From article below: “What’s it (Thanksgiving Day) about?” an Irish visitor asked me a couple of years back. “Everyone sits around giving thanks all day? Thanks for what? George bloody Bush?”
Actually, that Irishman stumbled on to the truth. That's exactly what we'll be thankful for on Thursday because without that strong hand on the helm, we wouldn't be here safe and sound living in the land of peace and prosperity!
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November 18, 2007, 8:00 a.m.
American Treasure
Giving thanks.
By Mark Steyn
Speaking as a misfit unassimilated foreigner, I think of Thanksgiving as the most American of holidays. Christmas is celebrated elsewhere, even if there are significant local variations: in continental Europe, naughty children get left rods to be flayed with and lumps of coal; in Britain, Christmas lasts from December 22nd to mid-January and celebrates the ancient cultural traditions of massive alcohol intake and watching the telly till you pass out in a pool of your own vomit. All part of the rich diversity of our world. But Thanksgiving (excepting the premature and somewhat undernourished Canadian version) is unique to America. “What’s it about?” an Irish visitor asked me a couple of years back. “Everyone sits around giving thanks all day? Thanks for what? George bloody Bush?”
Well, Americans have a lot to be thankful for. Europeans think of this country as “the New World” in part because it has an eternal newness which is noisy and distracting. Who would ever have thought you could have ready-to-eat pizza faxed directly to your iPod? And just when you think you’re on top of the general trend of novelty, it veers off in an entirely different direction: Continentals who grew up on Hollywood movies where the guy tells the waitress “Gimme a cuppa joe” and slides over a nickel return to New York a year or two later and find the coffee now costs $5.75, takes 25 minutes and requires an agonizing choice between the cinnamon-gingerbread-persimmon latte with coxcomb sprinkles and the decaf venti pepperoni-Eurasian-milfoil macchiato. Who would have foreseen that the nation that inflicted fast food and drive-thru restaurants on the planet would then take the fastest menu item of all and turn it into a kabuki-paced performance art? What mad genius!
But Americans aren’t novelty junkies on the important things. “The New World” is one of the oldest settled constitutional democracies on earth, to a degree “the Old World” can barely comprehend. Where it counts, Americans are traditionalists. We know Eastern Europe was a totalitarian prison until the Nineties, but we forget that Mediterranean Europe (Greece, Spain, Portugal) has democratic roots going all the way back until, oh, the mid-Seventies; France and Germany’s constitutions date back barely half a century, Italy’s only to the 1940s, and Belgium’s goes back about 20 minutes, and currently it’s not clear whether even that latest rewrite remains operative. The US Constitution is not only older than France’s, Germany’s, Italy’s or Spain’s constitution, it’s older than all of them put together. Americans think of Europe as Goethe and Mozart and 12th century castles and 6th century churches, but the Continent’s governing mechanisms are no more ancient than the Partridge Family. Aside from the Anglophone democracies, most of “the west’”s nation states have been conspicuous failures at sustaining peaceful political evolution from one generation to the next, which is why they’re so susceptible to the siren song of Big Ideas — Communism, Fascism, European Union. If you’re going to be novelty-crazed, better the zebra-mussel cappuccino than the Third Reich.
Even in a supposedly 50/50 nation, you’re struck by the assumed stability underpinning even fundamental disputes. If you go into a bookstore, the display shelves offer a smorgasbord of leftist anti-Bush tracts claiming that he and Cheney have trashed, mangled, gutted, raped and tortured, sliced’n’diced the Constitution, put it in a cement overcoat and lowered it into the East River. Yet even this argument presupposes a shared veneration for tradition unknown to most Western political cultures: When Tony Blair wanted to abolish in effect the upper house of the national legislature, he just got on and did it. I don’t believe the U.S. Constitution includes a right to abortion or gay marriage or a zillion other things the Left claims to detect emanating from the penumbra, but I find it sweetly touching that in America even political radicalism has to be framed as an appeal to constitutional tradition from the powdered-wig era. In Europe, by contrast, one reason why there’s no politically significant pro-life movement is because, in a world where constitutions have the life expectancy of an Oldsmobile, great questions are just seen as part of the general tide, the way things are going, no sense trying to fight it. And, by the time you realize you have to, the tide’s usually up to your neck.
So Americans should be thankful they have one of the last functioning nation states. Because they’ve been so inept at exercising it, Europeans no longer believe in national sovereignty, whereas it would never occur to Americans not to. This profoundly different attitude to the nation state underpins in turn Euro-American attitudes to transnational institutions such as the U.N. But on this Thanksgiving the rest of the world ought to give thanks to American national sovereignty, too. When something terrible and destructive happens — a tsunami hits Indonesia, an earthquake devastates Pakistan — the U.S. can project itself anywhere on the planet within hours and start saving lives, setting up hospitals and restoring the water supply. Aside from Britain and France, the Europeans cannot project power in any meaningful way anywhere. When they sign on to an enterprise they claim to believe in — shoring up Afghanistan’s fledgling post-Taliban democracy — most of them send token forces under constrained rules of engagement that prevent them doing anything more than manning the photocopier back at the base. If America were to follow the Europeans and maintain only shriveled attenuated residual military capacity, the world would very quickly be nastier and bloodier, and far more unstable. It’s not just Americans and Iraqis and Afghans who owe a debt of thanks to the U.S. soldier but all the Europeans grown plump and prosperous in a globalized economy guaranteed by the most benign hegemon in history.
