As has been written elsewhere, Thanksgiving is the best of all American holidays. It commemorates nothing. Especially now that the indigenous North American people are letting the rest of us know they regard the arrival of Europeans on these shores as a parasitic invasion.
Columbus Day, anybody?
Therefore, there’s no solemnity attached to Thanksgiving. So no need to become mawkish. Nor is there any obligation to exchange presents. That spares budgets. For these gifts we can be thankful.
But aside from the uniquely American perspective of gorging in thanks of having plenty to devour, there is a fine basis for Thanksgiving. Gratitude. Americans, well, the almost half of us aware of what a great deal we have going here, should be grateful for the general feasting then idleness we indulge on the fourth Thursdays of Novembers.
No other nation has anything like it. When foreign lands feast, their celebratory festivals are usually connected to some religious splendiferousness or revive a significant national moment.
Bounty does not rate speechifying, hosannas, cannonades, or fireworks. Maybe just some belt loosening after the meal.
Why, yes, I am grateful for the day. Through it I can look back on all the efforts by relatives and other citizens who saw beyond themselves. They worked to form a better America for all. Unfortunately, recent election results cast a pall over Thanksgiving 2024. The next four will likely be further dampened or outright darkened.
What approaches our nation should not inspire optimism but dread. Not that we are threatened by adversaries beyond the horizon. Instead, because we have chosen to go backwards.
Some of the suggestions being growled by the victors need to make all of us who didn’t doze throughout school and then prospered immeasurably from liberal education as adults understand our successors may soon be leading lives our parents thought behind us. Lives our parents might’ve thought they’d and we would’ve advanced far enough to be impossible to bequeath to our inheritor generations.
Although it’s been decades since I’ve last read either, The Jungle and The Grapes of Wrath still retain power over me. As I suspect both novels do upon readers each have stirred.
For the uninitiated, Upton Sinclair wrote The Jungle as a serial in 1905. These chapters were compiled and published as a novel in 1906. It delved into a nearly barbaric turn of the last century Industrial America. Set in the Chicago stockyards, meatpacking served as the book’s setting. But almost any intensive branch of industry could’ve sufficed.
Seen through The Jungle, Americans today should reflect on all the benefits modern workers enjoy. Then gander at the safety measures, rules, and regulations which have been instituted to prevent workplace injuries and deaths.
None of these existed during the era of The Jungle. Working people then were at the mercy of ruthless management. The dignity of hourly laborers never factored into any consideration. Profits made people expendable.
Published in 1939, The Grapes of Wrath remains at heart a Depression Era saga. The Joads are an Okie family who forced through Dustbowl conditions must migrate West. During this trek their experiences among “good people,” meaning those spared the Depression’s harshness, author John Steinbeck puts to lie the notion of big-hearted American compassion. In his book as in life, the Depression has let the country’s worst traits surface. These are willfully inflicted against the Joads. Steinbeck used them to represent millions of displaced and distraught Americans of the 1930s.
Maybe because father worked inside an assembly plant only decades after Progressives fitfully lessened industrial exploitation; maybe because mother had spent her girlhood in a sharecropping family. She knew the kind of stoop labor the Joads did. The kind that grudged pennies for those harvesting the crops.
Since so many current Americans’ backgrounds are distant from arduous honest labor, the notion of such exhausting toil is as unknown as the rotary phone, 45 rpm records that required adapters, or cars with clutches and three on the trees. And while rampant automation and rampaging AI won’t reintroduce bonewearying physical labor to post-industrial Americans, both innovations are steadily pushing the already marginal among us landed citizens farther out to sea.
The future will require brains and intellect. We are producing people much better suited to preparing ham sandwiches. And yes, with mustard, please.
Sometime around Thanksgiving, particularly a few days after, I oblige myself to remember how good it is for the majority of Americans. The life of cushy ease and Jetsons-life convenience we lead today would’ve had my grandmother wondering if Heaven had been transported to earth. Religious a woman as she was, Alice doubtlessly would’ve delivered the proper Scripture to signify the moment.
Had to insert the last in this post. Rummaging a few weeks ago, I uncovered a photo of her from the pile. I’d snapped it back in January 1978. Sneakily. Alice was notoriously camera shy in her later years. At that time, she might’ve espoused that photography stole portions of the soul. Whereas painted portraiture might’ve burnished it. May have been something to her thought. After all, a portraitist adds further human luster to his or her painting. Gleams that often invite speculation. A photo just freezes a moment.
