HOW THANKSGIVING RE-INVENTED ITSELF...

Relax and let me tell you the story of how Thanksgiving re-invented itself.  Pour a drink, cut a piece of pie or carve a slice of ham or turkey or lamb and make a quick sandwich...  What you are about to read is as essential to being American as anything can get, this story is about the ability of a people to change and improve themselves...

Above the enchanting olfactions of Thanksgiving, sweet potato pie, roast turkey, corn bread muffins, giblet gravy, oyster stuffing, collard greens and such or rather woven within it is the unspoken story about how Thanksgiving re-invented itself… or how Americans re-invented it… it truly is a remarkable and heroic story...

As most American stories go, it was a collaboration between every race sex and religion, it was a nations accomplishment .. and for this we should all be thankful and proud...  I know of no other place on earth where such fundamental change in the psyche of a people could have happened.  America, over 200 years after its invention is still a truly remarkable place that celebrates freedom and equality and is forgiving of the simple human foibles for the greater good of mankind... Thank you America!

Thanksgiving is a patently American Holiday which traces its origin back to a seminal feast of questionable historical accuracy between English colonists and a tribe of Aboriginal inhabitants of North America in commemoration of the first successful year of settlement of Europeans in the new world.  As such, Thanksgiving has got to be the most ironic of all American holidays when one considers the inevitability of that protracted historical tragedy that would ultimately spell the utter demise of all Native Americans!  One must surely reconsider if the Native Americans were truly on board with this apocalyptic death wish in the making or whether this American Myth was invented to smooth over the gruesome historically documented reality we all know to be true… But what matters now that many centuries lay between the marginalization of  native Americans is how we treat history.  The bitterness of those times deserves to be told in truth.  Now this is a topic most appropriately discussed whilst enjoying a bountiful thanksgiving spread or afterwards, sipping aperitif and fine home crafted desserts and pastry.

Unlike other old traditions that become culturally obsolete though nonetheless continue to occupy our calendars, Thanksgiving has undergone perhaps one of the most comprehensive makeovers as holidays go; preserved now as a node of gratitude for the many blessings quantified within the past year of our lives, a time for family and friends to convene around a table of thankfulness, charity and humility.  That is the true meaning of Thanksgiving…  Let us lift our full glasses of wine, beer, spirits, sweet tea or cool-aid in a toast to the fine art of moving on!

Thanksgiving was able to morph into a totally different kind of holiday precisely because it was mythical in nature.  Unlike Columbus day, (mythical but in different ways), which celebrates the scatterbrained meanderings of a lost European navigator who unwittingly stumbles upon civilizations previously known to the ancient Egyptians, Romans, Greeks, Persians and Vikings whose knowledge had been conveniently lost or destroyed by the Roman Catholic Church, Thanksgiving never existed to make legitimate any claim on authorship or discovery.  It never was anything more than a humble wiping of the brow at the end of a difficult planting season that would have gone hopelessly awry were it not for the generous intervention of Native Americans whose horticultural knowledge of indigenous species greatly surpassed those of their soon to be oppressors… but that is another story too…  And this is a point that, were it a movie, there would appear a caption floating upon the screen, “Take sip of cocktail now”!

That is why today we can so easily transition into the newly defined traditions of the giving of thanks but in so doing we should also incorporate a moment of sober contemplation of the loss of thousands of nations of human beings, lost languages, traditions, technology, wisdom and philosophy.  We cannot, should not merely switch out one horrible mistake of a tradition for one that sits better upon our conscience… Take this time to memorialize the struggle of our brothers and sisters who began cultivating this great nation over ten, thousand years ago… remember them… making a mental note that it was through their sacrifice and our consciousness that Thanksgiving was able to re-invent itself…  Not to make Thanksgiving into a lugubrious day of mourning… but to take just a moment of time to remember where it all really started.  We should all be joyful that the tradition of Thanksgiving has been cleaned-up and revised to better suit the needs of American people and no time is this holiday so precious than now when we are experiencing some of the most difficult economic times in the history of this country.