That said, Thanksgiving isn’t about the big geopolitical picture, but about the blessings closer to home. Last week, the state of Oklahoma celebrated its centennial, accompanied by rousing performances of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s eponymous anthem:
We know we belong to the land
And the land we belong to is grand!
Which isn’t a bad theme song for the first Thanksgiving, either. Three hundred and eighty-six years ago, the pilgrims thanked God because there was a place for them in this land, and it was indeed grand. The land is grander today, and that too is remarkable: France has lurched from Second Empires to Fifth Republics struggling to devise a lasting constitutional settlement for the same smallish chunk of real estate, but the principles that united a baker’s dozen of East Coast colonies were resilient enough to expand across a continent and halfway around the globe to Hawaii. Americans should, as always, be thankful this Thanksgiving, but they should also understand just how rare in human history their blessings are.
© Mark Steyn 2007
8 comments:
Here's one American who understands and gives thanks for those blessings.
And a very happy one to you and yours.
Coming from that one other country that celebrates Thanksgiving, albeit "a premature and undernourished one", (whatever that can possibly mean--bad hair day, Mark?), I have a question. Ours is in early October for obvious reasons, but otherwise they seem to be pretty much the same--family, turkey, pumpkin pie, blessings, football, etc. We don't tend to do long distance travel during ours--again for obvious reasons--but otherwise very similar. But I'm always amazed at how Americans will jam the airports, converge from far and wide, overeat all the turkey and trimmings and enjoy the game together, etc. and then do exacly the same thing all over again less than four weeks later! You hardly give yourselves enough time to digest or let the family squabbles cool off. We at least space Halloween between our turkeys.
Peter, Perhaps Mark was referring to the bi-cultural nature of your land. The English side exhibits self-control and the French side disdains a meal without garlic. Allors.
The logistics of the two holidays so close together is even more of a nightmare when you have kids in college.
Hmm. I can wile away a pleasant day throwing all kinds of barbs at our Gallic brethern, but I think I would be a little hesitant to razz them about garlic. Erp, you don't go staight for the enemy's strength!
If you will permit a slight diversion from the theme here, yesterday in a country antique store, while my wife was searching for Christmas baubles, I came across a little "bathroom book" that featured copies of magazine and newspaper ads for all the pre-packaged, canned, frozen foods that took North America by storm from the 40's to the 60's. What a hoot and boy, did we eat some awful, weird stuff. Remember all those revolting Kraft recipes involving cream cheese, mayonnaise, peanut butter, graham crackers, etc.?? And who could forget jellied carrot and pineapple salad? Kool-aid as a pre-dinner cocktail for guests? Endless bland, unspiced casseroles? How about my personal favourites--(instant) coffee-glazed Spam and a delightful luncheon salad consisting of a pile of cottage cheese surrounded by canned peach slices, topped by a cherry and ringed by fritos for dipping. And the endless varieties of frozen and canned "Italian" slop! On and on it went, and it made me remember why so many dinners were such a struggle and why my friend used to say about the period: "Dessert was the prize you got for getting through the main course." Of course, those were the days when salt was considered an exotic spice and lean meat was a health hazard. I think this was the real reason Thanksgiving was so wonderful--it was a reversion to traditional recipes and cooking.
Vive l'ail!
Garlic is okay if, after the dish is prepared and before it's served, the odor has been eliminated. The book you saw wasn't this by any chance?
Horrible “American” food? I never tasted it because my parents were Albanian immigrants and never used any prepared foods, maybe tomato paste in a pinch. My mother was a perfectionist and everything was prepared perfectly and no amount of trouble was too much. To make matters worse, my mother-in-law, a couple of generations away from Italy, was an Italian cook par excellence and would go to the ultimate trouble to make things correctly using no prepared foods at all.
So what’s a poor young bride to do? Why go to cooking classes at the 90th St YMCA in Manhattan. That’s where I learned to cook and also learned that it was a skill I couldn’t get too excited about. Of course, I did it for about 40 years before retiring and letting the second team have a go at it. He loves to cook, is getting pretty good at and even likes cleaning up.
Sorry, editor is my alter ego.
Yes, it was definitely an Anglo thing immigrants saved us from. My wife grew up in a home of Greek immigrants and knew none of it, but she remembers her beloved grandmother snorting "Dogfood!" at the Kraft commercials. Remember too that, apart from some very mundane Chinese food and barbeque chicken, take-out and foreign food was pretty much either unavailable or high-brow expensive. How did we survive without pizza?
The palatable, even delicious, exceptions were roasts on the first night (they came cold and congealed on subsequent nights) and desserts other than cakes. I don't think I tasted a real homemade cake until I was well into my teens when even my postwar bride mother decided she had had enough. I'll tell you, the angels sang that day.
Peter, I believe you may be younger than my kids (youngest 44), so your childhood and mine were quite different.
Talk about pizza! I never heard of it or tasted it until I my future husband took me to a pizzeria in Brooklyn called Ragazzi’s (translates to something like ragamuffins). I thought I had died and gone to heaven. Of course, the stuff that passes for pizza now bears no resemblance to the ambrosia of the glory days of the mid 50's.
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