November 23, 2006
Thanksgiving Posted by Fredric Smoler at 04:05 PM EST In my circles—call them educated liberal middle-class, for want of any greater precision—I have noticed, for as long as I have been an adult, a tendency to be a bit derisive about Thanksgiving. The holiday tends to be depicted as gluttony in preparation for consumerism, surrounded by a lot of family one might not want to see, on a day faintly yet irritatingly suffused by a religiosity one probably does not feel. Today’s New York Times editorial captures this tone nicely, when it opens with a question: “Is this the year Thanksgiving becomes nothing more than the prelude to tomorrow’s shopping?” and then suggests “an enlarged sense of the day, as a last defense against Christmas.” But the editorial manages to end with some mawkishness noteworthy for its lack of specificity: “Just when it feels as though we might be overlooking the meaning of this holiday—the peculiar value of Thanksgiving—it becomes clear that we have drawn together once again not to exchange the gifts our entire culture seems to be driving us to shop for but to share, simply, each other.” Why does Thanksgiving bring out this combination of irritability and vacuity? I remember primary school lessons in our civic religion talking not about “sharing, simply, each other,” but about gratitude for the land’s bounty, and for being safe from foreign kings. My guess is that Thanksgiving logically implies giving thanks to, giving thanks for, and simply giving thanks, and that all of these impulses make my sort uneasy. The thanks are supposed to be given to God, and my circles tend to be pretty secular. Thanks are supposed to be given for the blessings of the American founding, but the bounty of the land is now widely imagined to have been stolen, or otherwise tainted, and there is a sense there are no more foreign kings. Wicked old Europe is seen to be populated by Social Democratic and pacific welfare states, which my sort often admires more than we admire our own political arrangements. Giving thanks at all may run afoul of a quiet but deeply-rooted meritocratic certainty that our happy circumstances are the result of having gotten into a decent college and a good professional school on the strength of our own industry. In general terms, of course, we dutifully insist we have received undeserved privileges, but alongside that we are pretty confident that we’ve earned it, and why give thanks to anyone for hard-won and deserved success? At the risk of churching it up, take a look at the other side of the question. Wicked kings are still doing pretty well over much of the globe, and they can always stage a comeback in the lands where they seem to have vanished. Most people who have perceived the possibility of fascism in the Bush administration have rather oddly failed to see even a trace of it in, say, France, where the National Front beat out the Socialist Party for second place in the first round of the 2002 presidential election. The land’s bounty may well be a result of the way the American founding worked out. Some interesting Latin American developmental economists seem to think so. The Social Democratic welfare states are recent arrivals, and most of them owe something to, well, Americans. A few years ago I got a look at St. Vith, in Belgium. It looked like the set of Leave It To Beaver or My Three Sons, which surprised me until I remembered that American aircraft had leveled the town after a couple of Panzer armies finally pushed their way into it. Some decent political arrangements are very literally built on the ruins of some very indecent political arrangements. Outside of Atlanta and the swath Sherman cut to, through, and past that city, our society is rarely built on such literal ruins. Something to give thanks for. Back in those primary school civic lessons, I got the sense that Thanksgiving was also thanks for a second chance. I later read F. Scott Fitzgerald’s assertion that “There are no second acts in American lives,” and I thought I knew what it meant, but it still baffled me. The civic religion held the contrary: America above all meant that there could be a second act, or at least a chance at one. To get that second chance you needed pluck, and you needed luck, even if only the luck to get here. Luck remains something you should be thankful for.
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