I am so glad that we have Thanksgiving…  I see the proud cooks showing their turkeys and holiday dishes on Facebook I smell the sweet and savory culinary creations wafting down the halls of my apartment building… everywhere there is the smell of joy and happiness and thankfulness that we were able to even live to experience this day.  What happened in the past is done… forgiven but not forgotten… what happens in the present and the future is our legacy to uphold.   Nothing says this better than the first glimpse of a fabulous thanksgiving spread prepared with love… Cheers! And Happy Thanksgiving to you all!

FIN

Written by David Vollin

EDITORIAL: SECESSION, SEDITION OR JUST PLAIN SILLINESS?

 

Why on earth would any State want to secede from The United States of America?  The mere suggestion of secession by any U.S. State or territory in a country already amped-up by the real prospect of destructive terrorists threats in the wake of 911 is no less than an overt act of sedition punishable by law!  That this administration has dealt with the mere suggestion of secession by its own citizens demonstrates the utmost temperance, a hallmark so very representative of the calm and thoughtful Barack Obama in stark contrast to the “Shoot-Em-Up Cowboy” mentality of his predecessor George W. Bush.  In the third Presidential Debate Romney exhibited latent traits of war-mongering and other barbarisms demonstrative of what would surely reveal itself as a “Strike Now Evade Or Circumvent Accountability Later” philosophy.  But the juiced-out production the republican party has attempted to brainwash The American People with since Ronald Reagan took the White House has played out, the credits have rolled by, the screen is blank, the house lights have come on and the curtain has now closed… the audience has left the theater and is now walking out into the real light of day. The only thing that stands in the way of The American people and the recapture of the American way of life are the very politicians they have elected to protect their rights, jobs and freedoms.  Heretofore these politicians have squandered precious time with inane partisan allegiances and biases that have nothing to do with the better and larger interest of Americans as a whole. 

 

If congress really had the interests of the American people at heart they would go to the capitol and refuse to leave the chambers of congress until they had worked out a bipartisan plan to return jobs, security and economic prosperity to America!  But the whole thing has become “Just A Job” to them, they wake up, piss off billions of dollars taxpayers money and time playing insider games that never result in a payout of benefits for millions of Americans who are jobless, homeless and hopeless and then go home like thousands of other commuters to do the same stupid thing over and over and over again.  Likewise, instead of posting ridiculous petitions for secession, something that just is not ever going to happen, these Americans who are so unhappy with the their country should focus on the real issues at hand; The inability of congress to set petty differences aside and galvanize itself in the true spirit of Americanism to solve the great problems facing our country as it enters the twenty-first century…  How do you explain to a father and mother who are have lost their jobs and are about to lose their house and stability that you are going to resurrect an anachronistic and obsolete technique called the filibuster to waste time in  congress instead of doing what intelligent, principled men in congress should do, discuss and negotiate in those precious hours that stand between a rapidly sinking ship and a plan of action that might save vessel and crew!

 

My first reaction to the absurdity of these secession petitions was simply to ignore them; better to focus on issues of dire urgency and immediacy than to waste valuable time and energy on spoiled, selfish individuals who would distract the American consciousness away from the real issues of the day.  Every minute wasted on this idiocy means time taken away from real issues such as providing food and shelter for the displaced.  Can you imagine what would happen if these misguided souls focused their energy on petitioning congress to develop legislature that would give incentives to companies who kept their manufacturing operations on U.S. soil?  Can you imagine what could happen if these disgruntled Americans used their energy to petition congress to develop incentives to protect U.S. property and assets from foreign investors while we rebuild our economy from the ground up?

