Sunday, December 7, 2003
Wednesday, December 3, 2003
Chomsky was amazing, as usual. I especially enjoy his understanding of economic issues and his sweeping and thorough knowlege of U.S. and Foreign affairs and history. Not surprisingly, the Lawrence Eagle Tribune refused to cover the event. Not lacking in irony, they endorsed the construction of the ornate Rogers Hall it was held in. I'm in the process of writing a clear, yet nasty letter to the Editor in Chief---nasty meaning upbraiding and critical, but not rude. Rudeness is pretentious I feel and just alienates your audience whereby they just write you off as some fanatic.
I'm reading up now on Chomsky's deliberations on Nixon and Watergate and Bay of Pigs. Intriguing shit .. I recommend it to anyone.
http://www.zmag.org/chomsky/ni/ni-c10-s32.html
Also, check out some of Rich Mackin's letters. These are fucking hilarious:
http://www.richmackin.org/CDCP/BOLmain/BooksOfLetters.html
I'm reading up now on Chomsky's deliberations on Nixon and Watergate and Bay of Pigs. Intriguing shit .. I recommend it to anyone.
http://www.zmag.org/chomsky/ni/ni-c10-s32.html
Also, check out some of Rich Mackin's letters. These are fucking hilarious:
http://www.richmackin.org/CDCP/BOLmain/BooksOfLetters.html
Tuesday, December 2, 2003
lacking time here but wanted to post this..i just LOVED it..and Carolyn Myss does kick serious ass
Be Thankful You're Not Dubya
Craving more juicy reasons to offer up profound gratitude this T-day? Try a few of these
By Mark Morford, SF Gate Columnist Wednesday, November 26, 2003
---------------------------------------------------------------------
This Thanksgiving, as you sip the wine and hug the family and toast the friends and hoard the stuffing and curse the airport security, remember to give thanks you are not G.W. Bush. Hey, it's important.
1) Be thankful that you do not have to suffer Dubya's massive crushing karmic burden, as wrought by inflicting heaps of environmental disaster and vicious unnecessary war and a stunning string of lies lies lies like a firehose of giblet gravy splattered all over the planet.
For it really is all too plain: G.W. Bush is one of the most reviled and openly disrespected major world leaders in modern history. America has never been so embarrassed and reluctant to send a president abroad. We cringe when the man takes the stage. We offer humiliated apologies to our former allies, and to the 200,000 Bush/war protesters in London, just last week.
In Bush's defense, it cannot be easy to be so undeservedly powerful, yet so bumbling and inarticulate and globally loathed for your abhorrent policies and hollow corporate agenda and baffled doofus manner. This Thanksgiving, be grateful you are not him.
2) Thanks, you might want to give, that you are not Iraqi. Be grateful you did not go from brutal scowling despot who at least kept the damn lights on to brutish occupying army no one asked for that is right now laying waste to whatever remains of your once semi-proud oil-rich nation.
Give thanks, furthermore, that you are not one of the estimated 10,000 Iraqi civilians killed to date by U.S. forces, not to mention one of the untold tens of thousands of Iraqi soldiers who were hammered by our million pounds of billion-dollar ordnance in the first few days of the massacre. Be grateful you are not dead in the name of American political and petrochemical profiteering.
3) Give thanks you are not a member of the much-abused U.S. military. Sad but true. Be grateful you are not right now suffering that sickening sinking feeling that you are not, in fact, protecting America from any sort of marauding terrorists, or defending our honor, or our way of life, or guarding innocents from swarthy evildoers and nonexistent WMDs.
But that you are, instead, a wholly disposable henchman for the BushCo corporate regime, with the odds increasing every minute that you will soon join the more than 9,000 U.S. wounded or more than 430 "necessary" dead U.S. soldiers Rumsfeld mentions when he shrugs off the latest round of guerrilla bombings that killed another batch of your friends. Support our troops. Bring them home right now.
4) Be grateful BushCo's ratings are slipping lower than an SUV's mpg rating, and there is only one year left until he joins his father as one of those embarrassing historical footnotes, a jagged scar on the heart of a wary America that other countries point to in years to come and say wow that's a nasty scar where'd you get that, and we reply, George W. Bush, and they go, oh my God, that's right. So sorry.
5) Be grateful you are not right now in any way related to, or serve as a spokesperson for, or are employed as one of the apparently very deranged or heavily drugged plastic surgeons who worked on Michael Jackson. This is a gimme.
6) While you're at it, give thanks you're not Paris Hilton, Anna Nicole Smith, Bennifer, Britney, Liza Minnelli, Joan Rivers, Howard Stern, Ann Coulter, Ashton Kutcher, Bill O'Reilly, Anna Kournikova, Madonna or Mary Hart. These are lives you probably do not want to lead. Give thanks your soul is not all withery and Botoxed and that it still manages to radiate cool colors like one of those funky cheesy fiber-optic lamps from the '70s.
