation’s unassailable prosperity and unquestioned exceptionalism.
Today, it is hard to imagine any serious person who believes in either one of those things. Consumerism, prosperity’s ill-tempered child, has replaced life that is nasty, brutish and short with one that is tepid, empty and endless. Yet it is often hard to envision what else it is we Americans all hold in common. The myth of American exceptionalism--the notion that our system somehow inoculated us against the passions and prejudices of the world--was shattered once and for all last spring in the Los Angeles riots.
This Thanksgiving, more than ever, we need something else--an answer to Rodney King’s now famous question: “Can we all get along?” Our faiths are too various and--at the end of this terrible century--perhaps too battered to provide a common answer. Reason may, for it tells us we have no choice but to get along. We could do worse than to reason with one another. For, as these lines of our fellow Californian, the poet Czeslaw Milosz, remind us:
Human reason is beautiful and invincible.
No bars, no barbed wire, no pulping of books,
No sentence of banishment can prevail against it.
It establishes the universal ideas in language,
And guides our hand so we write Truth and Justice
With capital letters, lie and oppression with small.
It puts what should be above things as they are,
It is an enemy of despair and a friend of hope.
There, I think is a blessing to be pronounced over all our Thanksgiving tables.