 

I eavesdropped on someone’s commentary on the recent petitions for secession the other day as they offered a succinct solution, “Well let them secede”!  I wanted to follow-up with an admonition but following the august example of my president, Mr. Obama I restrained myself from immediate unpolished commentary deciding to put further thought into the matter before publishing my personal opinion… It is my understanding that a state may not, in fact secede and that the very act of secession inclusive of any degree of its process would be considered “Sedition” or treason, an act punishable by law!  In the mid nineteenth century The Confederate Movement was put down by the Union Army the criminal perpetrators absolved of their crimes against The United States Government in lieu of the Abolition of Slavery for all time pursuant to the 13^th Amendment and the peaceful restoration of those criminal, treasonous States to the Union.  For further commentary on The Confederate Movement go to the article “RETHINKING THE RELEVANCE AND LEGACY OF THE CONFEDERATE MOVEMENT IN AMERICA”  at this link:  http://forthebrothas.blogspot.com/2012/04/rethinking-relevance-and-legacy-of.html.   

 

One night whilst biking on the mall, this night in particular to photograph the new WWII Memorial I was stunned by a poignant caption carved deep into the stone and it read, “Freedom Is Not Free”!  That statement moved me so that it has stayed in my consciousness ever since.  The framers of The American Constitution, the Authors of The Declaration of Independence, The Gettysburg Address, The Emancipation Proclamation, The Civil Rights Act shared the common vision that Americans should act as a unified front not as a broken, disheveled, undignified confusion of rabble!  Americans do not betray their country, they do not threaten it with secession when they feel they have not got their way, we are not children quitting the game when because we feel insecure or simply because we have lost a round.  We are Americans, strong and resilient and possessed with a tenacious sense of fraternity we have the unique ability to love those with whom we differ philosophically because we understand the holistic equation, we see the bigger picture, we are the bigger person!

 

FIN

Written By David Vollin

 

 

References: Click on the link below to view the referenced dument in its entirety.

1.        The Civil Rights Act:  http://www.archives.gov/education/lessons/civil-rights-act/ 

2.       The Emancipation Proclamation:  http://www.archives.gov/exhibits/featured_documents/emancipation_proclamation/ 

3.       The Gettysburg Address:  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gettysburg_Address 

4.       The U.S. Constitution:  http://www.senate.gov/civics/constitution_item/constitution.htm 

5.       The Declaration of Independence:  http://www.archives.gov/exhibits/charters/declaration_transcript.html 

“LINCOLN” A CIVIL WAR RETROSPECTIVE TAKES A CANDID LOOK AT THE POLITICKING OF THE 13TH AMENDMENT INTO LAW…

If there is one clear message conveyed in Spielberg’s newest documentary/drama about a short segment in the life of President Lincoln it would be that slavery was the fundamental cause of the American Civil War.    Central to Spielberg’s development of that theme which fundamentally rocked the mid nineteenth-century American States to their very foundations on both sides of the Mason-Dixon Line was the concept of divine right.  But the intellectual argument against divine right shall have to be left to other venues in order to be developed in its entirety.  This movie opened up so many doors to contemplation that Spielberg surely must follow-up in order to tell those unique stories as well.  Lincoln is the story of how one of Americas most renowned and controversial presidents took an aggressive lead in the little known saga of the politicking of the 13^th Amendment into law.  This is the story of how a few powerful and principled white men ended over 200 years of enslavement of Africans and black men in North America, effectively completing what the founders had failed to accomplish 100 years earlier at the birth of America. 

Spielberg laid no tinsel or guild upon the artifice employed to procure the narrowly ratified 13^th Amendment or upon a war weary congress struggling to make manifest the egalitarian ideals of the Enlightenment; freedom and equality for all men.  He revealed the grit and grime, the bribes and back room deals, and the trickery so common now in our twenty-first century congress/lobbyist relations; this was its origin.  What is most notable is that he did not shrink from including racially biased content delivered by characters who did not embrace emancipation in order to achieve a higher degree of verisimilitude.  Nothing was edited, no euphemisms were afforded and characters spoke as clearly as they would have done, unfiltered to deliver the mindset of the times.  Notwithstanding, the nobility of the ratification of the 13^th Amendment was not diminished; Spielberg demonstrated that however grudging, Congress understood its duty to fulfill the egalitarian prophecy framed in The Declaration of Independence and The Constitution over 100 years earlier by the founding fathers but he accurately demonstrated how hard-fought that battle was. 