7) Be thankful they have yet to figure out a way to blot out the sun. Or, for that matter, the moon.
8) Offer immense gratitude that despite a massive ongoing Herculean effort on the part of numerous world governments to rape and pillage and pretty much slap down most all tender offerings of the planet, Earth still manages to produce for us an astonishing array of flora and fauna and oxygen and edible delicacies and awe-inspiring trees and relentless merciless beauty.
9) Be thankful the planet rather effortlessly continues to baffle scientists and confound astronomers and completely entrance biologists and philosophers and poets. We still, for example, have no idea why whales sing, or how long they live, or where blue whales, the largest and most magnificent creatures on the planet, go to mate. Be grateful for the Mystery.
10) Kneel down, right now, for free speech. Oh yes. We must. Because it is under severe duress. To exercise it now, to speak out against BushCo and war and global corporate profiteering, is a true sign that you are a traitor and an al Qaeda operative and a personal friend of Barbra Streisand. This is what they sneer at you.
Give it up, instead, for free unfettered alt-news sources like truthout.org. And commondreams.org. And alternet.org and counterpunch.com and buzzflash.com and smirkingchimp.com and even Slate and the BBC and The Onion. Cheney scowls, Rove oozes, Ashcroft would love nothing more than to shut down the entire impious godforsaken Internet. Be grateful they can only quiver and hiss and rattle their chains. So far.
11) Molly Ivins. Gore Vidal. Michiko Kakutani. David Foster Wallace. Don DeLillo. Maureen Dowd. Caroline Myss. W.G. Sebald. Tom Robbins. Starhawk. William Rivers Pitt. Rob Brezny. David Attenborough. Dave Eggers. Joseph Campbell. Lewis Lapham. Haruki Murakami. Katha Pollitt. Et al. Thank you.
12) For baskets of locally grown organic small-farm produce delivered to your door. For handmade whiskey-filled chocolate truffles smeared over a lover's tailbone. For Bernese mountain dogs. For the return of Opus. For Rufus Wainwright and Beth Orton and the Mini Cooper. L'Occitane honey incense and the Apple iPod and "Six Feet Under." For Cate Blanchett, The Sun magazine, The New Yorker, Peet's coffee and "Spirited Away."
13) Here is the big cliché. Here is the final praise. It cannot be overstated: Despite an impressive assault on civil liberties, despite savage BushCo attacks on everything from national forests to air quality to rivers and oceans and water quality and health care, despite attempts to numb the national consciousness overall, we must give enormous, unfettered thanks for this incredible and kaleidoscopic America.
Ours remains the most breathtakingly beautiful, diverse, epic, multifaceted, multiorgasmic landscape on the planet today. It's true.
We tend to forget. We take for granted. We presume it must be like this everywhere. But one quick trip abroad will only serve to remind you and reinforce your devout appreciation for what this country can offer, the free expression and the religious autonomy and the clean water and the good dentistry and the fresh produce and the space to explore.
We are deeply flawed. We are massively arrogant. We are bratty and insolent and abusive and sloppy and violent. But we balance it with astounding acts of love and beauty and art, nature preserves and activism and organic awareness and sex positivism and community awareness and quiet personal spiritual questing and lots and lots of great bookstores.
14) Here is where you make you own list. Here is where you set aside the cynicism and the sighing and the bitterness, just for a moment, and get quiet, look around, look inside, check the karmic inventory and offer up heaping pies of gratefulness for what you find.
Sure it seems clichéd. Of course you don't need some holiday to be deeply thankful for the radiance in your life. But, hey, an opportunity is an opportunity. Just remember, big meaty drumsticks of general gratitude are absolutely fine. But the divine, personal gravy is where the real flavor is.
_____________________________________________________________________
Why I Hate Thanksgiving
>by Mitchel Cohen
>
>with much material contributed by Peter Linebaugh
>and others whose names have over the years been lost
>
>
>The year was 1492. The Taino-Arawak people of the Bahamas discovered
>Christopher Columbus on their beach.
>
>Historian Howard Zinn tells us how Arawak men and women, naked, tawny, and
>full of wonder, emerged from their villages onto the island's beaches and
>swam out to get a closer look at the strange big boat. When Columbus and
>his sailors came ashore, carrying swords, speaking oddly, the Arawaks ran
>to greet them, brought them food, water, gifts. Columbus later wrote of
>this in his log. Here is what he wrote:
>
>"They brought us parrots and balls of cotton and spears and many other
>things, which they exchanged for the glass beads and hawks' bells. They
>willingly traded everything they owned. They were well-built, with good
>bodies and handsome features. They do not bear arms, and do not know them,
>for I showed them a sword, they took it by the edge and cut themselves out
>of ignorance. They have no iron. Their spears are made of sugar cane. They
>would make fine servants. With 50 men we could subjugate them all and make
>them do whatever we want."
