Connecting the Dots
by Glynn Wilson

The Thanksgiving editorial column is an American newspaper tradition.

Surfing around the Web looking for a good one leads me to believe it is a tradition that perhaps should be abolished.

But since I am thankful for getting to sleep really, really late today and avoid a large Baptist family gathering, I will offer up a few Thanksgiving columns for your perusal and a few pithy comments.

One of my favorite ideas for a Thanksgiving column comes from Gail Collins at the New York Times. In the end the column leaves much to be desired, but I like the idea anyway.

The subheader is: “Qualities We Don’t Want in the Next President.” Now you have to admit, that’s a column any lover of democracy and Bush basher would read, although it really doesn’t deliver much in the way of a satisfying feast.

“The first undesirable attribute was loyalty, in the sense of valuing personal relationships over competence,” she writes. “Really, we need to elect someone who would push his/her grandmother under a bus if she screwed up the mission.”

That’s not the way I would have put it, but you decide.

Presidential Shopping List

Another New York Times columnist, Richard Cohen, has an interesting idea.

In his column, Turkey Tune-Out Time, he advocates a break from e-mail:

“…e-mail is a bummer and addiction to it perverse,” he says.

Why?

“First, e-mail is reactive, a wait-and-respond thing, the surest guarantee of inside-the-box thinking. Second, it’s a lousy tool for conflict resolution, a multiplier of misunderstandings. Third, it leads people to say things they would never say face to face. Fourth, once they’re said, they’re recorded in their colossal inanity for all eternity.

“What you accumulate,” said an expert he found, is “interpersonal sludge.”

So he recommends that we all, “Turn off, tune out, drop in. And a decent-sized turkey takes five hours to cook.”

Not bad advice. Too bad I can’t take it. You?

My least favorite newspaper these days, The Birmingham News, totally abdicates its responsibility to write a Thanksgiving column and gives up the space to a local preacher, who offers up more religious nonsense than any newspaper should ever print.

Thanksgiving Blessings

My second least favorite newspaper down in Mobile does write its own column, but it resorts to documenting a capitalist list of crops and gives their monitary value.

“The harvests have grown considerably larger since that first feast in 1621. American farmers produce about 700 metric tons of the top 20 products such as corn, beef, chicken, wheat and, of course, turkeys. Just the major crops are valued at more than $80 billion annually.”

What, are we supposed to be impressed by that?

As We Celebrate Today, ‘So Far From Want’

Of course, they are so far away from the war in Iraq and the goings on in Washington that perhaps they should be forgivin for being so happily ignorant. They say ignorance is bliss. Maybe that’s true.

Then, my third least favorite newspaper, which is doing everything it can to make it to the top of my list, runs a column from that bastion of stupidity, David Prather. You may remember him as the guy who said Don Siegelman was guilty, “relatively speaking.”

Today he writes:

“When you are enumerating the many things for which you are thankful, a good place to start would be that you live in the United States of America. It’s not the United States of Perfection. We face many and extremely daunting challenges. But it’s not the United States of Awfulness either.”

I guess not, David, as long as you are still getting that fat Newhouse paycheck for writing something so stupid. Try going downtown to the homeless shelter or the VA hospital and see how the poor and those without health insurance feel about the so-called land of the free. Oh, but we don’t care about those people, do we, since they can’t afford to buy a newspaper.

A Day to be Happy

Then, Alabama’s little family-owned liberal newspaper in Anniston also abdicates its responsibility to write a column, but at least it gives the space over to something educational. It reprints two thanksgiving speeches, one from Abraham Lincoln, a Republican, when he encouraged a national day of Thanksgiving, and another from Franklin Delano Roosevelt, a Democrat, who actually established the modern Thanksgiving national holiday.

The Words of Thanksgiving

Then, of course predictably, the smartest Thanksgiving column comes not from a newspaper at all, but from a blog: Our new friend Scott Horton of Harper’s.org.

“This is the day on which Americans learn the truth of the ancient Greek wisdom that true happiness lies in the exercise of restraint and moderation. And like most wisdom, we acquire this one through foolishness - an afternoon of outrageous excess, followed by stupefied slumber, and in most households hours of spectator sports on the television. That is the comfortable ritual I grew up with - the anxiously anticipated family gathering, the banquet of excesses, sometimes occasional sparks of anger, conflict and infantile regression among the school kids returning home for the holidays.

“But there are some deeper thoughts worth contemplating on a day like today. For instance, the promise of the original English settlers of the seventeenth century. The thoughts of John Winthrop, particularly his sermon, “A Model of Christian Charity,” said on board the Arabella in 1630. Winthrop spoke in distinctly Calvinist tones of a divine providence which brought wealth and comfort to some, but destitution and slavery to others. He preached a duty of brotherly love, of kindness to those in the unknown world before him…

Thanksgiving 2007

As for me, it’s time to break out the bowl and put the Yuengling on ice and get comfortable in the Strat-o-lounger in front of the cable TV. A holiday to me means a day of rest.

Ask me what I will be doing today, and I will say: “As little as possible.”

Happy Thanksgiving indeed.

Tags: Connecting the Dots

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