It’s sad our society is in such decline that reading literature has become a chore. Books expand minds. Adept teachers leading those classes produce expansive students.
I can’t imagine how poorer my cohort and I would be today if we hadn’t been assigned to read The Jungle and The Grapes of Wrath. The former is nowhere near as regarded as “subversive” as the latter. Primarily in the nation’s Southeast, school boards whose purposes have been usurped by narrowminded illiterates believing themselves adjunct clerics, as well as white Christian nationals who’ve closed their minds, are denying students vicarious opportunities through restrictive reading.
There are library shelves emptied of titles that have been banned. But that crime is for a future post.
Perhaps because The Grapes of Wrath is set in agrarian America it’s easier to wrap a warped mind around than the urban industrial setting of The Jungle. A good part of the Southeast remains rural. It’s not a stretch to envision today the atmosphere and conditions burdening the Joads and the rest of the figures contained within Steinbeck’s Great American Novel.
Moreover, set as The Grapes of Wrath was in the throes of the Depression, the real Christianity those pages contain is what many parents now find objectionable. Such phony piety proclaimers vilify the book as socialism. Then I suppose they must also dispute the New Testament. Whole tracts of it have been lifted, updated, and put into actual practice by the characters within The Grapes of Wrath.
Subversive indeed, John Steinbeck. Subversive indeed.
Much as I enjoy having read both novels, television offers a more immediate edification perfect for Thanksgiving. And pictures are easier for minds to grasp than writing.
Particularly American minds. No, that’s not a dig at our less literate citizens or less dynamic America as a whole. Back in the first Gilded Age, when a political macher named William “Boss” Tweed lorded over New York City politics, he never worried what reporters uncovered then published about his municipal thieving. Akin to an alarming percentage of MAGAs, they couldn’t read. Or at least couldn’t comprehend what they read. Which is just as bad, no?
However, Boss Tweed despised newspaper cartoonists. Thomas Nast was his nemesis. Nast’s deft pen and ink caricatures simply, no, directly skewed Boss Tweed in ways tomes chronicling his malfeasance couldn’t have.
In fact, Boss Tweed may’ve uttered one of the best unfiltered statements from an American politician – right up there with Richard Nixon’s “I’m not a crook!” New York’s then Chief Thief allegedly exclaimed, “Let’s stop those damned pictures! I don’t care so much what papers write about me – my constituents can’t read. But damn it they can see pictures!”
MAGAs can’t read. But memes they understand.
For the longest, I’ve made it yearly appointment viewing to watch Harvest of Shame. This CBS documentary should be required of every high school student’s eyeballs. One that should be viewed just before Thanksgiving break.
Yes, it was filmed in the early 1960s. Yes, horror of horrors, it’s in black and white. But the topic reported then has served as a graphic reminder for my Boomer cohort from what a good portion of us have ascended. A wrong turn, a wrong meeting, a wrong path taken by our parents, their lacking the drive to strive, that could’ve been our elders newsman Edward R. Murrow might’ve been interviewing in the more obscure and patently ignored reaches of Dawgpatch.
Election 2024 results have the potential to make Harvest of Shame current. Well, certainly for landed Americans whose recourses are few and which the incoming administration intends to further straiten.
If Americans of all stripes permit the incoming administration to use Gestapo tactics in identifying, rounding up, detaining illegal aliens in concentration camps then mass deporting them, enormous percentages of the workers who harvest our produce, dress our meat in meat-packing plants will be gone. Machines will not replace them.
There are no stoop labor substitutes. There are no devices that cleave or slice beef and pork carcasses or bone fowl. Without human hands these tasks don’t get done.
Assuredly the know-nothing-of-America cabinet and advisers being slapped together by the 78-year-old penile implant blithefully believe addicted Americans now letting themselves waste away on oxy and fentanyl subsidized by national and states’ social assistance programs will rouse their lazy bones from stupor. That is after the emptyheaded threat of their losing access to the public trough the junkies will then cleanse themselves amid the fields or beside conveyors.
Once our hearty genuine laughter subsides, what else could be farther from the truth?
Those salts of the earth are so beat, they’ll starve before they work. They’d certainly let us rot away.
Joads they’re not.