>
>And so the conquest began, and the Thanotocracy -- the regime of death --
>was inaugurated on the continent the Indians called "Turtle Island."
>
>You probably already know a good piece of the story: How Columbus's Army
>took Arawak and Taino people prisoners and insisted that they take him to
>the source of their gold, which they used in tiny ornaments in their ears.
>And how, with utter contempt and cruelty, Columbus took many more Indians
>prisoners and put them aboard the Nina and the Pinta -- the Santa Maria
>having run aground on the island of Hispañola (today, the Dominican
>Republic and Haiti). When some refused to be taken prisoner, they were run
>through with swords and bled to death. Then the Nina and the Pinta set sail
>for the Azores and Spain. During the long voyage, many of the Indian
>prisoners died. Here's part of Columbus's report to Queen Isabella and King
>Ferdinand of Spain:
>
>"The Indians are so naive and so free with their possessions that no one
>who has not witnessed them would believe it. When you ask for something
>they have, they never say no. To the contrary, they offer to share with
>anyone." Columbus concluded his report by asking for a little help from the
>King and Queen, and in return he would bring them "as much gold as they
>need, and as many slaves as they ask."
>
>Columbus returned to the New World -- "new" for Europeans, that is -- with
>17 ships and more than 1,200 men. Their aim was clear: Slaves, and gold.
>They went from island to island in the Caribbean, taking Indians as
>captives. But word spread ahead of them. By the time they got to Fort
>Navidad on Haiti, the Taino had risen up and killed all the sailors left
>behind on the last voyage, after they had roamed the island in gangs raping
>women and taking children and women as slaves. Columbus later wrote: "Let
>us in the name of the Holy Trinity go on sending all the slaves that can be
>sold." The Indians began fighting back, but were no match for the Spaniard
>conquerors, even though they greatly outnumbered them. In eight years,
>Columbus's men murdered more than 100,000 Indians on Haiti alone. Overall,
>dying as slaves in the mines, or directly murdered, or from diseases
>brought to the Caribbean by the Spaniards, over 3 million Indian people
>were murdered between 1494 and 1508.
>
>What Columbus did to the Arawaks of the Bahamas and the Taino of the
>Caribbean, Cortez did to the Aztecs of Mexico, Pizarro to the Incas of
>Peru, and the English settlers of Virginia and Massachusetts to the
>Powhatans and the Pequots. Literally millions of native peoples were
>slaughtered. And the gold, slaves and other resources were used, in Europe,
>to spur the growth of the new money economy rising out of feudalism. Karl
>Marx would later call this "the primitive accumulation of capital." These
>were the violent beginnings of an intricate system of technology, business,
>politics and culture that would dominate the world for the next five
>centuries.
>
>All of this were the preconditions for the first Thanksgiving. In the North
>American English colonies, the pattern was set early, as Columbus had set
>it in the islands of the Bahamas. In 1585, before there was any permanent
>English settlement in Virginia, Richard Grenville landed there with seven
>ships. The Indians he met were hospitable, but when one of them stole a
>small silver cup, Grenville sacked and burned the whole Indian village.
>
>The Jamestown colony was established in Virginia in 1607, inside the
>territory of an Indian confederacy, led by the chief, Powhatan. Powhatan
>watched the English settle on his people's land, but did not attack. And
>the English began starving. Some of them ran away and joined the Indians,
>where they would at least be fed. Indeed, throughout colonial times tens of
>thousands of indentured servants, prisoners and slaves -- from Wales and
>Scotland as well as from Africa -- ran away to live in Indian communities,
>intermarry, and raise their children there.
>
>In the summer of 1610 the governor of Jamestown colony asked Powhatan to
>return the runaways, who were living fully among the Indians. Powhatan left
>the choice to those who ran away, and none wanted to go back. The governor
>of Jamestown then sent soldiers to take revenge. They descended on an
>Indian community, killed 15 or 16 Indians, burned the houses, cut down the
>corn growing around the village, took the female leader of the tribe and
>her children into boats, then ended up throwing the children overboard and
>shooting out their brains in the water. The female leader was later taken
>off the boat and stabbed to death.
>
>By 1621, the atrocities committed by the English had grown, and word spread
>throughout the Indian villages. The Indians fought back, and killed 347
>colonists. From then on it was total war. Not able to enslave the Indians
>the English aristocracy decided to exterminate them.
>
>And then the Pilgrims arrived.
>
>When the Pilgrims came to New England they too were coming not to vacant
>land but to territory inhabited by tribes of Indians. The story goes that
>the Pilgrims, who were Christians of the Puritan sect, were fleeing
>religious persecution in Europe. They had fled England and went to Holland,
>and from there sailed aboard the Mayflower, where they landed at Plymouth
>Rock in what is now Massachusetts.