The movie spans only a few months between the ending of Lincolns first term and his untimely assassination at the outset of the second.  It reveals a Lincoln who had clear and carefully thought out plan to end slavery and how he bided his time in order to change the course of history.  The story of Lincoln’s turbulent home life is a mere but humanizing background to the dizzying politics of what would then have been a bustling and war-torn Washington, D.C. 

The movie opens as Lincoln speaks with former slaves now enlisted as Union Officers in a segregated regiment.  Lincoln congratulates them for their legendary valour in battle setting the tone for their presence throughout the movie as a sign of socioeconomic change.  That they were so present at the meeting of the Southern Delegation yet absent at Appomattox was also a cleverly embedded note.  Spielberg chose a radical departure from what one might have expected of Appomattox, a gentlemanly gesture of departure at the terminus of surrender… As such it is easy to visualize Appomattox as such, a mere formality at the end of a much greater performance.

Overall, Spielberg’s “Lincoln” was a wonderfully accurate and detailed account of the politicking of the 13^th Amendment to the American Constitution within its ensanguined context of gun smoke, corpse-strewn battlefields, elegant parlors and the halls of congress it did remind us that people who could easily have turned their backs on slavery came together in one city to emancipate the enslaved forever, not with any clear plan of how they would move forward once the deed had been done but doing so because this change would ultimately be for the betterment of all men.

FIN

Written by David Vollin

EDITORIAL: A GLIMMER OF HOPE IN A GREY WORLD...

 

Whether Obama’s commitment to break away from the obsolete practices of the past, taking government out of the hands of big business and placing it back into the hands of the people is shared by the majority of Americans will be decided on the political battlefield by the close of 11/6-12.  

For those honest, hardworking Americans who simply desire to get past the drudgery and hopelessness of working merely to pay bills, who hope someday, somehow to be able to afford to exist with a reasonable degree of comfort and safety which includes some form of economic security, a nest egg for tomorrow, election day looms as the threshold of either a great and promising opportunity for the working man or a lost one. 

 

For many weeks I have remained silent; listening, watching, thinking and hoping that this presidential race was not about race but about real, tangible, human issues.  Issues that would touch the lives not only of pampered millionaires but of the millions whose nitty gritty work actually brings those millions into Wall Street… It seemed so strange that the republicans could be blinded to the fact that their obsolete recipe for capitalism had run the country into the ground during the 8 years of the Bush Administration.  Partisanship or not, I wondered,  could they really have been oblivious to the way in which the Bush Administration allowed wall street bankers to rape and pillage the once healthy American economy?  Did they miss the patently gangster process by which Americans paid for a war in which Iraq was physically devastated in order to find weapons of mass destruction that did not exist and then taxpayers were made to pay for Halliburton to rebuild it again?  Did they not know that Bush and Cheney owned significant economic interests in Halliburton?  I had to stand back as a democrat and look at the picture more objectively.  My head was spinning with ugly images of the obvious… Every molecule of the republican administration under Bush revealed a massive fear campaign steeped in alleged terrorist and illegal alien threats clearly launched to blind the public of the real threat the American way of life, the elitist and corrupt Republican Party itself!  Each day under republican rule painted a different code color of fear and suspicion.  In contrast the Obama administration has been like smooth, gentle surface of a woodland pond.  If the terror was so real where did it go?  Was it coming for Bush and the republicans or was it just conjured up by them?  

