Nobody but America celebrates Thanksgiving. It is reserved by history and the intent of “the founders” as the supremely white American holiday, the most ghoulish event on the national calendar. No Halloween of the imagination can rival the exterminationist reality that was the genesis, and remains the legacy, of the American Thanksgiving. It is the most loathsome, humanity-insulting day of the year – a pure glorification of racist barbarity. White America embraced Thanksgiving because a majority of that population glories in the fruits, if not the unpleasant details, of genocide and slavery and feels, on the whole, good about their heritage: a cornucopia of privilege and national power. Children are taught to identify with the good fortune of the Pilgrims. It does not much matter that the Native American and African holocausts that flowed from the feast at Plymouth are hidden from the children’s version of the story – kids learn soon enough that Indians were made scarce and Africans became enslaved.
Tag Archives: Thanksgiving 2013
Auspicious Simultaneity: Holiday Potentiation
We gather together to ask the Lord’s blessing;
He chastens and hastens His will to make known.
The wicked oppressing now cease from distressing.
Sing praises to His Name; He forgets not His own.
How to post something about Chanukah as well as Thanksgiving without going into cultural dissonance? Is it portentous or auspicious that they fall on the same day this year? What, in God’s name, does it all mean? I met someone recently who told me it meant people were going to find redemption…
I certainly hope he is right.
Θεοφάνεια
Sing, O daughter of Zion; shout, O Israel;
be glad and rejoice with all the heart,
O daughter of Jerusalem.
The Lord hath taken away thy judgments,
he hath cast out thine enemy:
the king of Israel, even the Lord, is in the midst of thee:
thou shalt not see evil any more.