>
>Religious persecution or not, they immediately turned to their religion to
>rationalize their persecution of others. They appealed to the Bible, Psalms
>2:8: "Ask of me, and I shall give thee, the heathen for thine inheritance,
>and the uttermost parts of the earth for thy possession." To justify their
>use of force to take the land, they cited Romans 13:2: "Whosoever therefore
>resisteth the power, resisteth the ordinance of God: and they that resist
>shall receive to themselves damnation."
>
>The Puritans lived in uneasy truce with the Pequot Indians, who occupied
>what is now southern Connecticut and Rhode Island. But they wanted them out
>of the way; they wanted their land. And they seemed to want to establish
>their rule firmly over Connecticut settlers in that area.
>
>In 1636 an armed expedition left Boston to attack the Narragansett Indians
>on Block Island. The English landed and killed some Indians, but the rest
>hid in the thick forests of the island and the English went from one
>deserted village to the next, destroying crops. Then they sailed back to
>the mainland and raided Pequot villages along the coast, destroying crops
>again.
>
>The English went on setting fire to wigwams of the village. They burned
>village after village to the ground. As one of the leading theologians of
>his day, Dr. Cotton Mather put it: "It was supposed that no less than 600
>Pequot souls were brought down to hell that day." And Cotton Mather,
>clutching his bible, spurred the English to slaughter more Indians in the
>name of Christianity.
>
>Three hundred thousand Indians were murdered in New England over the next
>few years. It is important to note: The ordinary Englishmen did not want
>this war and often, very often, refused to fight. Some European
>intellectuals like Roger Williams spoke out against it. And some erstwhile
>colonists joined the Indians and even took up arms against the invaders
>from England. It was the Puritan elite who wanted the war, a war for land,
>for gold, for power. And, in the end, the Indian population of 10 million
>that was in North America when Columbus came was reduced to less than one
>million.
>
>The way the different Indian peoples lived -- communally, consensually,
>making decisions through tribal councils, each tribe having different
>sexual/marriage relationships, where many different sexualities were
>practiced as the norm -- contrasted dramatically with the Puritan's
>Christian fundamentalist values. For the Puritans, men decided everything,
>whereas in the Iroquois federation of what is now New York state women
>chose the men who represented the clans at village and tribal councils; it
>was the women who were responsible for deciding on whether or not to go to
>war. The Christian idea of male dominance and female subordination was
>conspicuously absent in Iroquois society.
>
>There were many other cultural differences: The Iroquois did not use harsh
>punishment on children. They did not insist on early weaning or early
>toilet training, but gradually allowed the child to learn to care for
>themselves. And, they did not believe in ownership of land; they utilized
>the land, lived on it. The idea of ownership was ridiculous, absurd. The
>European Christians, on the other hand, in the spirit of the emerging
>capitalism, wanted to own and control everything -- even children and other
>human beings. The pastor of the Pilgrim colony, John Robinson, thus advised
>his parishioners: "And surely there is in all children a stubbornness, and
>stoutness of mind arising from natural pride, which must, in the first
>place, be broken and beaten down; that so the foundation of their education
>being laid in humility and tractableness, other virtues may, in their time,
>be built thereon." That idea sunk in.
>
>One colonist said that the plague that had destroyed the Patuxet people --
>a combination of slavery, murder by the colonists and disease -- was "the
>Wonderful Preparation of the Lord Jesus Christ by His Providence for His
>People's Abode in the Western World." The Pilgrims robbed Wampanoag graves
>for the food that had been buried with the dead for religious reasons.
>Whenever the Pilgrims realized they were being watched, they shot at the
>Wampanoags, and scalped them. Scalping had been unknown among Native
>Americans in New England prior to its introduction by the English, who
>began the practice by offering the heads of their enemies and later
>accepted scalps.
>
>"What do you think of Western Civilization?" Mahatma Gandhi was asked in
>the 1940s. To which Gandhi replied: "Western Civilization? I think it would
>be a good idea." And so enters "Civilization," the civilization of
>Christian Europe, a "civilizing force" that couldn't have been more
>threatened by the beautiful anarchy of the Indians they encountered, and so
>slaughtered them.
>
>These are the Puritans that the Indians "saved", and whom we celebrate in
>the holiday, Thanksgiving. Tisquantum, also known as Squanto, a member of
>the Patuxet Indian nation. Samoset, of the Wabonake Indian nation, which
>lived in Maine. They went to Puritan villages and, having learned to speak
>English, brought deer meat and beaver skins for the hungry, cold Pilgrims.