 

I wondered how those who worked for a living, just like me, could even think about supporting a party that still believed in trickle-down economics or what I like to call “Pie Crust” economics…  The wealthiest classes eat the meat filling of the pie and the rest of the population picks up the fallen pie crust crumbs… hardly an acceptable condition.  Some might even call this form of capitalism, “Pig-Foot” economics…  not too far removed from the “Voodoo” economics of an earlier republican president.  Both Reaganomics and the republican policies of Bush ignored the welfare of the common man.  Life was about big business acquisitions and international trade while the American worker was looked at as some filthy parasite leeching away at the ill-gotten profits of big business. Why would anyone opt for such a miserable existence except if they did so with the intent that however bad off they might be, others would be harmed even more possibly eliminating them from the pool of competition… my face grew grim because I knew that only two things could cause a person to be so ignorant to and accepting of their own demise… racism… or just sheer ignorance…  As always, I hesitate to pull the race card because it truly has no place in logical, rational assessment but since the prospect has been raised so many times both openly and subliminally I had to visit it if just for one unpleasant moment… but I happily moved on… I am sure there have been some reasons for the resistance to Obama based in racism but in order to be bigger I mustn’t dwell on it… the first Obama win proved that racism, though present, was far less a variable than I had ever imagined… but a variable nonetheless…

 

Well, I sighed, if it is not racism then what have could make poor, working class or even middle class people identify philosophically with the very rich? The answer, if indeed it was the real answer was even more disturbing… I thought; it is because supporting elitist policy, even though they are far from being part of that elite class, makes them feel closer to something they wish to be but are not or may never be; a reality they cannot cope with accepting…  It reminds me of the mid-twentieth century sitcom “Bewitched” in which the child Tabitha was possessed with the magical power of “Wish-Craft”!  The rusty special effects that unconvincingly transformed Tabitha’s wish-craft into reality appeared to be the very same faux magic as a poor man’s misguided support for elitist republican policies that saw him only as a poor an insignificant pawn.  How could a poor man think about supporting the enslaving policies of the very rich?  It is like the ancient practise of the warrior to eat the flesh of a formidable animal of prey and/or array himself in the animals likeness in order to become enamored of that animals legendary qualities… Wish craft yes… I can see why desperate and hopeful people could fall into such folly but what does any of this buffoonery have to do with reality?  The reality is that the very wealthy and powerful Americans are not on the same side as the poor and working and middle classes… we are diametrically opposed…  they can only remain wealthy if we remain poor…

 

Obama’s seasoned perspicacity is a clarion to all who truly love freedom and want to protect it! His commitment invigorates the spirit of fairness and humanitarianism as well as to encourage sound economic and social policy is unprecedented…  He sees past the next 4 years knowing that change may not be felt before the ending of his term and that is the very definition of a new start!  He is the first runner in the relay… he is steadfast to get the game going and ready to pass on the baton having made a fundamental gain in the first heat.  He is the president of the common man…  He thinks like we think… A rich man does not understand the simple setbacks and challenges common men face in their day to day existence because it is not their experience…

I cannot touch every man and woman in ways that will help them identify a betrayal to themselves and to others. Common men and women who support policy designed for the wealthy, elite are traitors to their own cause.  Common men and women do not have time in this life to wait for the crumbs of trickle-down, pig-foot, pie-crust or wish-craft economics to fall onto their already bare plates… their lives will be over and spent in need and want… The world is far too wide and all I can do is hope that the misguided will one day wake up from their disconnected fantasies and join those who struggle for real freedom and justice.  In the present my thoughts are with those brothers and sisters of all races, creeds, sexes, religions and nationalities who are still able to see through the heavy cloud of deceit and distraction created to masque the villainous misdeeds of the very rich under the guise of the republican party.  My only hope is that most of us who call ourselves Americans can keep the commitment to real change and not weaken and fall back into imprudent and corrupt practices of the past.  But in order to do this Americans must understand that real change is not an overnight process and Americans have not ever truly done what they needed to do in order to effect real change.  Change is not a magical spell achieved through the instantaneous process of “Wish-Craft”, it comes only after long hard effort and struggle to remove the old and replace it with the new.  So those of like mind who still have hope for the America envisaged by the framers and the slaves and their descendants who upheld the commitment to freedom and social evolution, they are my glimmer of hope in a grey world…

 

FIN

 

Written by David Vollin

www.forthebrothas.blogspot.com