Happy Thanksgiving!

Charles Blow's column this morning is "The Horrible History of Thanksgiving," a helpful reminder of the Native American genocide at the core of U.S. history; in it Blow concludes:

I spent most of my life believing a gauzy, kindergarten version of Thanksgiving, thinking only of feasts and family, turkey and dressing.

I was blind, willfully ignorant, I suppose, to the bloodier side of the Thanksgiving story, to the more honest side of it.

But I’ve come to believe that is how America would have it if it had its druthers: We would be blissfully blind, living in a soft world bleached of hard truth. I can no longer abide that.

Blow has been a man-on-fire recently with his hard-hitting columns on Mike Bloomberg (see "You Must Never Vote for Bloomberg" and "Bloomberg’s Bogus, Belated Mea Culpa"). Unfortunately, the company that employs Blow, The New York Times, is one of the world's chief bleachers of hard truth. Hopefully Blow can sustain his man-on-fire rebirth and focus some of his wrath on the newspaper's manufacture of official enemies. Maybe there will be column on Julian Assange or Jeremy Corbyn.

It's too bad that Blow didn't read a column that appeared on the same opinion page 25 years ago. Written by Arthur Quinn, my professor in the Department of Rhetoric at U.C. Berkeley, "The Miracle Harvest" traces the origin of Thanksgiving as a national holiday to a proclamation by Abraham Lincoln following the Union's bloody defeat at Chickamauga. Basically, Thanksgiving was a reelection ploy.

The Civil War is the single greatest event in the history of the United States, an event that still dominates our politics today. We shall see next year if a purely Dixiecrat campaign can triumph for the first time in a national election. Trump did not run a completely white ultra-nationalist campaign in 2016. But Trump's four years in office have eliminated the "big tent" aspects of his candidacy -- the promise of a vast infrastructure rebuild; the promises to reduce the U.S. overseas military footprint and to discipline the Saudis -- and left him entirely reliant on appeals to a Wallacite Know Nothing reactionary base of voters.

Quinn notes (something Blow mentions) that when the Pilgrims arrived at Plymouth they found it largely deserted, the natives having been wiped out by plague:

Moreover, the Pilgrims had survived their ordeal, if barely, only because a previous people had not. The colonists had found Plymouth deserted but with many signs of previous inhabitants. They found large corn caches, without which they almost certainly would have starved. They also found human bones scattered around -- not just the occasional skeleton but piles of them, as if this had been a battlefield where corpses had been left to rot. The Pilgrims subsequently learned that the Pawtuxet Indians who lived there had recently been wiped out by an epidemic, a catastrophe that would become all too familiar to the indigenous peoples of eastern North America.

Troy Vettese argued in an excellent article last year in New Left Review (see "To Freeze the Thames") that the Little Ice Age of the 17th century was caused by the genocide of millions of indigenous people in the New World due to exposure to settlers from the Old World.

Thanksgiving, both its origin as a national holiday during the Civil War and as an actual historical event in the 1600s, might be dubbed Halloween II; it is essentially a nationalist appreciation of the dead by those who remain behind. (That being said, maybe Veterans Day is Halloween II and Thanksgiving is Halloween III.)

Art Quinn died of brain cancer in 1997. Today U.C. Berkeley's Bancroft Library offers a research fellowship in his name.

The Colt 45 Chronicle #62

As Captain American: The Winter Soldier debuts this weekend, shattering the box-office record for the month of April, by luck of the draw the letter selected is my recitation of the Joe Simon and Jack Kirby origin of Captain America. (I clearly took it to heart.)

The Quinn referred to below is Arthur Quinn, our -- mine and my friend Mark's -- distinguished professor in the Rhetoric Department.

Previously, I said that I recall very little of these letters, written as they were more than a quarter-century ago. But I do remember one line -- at least a portion of it -- from this one: "Icarus drops twenty-two floors into Hudson blows right through concrete." -- My wife and I lived on the 22nd floor in a university high-rise apartment building next to the Henry Hudson Parkway and the Hudson River.

Autumn 1988

I thank you, Mark, for thinking of me and sending along letters for me to read. I always enjoy them. -- Looking that rat right in the eyes, and it turns out to be Quinn, and Quinn turns out to be us. Oh, shit. But I got the sun out here, after all. -- The sun is bright in the morning; it's mostly white, in the middle, and then a glaring gold, and then apple-red on the edges; it's a stadium-light sun, and it strings up the curved Harlem earth from my pre-work window. Icarus drops twenty-two floors into Hudson blows right through concrete. The subway awaits me with moist urine hands. And I try to get there fast because it's warm there. As I speed, I pass guys on their way to the site, guys who I used to be, guys with boots stained with gypsum dust. And I look at them, hitting 'em in the face with my eyes, and they don't even see me. They're thinking about the shit, all the shit, they have to deal with during the day. And I wish I were them . . . I lurch off unnoticed.

Steve Rogers was a potato-peeling frailty before being injected and electrified into Captain America. He sat in that movie house crucifying himself on the silver screen; 98 lbs. and a head of blond straw. He wanted to serve, to fight and die -- walk the stars. One day, the authorities behind Uncle Sam saw this, and they took skinny Steve aside, out the underwear line of Middletown, Kansas. They offered him his chance, risks and all, and he took it. He killed a Nazi within seconds. Shit -- and I mean this -- I think we're all ready to be Captain America. I'm ready for the transformation -- out of idolatry and into action, from milksop to worldbreaker. We get our chances every fucking day, and every day we let them tweet on by. Pretty soon I'm taking mine.

The Colt 45 Chronicle #43

This letter, number 43 from a collection that I retrieved from a storage space during halftime of last January's Seattle Seahawks playoff elimination in Atlanta, was written to a professor of mine for whom I had worked as a reader in a philosophy of history course. 

Arthur Quinn was the top professor in my department. He was there to write books, of which he published many, and do research. But he was also a standout lecturer, a winner of the university's Distinguished Teaching Award. My buddies and I looked up to him. The rumor was that he had played professional baseball in the Minnesota Twins farm system. Often you could find him playing an aggressive game of tennis on the courts near Edwards Stadium. He was a catholic and a family man with a attractive wife and handsome children. He was smart of course, but he was also kind and lively and he didn't tolerate bullshitters. I remember him just blowing up some guy who was reading a newspaper in class one morning. Art Quinn was the guy who every aspiring academic, like myself, wanted to be.

I think I wrote him a total of three letters -- I had to be careful: I didn't want to set off a volatile reaction to bullshit -- and the short one below was the first. I was suffering from the unexpected loss of the powerhouse Oakland A's to the weak-hitting Los Angeles Dodgers in the 1988 World Series; that, and I was quickly understanding what a wasteland the rat race offered.

Autumn 1988

You've got to die for your team. And I did. I sat there in NYC and spat blood back at the TV screen, blood that came from the heart. To see Canseco and Lansford and Henderson and McGwire whiff one after the other after the next was enough to ring my soul with a thousand LA tattoos. My only wish would be that big tragedies really do shoot off on the vault of heaven, that there's something that makes the big tragedy big, that separates it from every day, from all that quotidian waking-up-while-it's-still-too-dark-to-go-to-work suffering. But I suspect, as every young man must come to suspect, that there is no difference.