>Tisquantum stayed with them and helped them survive their first years in
>their New World. He taught them how to navigate the waters, fish and
>cultivate corn and other vegetables. He pointed out poisonous plants and
>showed how other plants could be used as medicines. He also negotiated a
>peace treaty between the Pilgrims and Massasoit, head chief of the
>Wampanoags, a treaty that gave the Pilgrims everything and the Indians
>nothing. And even that treaty was soon broken. All this is celebrated as
>the First Thanksgiving.
>
>My own feeling? The Indians should have let the Pilgrims die. But they
>couldn't do that. Their humanity made them assist other human beings in
>need. And for that beautiful, human, loving connection they -- and those of
>us who are not Indian as well -- paid a terrible price: The genocide of the
>original inhabitants of Turtle Island, what is now America.
>
>Let's look at one example of the Puritan values -- which were not, I
>repeat, the values of the English working class values that we "give
>thanks for" on this holiday. The example of the Maypole, and Mayday.
>
>In 1517, 25 years after Columbus first landed in the Bahamas, the English
>working class staged a huge revolt. This was done through the guilds. King
>Henry VIII brought Lombard bankers from Italy and merchants from France in
>order to undercut wages, lengthen hours, and break the guilds. This
>alliance between international finance, national capital and military
>aristocracy was in the process of merging into the imperialist
>nation-state.
>
>The young workers of London took their revenge upon the merchants. A secret
>rumor said the commonality -- the vision of communal society that would
>counter the rich, the merchants, the industrialists, the nobility and the
>landowners -- would arise on May Day. The King and Lords got frightened --
>householders were armed, a curfew was declared. Two guys didn't hear about
>the curfew (they missed Dan Rather on t.v.). They were arrested. The shout
>went out to mobilize, and 700 workers stormed the jails, throwing bricks,
>hot water, stones. The prisoners were freed. A French capitalist's house
>was trashed.
>
>Then came the repression: Cannons were fired into the city. Three hundred
>were imprisoned, soldiers patrolled the streets, and a proclamation was
>made that no women were allowed to meet together, and that all men should
>"keep their wives in their houses." The prisoners were brought through the
>streets tied in ropes. Some were children. Eleven sets of gallows were set
>up throughout the city. Many were hanged. The authorities showed no mercy,
>but exhibited extreme cruelty.
>
>Thus the dreaded Thanatocracy, the regime of death, was inaugurated in
>answer to proletarian riot at the beginning of capitalism. The May Day
>riots were caused by expropriation (people having been uprooted from their
>lands they had used for centuries in common), and by exploitation (people
>had no jobs, as the monarchy imported capital). Working class women
>organizers and healers who posed an alternative to patriarchal capitalism
>-- were burned at the stake as witches. Enclosure, conquest, famine, war
>and plague ravaged the people who, in losing their commons, also lost a
>place to put their Maypole.
>
>Suddenly, the Maypole became a symbol of rebellion. In 1550 Parliament
>ordered the destruction of Maypoles (just as, during the Vietnam war, the
>U.S.-backed junta in Saigon banned the making of all red cloth, as it was
>being sewn into the blue, yellow and red flags of the National Liberation
>Front).
>
>In 1664, near the end of the Puritans' war against the Pequot Indians, the
>Puritans in England abolished May Day altogether. They had defeated the
>Indians, and they were attempting to defeat the growing proletarian
>insurgency at home as well.
>
>Although translators of the Bible were burned, its last book, Revelation,
>became an anti-authoritarian manual useful to those who would turn the
>Puritan world upside down, such as the Family of Love, the Anabaptists, the
>Diggers, Levellers, Ranters, and Thomas Morton, the man who in 1626 went to
>Merry Mount in Quincy Mass, and with his Indian friends put up the first
>Maypole in America, in contempt of Puritan rule.
>
>The Puritans destroyed it, exiled him, plagued the Indians, and hanged gay
>people and Quakers. Morton had come over on his own, a boat person, an
>immigrant. So was Anna Lee, who came over a few years later, the Manchester
>proletarian who founded the communal living, gender separated Shakers, who
>praised God in ecstatic dance, and who drove the Puritans up the wall.
>
>The story of the Maypole as a symbol of revolt continued. It crossed
>cultures and continued through the ages. In the late 1800s, the Sioux began
>the Ghost Dance in a circle, "with a large pine tree in the center, which
>was covered with strips of cloth of various colors, eagle feathers, stuffed
>birds, claws, and horns, all offerings to the Great Spirit." They didn't
>call it a Maypole and they danced for the unity of all Indians, the return
>of the dead, and the expulsion of the invaders on a particular day, the 4th
>of July, but otherwise it might as well have been a Mayday!
>
>Wovoka, a Nevada Paiute, started it. Expropriated, he cut his hair. To buy
>watermelon he rode boxcars to work in the Oregon hop fields for small
>wages, exploited. The Puget Sound Indians had a new religion -- they
>stopped drinking alcohol, became entranced, and danced for five days,
>jerking twitching, calling for their land back, just like the Shakers!
>Wovoka took this back to Nevada: "All Indians must dance, everywhere, keep
>on dancing." Soon they were. Porcupine took the dance across the Rockies to
>the Sioux. Red Cloud and Sitting Bull advanced the left foot following with
>the right, hardly lifting the feet from the ground. The Federal Agents
>banned the Ghost Dance! They claimed it was a cause of the last Sioux
>outbreak, just as the Puritans had claimed the Maypole had caused the May
>Day proletarian riots, just as the Shakers were dancing people into
>communality and out of Puritanism.
>
>On December 29 1890 the Government (with Hotchkiss guns throwing 2 pound
>explosive shells at 50 a minute -- always developing new weapons!)
>massacred more than 300 men, women and children at Wounded Knee. As in the
>Waco holocaust, or the bombing of MOVE in Philadelphia, the State
>disclaimed responsibility. The Bureau of Ethnology sent out James Mooney to
>investigate. Amid Janet Reno-like tears, he wrote: "The Indians were
>responsible for the engagement."
>
>In 1970, the town of Plymouth Rock, Massachusetts held, as it does each
>year, a Thanksgiving Ceremony given by the townspeople. There are many
>speeches for the crowds who attend. That year -- the year of Nixon's secret
>invasion of Cambodia; the year 4 students were massacred at Kent State and
>13 wounded for opposing the war; the year they tried to electrocute Black
>Panthers Bobby Seale and Erica Huggins -- the Massachusetts Department of
>Commerce asked the Wampanoag Indians to select a speaker to mark the 350th
>anniversary of the Pilgrims' arrival, and the first Thanksgiving.
>
>Frank James, who is a Wampanoag, was selected. But before he was allowed to
>speak he was told to show a copy of his speech to the white people in
>charge of the ceremony. When they saw what he had written, they would not
>allow him to read it.
>
>First, the genocide. Then, the suppression of all discussion about it.
>
>What do Indian people find to be Thankful for in this America? What does
>anyone have to be Thankful for in the genocide of the Indians, that this
>“holyday” commemorates? As we sit with our families on Thanksgiving, taking
>any opportunity we can to get out of work or off the streets and be in a
>warm place with people we love, we realize that all the things we have to
>be thankful for have nothing at all to do with the Pilgrims, nothing at all
>to do with Amerikan history, and everything to do with the alternative,
>anarcho-communist lives the Indian peoples led, before they were massacred
>by the colonists, in the name of privatization of property and the lust for
>gold and labor.
>
>Yes, I am an American. But I am an American in revolt. I am revolted by the
>holiday known as Thanksgiving. I have been accused of wanting to go
>backwards in time, of being against progress. To those charges, I plead
>guilty. I want to go back in time to when people lived communally, before
>the colonists' Christian god was brought to these shores to sanctify their
>terrorism, their slavery, their hatred of children, their oppression of
>women, their holocausts. But that is impossible. So all I look forward to
>the utter destruction of the apparatus of death known as Amerika -- not the
>people, not the beautiful land, but the machinery, the State, the
>capitalism, the Christianity and all that it stands for. I look forward to
>a future where I will have children with Amerika, and … they will be the
>new Indians.
>
>
>------------------------------------
>Mitchel Cohen is co-editor of "Green Politix", the national newspaper of
>the Greens/Green Party USA, www.greenparty.org, and organizes with the
>NoSpray Coalition, www.nospray.org and the Brooklyn Greens.
>
>-------------------------------------
>
>
>In memorium. Lest we forget.
>The First Thanksgiving
>
>From the Community Endeavor News, November, 1995,
>as reprinted in Healing Global Wounds, Fall, 1996
>
>
>The first official Thanksgiving wasn't a festive gathering of Indians
>and Pilgrims, but rather a celebration of the massacre of 700 Pequot
>men, women and children, an anthropologist says. Due to age and illness
>his voice cracks as he talks about the holiday, but William B. Newell,
>84, talks with force as he discusses Thanksgiving. Newell, a Penobscot,
>has degrees from two universities, and was the former chairman of the
>anthropology department at the University of Connecticut.
>
>"Thanksgiving Day was first officially proclaimed by the Governor of the
>Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1637 to commemorate the massacre of 700 men,
>women and children who were celebrating their annual green corn
>dance-Thanksgiving Day to them-in their own house," Newell said.
>
>"Gathered in this place of meeting they were attacked by mercenaries and
>Dutch and English. The Indians were ordered from the building and as
>they came forth they were shot down. The rest were burned alive in the
>building," he said.
>
>Newell based his research on studies of Holland Documents and the 13
>volume Colonial Documentary History, both thick sets of letters and
>reports from colonial officials to their superiors and the king in
>England, and the private papers of Sir William Johnson, British Indian
>agent for the New York colony for 30 years in the mid-1600s.
>
>"My research is authentic because it is documentary," Newell said. "You
>can't get anything more accurate than that because it is first hand. It
>is not hearsay."
>
>Newell said the next 100 Thanksgivings commemorated the killing of the
>Indians at what is now Groton, Ct. [home of a nuclear submarine base]
>rather than a celebration with them. He said the image of Indians and
>Pilgrims sitting around a large table to celebrate Thanksgiving Day was
>"fictitious" although Indians did share food with the first settlers.
>
>
>- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
>- - -
>“Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired,
>signifies in the final sense a theft from those who hunger and are not fed,
>those who are cold and are not clothed.” Dwight D. Eisenhower
Craving more juicy reasons to offer up profound gratitude this T-day? Try a few of these
By Mark Morford, SF Gate Columnist Wednesday, November 26, 2003
---------------------------------------------------------------------
This Thanksgiving, as you sip the wine and hug the family and toast the friends and hoard the stuffing and curse the airport security, remember to give thanks you are not G.W. Bush. Hey, it's important.
1) Be thankful that you do not have to suffer Dubya's massive crushing karmic burden, as wrought by inflicting heaps of environmental disaster and vicious unnecessary war and a stunning string of lies lies lies like a firehose of giblet gravy splattered all over the planet.
For it really is all too plain: G.W. Bush is one of the most reviled and openly disrespected major world leaders in modern history. America has never been so embarrassed and reluctant to send a president abroad. We cringe when the man takes the stage. We offer humiliated apologies to our former allies, and to the 200,000 Bush/war protesters in London, just last week.
In Bush's defense, it cannot be easy to be so undeservedly powerful, yet so bumbling and inarticulate and globally loathed for your abhorrent policies and hollow corporate agenda and baffled doofus manner. This Thanksgiving, be grateful you are not him.
2) Thanks, you might want to give, that you are not Iraqi. Be grateful you did not go from brutal scowling despot who at least kept the damn lights on to brutish occupying army no one asked for that is right now laying waste to whatever remains of your once semi-proud oil-rich nation.
Give thanks, furthermore, that you are not one of the estimated 10,000 Iraqi civilians killed to date by U.S. forces, not to mention one of the untold tens of thousands of Iraqi soldiers who were hammered by our million pounds of billion-dollar ordnance in the first few days of the massacre. Be grateful you are not dead in the name of American political and petrochemical profiteering.
3) Give thanks you are not a member of the much-abused U.S. military. Sad but true. Be grateful you are not right now suffering that sickening sinking feeling that you are not, in fact, protecting America from any sort of marauding terrorists, or defending our honor, or our way of life, or guarding innocents from swarthy evildoers and nonexistent WMDs.
But that you are, instead, a wholly disposable henchman for the BushCo corporate regime, with the odds increasing every minute that you will soon join the more than 9,000 U.S. wounded or more than 430 "necessary" dead U.S. soldiers Rumsfeld mentions when he shrugs off the latest round of guerrilla bombings that killed another batch of your friends. Support our troops. Bring them home right now.
4) Be grateful BushCo's ratings are slipping lower than an SUV's mpg rating, and there is only one year left until he joins his father as one of those embarrassing historical footnotes, a jagged scar on the heart of a wary America that other countries point to in years to come and say wow that's a nasty scar where'd you get that, and we reply, George W. Bush, and they go, oh my God, that's right. So sorry.
5) Be grateful you are not right now in any way related to, or serve as a spokesperson for, or are employed as one of the apparently very deranged or heavily drugged plastic surgeons who worked on Michael Jackson. This is a gimme.
6) While you're at it, give thanks you're not Paris Hilton, Anna Nicole Smith, Bennifer, Britney, Liza Minnelli, Joan Rivers, Howard Stern, Ann Coulter, Ashton Kutcher, Bill O'Reilly, Anna Kournikova, Madonna or Mary Hart. These are lives you probably do not want to lead. Give thanks your soul is not all withery and Botoxed and that it still manages to radiate cool colors like one of those funky cheesy fiber-optic lamps from the '70s.
7) Be thankful they have yet to figure out a way to blot out the sun. Or, for that matter, the moon.
8) Offer immense gratitude that despite a massive ongoing Herculean effort on the part of numerous world governments to rape and pillage and pretty much slap down most all tender offerings of the planet, Earth still manages to produce for us an astonishing array of flora and fauna and oxygen and edible delicacies and awe-inspiring trees and relentless merciless beauty.
9) Be thankful the planet rather effortlessly continues to baffle scientists and confound astronomers and completely entrance biologists and philosophers and poets. We still, for example, have no idea why whales sing, or how long they live, or where blue whales, the largest and most magnificent creatures on the planet, go to mate. Be grateful for the Mystery.
10) Kneel down, right now, for free speech. Oh yes. We must. Because it is under severe duress. To exercise it now, to speak out against BushCo and war and global corporate profiteering, is a true sign that you are a traitor and an al Qaeda operative and a personal friend of Barbra Streisand. This is what they sneer at you.
Give it up, instead, for free unfettered alt-news sources like truthout.org. And commondreams.org. And alternet.org and counterpunch.com and buzzflash.com and smirkingchimp.com and even Slate and the BBC and The Onion. Cheney scowls, Rove oozes, Ashcroft would love nothing more than to shut down the entire impious godforsaken Internet. Be grateful they can only quiver and hiss and rattle their chains. So far.
11) Molly Ivins. Gore Vidal. Michiko Kakutani. David Foster Wallace. Don DeLillo. Maureen Dowd. Caroline Myss. W.G. Sebald. Tom Robbins. Starhawk. William Rivers Pitt. Rob Brezny. David Attenborough. Dave Eggers. Joseph Campbell. Lewis Lapham. Haruki Murakami. Katha Pollitt. Et al. Thank you.
12) For baskets of locally grown organic small-farm produce delivered to your door. For handmade whiskey-filled chocolate truffles smeared over a lover's tailbone. For Bernese mountain dogs. For the return of Opus. For Rufus Wainwright and Beth Orton and the Mini Cooper. L'Occitane honey incense and the Apple iPod and "Six Feet Under." For Cate Blanchett, The Sun magazine, The New Yorker, Peet's coffee and "Spirited Away."
13) Here is the big cliché. Here is the final praise. It cannot be overstated: Despite an impressive assault on civil liberties, despite savage BushCo attacks on everything from national forests to air quality to rivers and oceans and water quality and health care, despite attempts to numb the national consciousness overall, we must give enormous, unfettered thanks for this incredible and kaleidoscopic America.
Ours remains the most breathtakingly beautiful, diverse, epic, multifaceted, multiorgasmic landscape on the planet today. It's true.
We tend to forget. We take for granted. We presume it must be like this everywhere. But one quick trip abroad will only serve to remind you and reinforce your devout appreciation for what this country can offer, the free expression and the religious autonomy and the clean water and the good dentistry and the fresh produce and the space to explore.
We are deeply flawed. We are massively arrogant. We are bratty and insolent and abusive and sloppy and violent. But we balance it with astounding acts of love and beauty and art, nature preserves and activism and organic awareness and sex positivism and community awareness and quiet personal spiritual questing and lots and lots of great bookstores.
14) Here is where you make you own list. Here is where you set aside the cynicism and the sighing and the bitterness, just for a moment, and get quiet, look around, look inside, check the karmic inventory and offer up heaping pies of gratefulness for what you find.
Sure it seems clichéd. Of course you don't need some holiday to be deeply thankful for the radiance in your life. But, hey, an opportunity is an opportunity. Just remember, big meaty drumsticks of general gratitude are absolutely fine. But the divine, personal gravy is where the real flavor is.
_____________________________________________________________________
Why I Hate Thanksgiving
>by Mitchel Cohen
>
>with much material contributed by Peter Linebaugh
>and others whose names have over the years been lost
>
>
>The year was 1492. The Taino-Arawak people of the Bahamas discovered
>Christopher Columbus on their beach.
>
>Historian Howard Zinn tells us how Arawak men and women, naked, tawny, and
>full of wonder, emerged from their villages onto the island's beaches and
>swam out to get a closer look at the strange big boat. When Columbus and
>his sailors came ashore, carrying swords, speaking oddly, the Arawaks ran
>to greet them, brought them food, water, gifts. Columbus later wrote of
>this in his log. Here is what he wrote:
>
>"They brought us parrots and balls of cotton and spears and many other
>things, which they exchanged for the glass beads and hawks' bells. They
>willingly traded everything they owned. They were well-built, with good
>bodies and handsome features. They do not bear arms, and do not know them,
>for I showed them a sword, they took it by the edge and cut themselves out
>of ignorance. They have no iron. Their spears are made of sugar cane. They
>would make fine servants. With 50 men we could subjugate them all and make
>them do whatever we want."
>
>And so the conquest began, and the Thanotocracy -- the regime of death --
>was inaugurated on the continent the Indians called "Turtle Island."
>
>You probably already know a good piece of the story: How Columbus's Army
>took Arawak and Taino people prisoners and insisted that they take him to
>the source of their gold, which they used in tiny ornaments in their ears.
>And how, with utter contempt and cruelty, Columbus took many more Indians
>prisoners and put them aboard the Nina and the Pinta -- the Santa Maria
>having run aground on the island of Hispañola (today, the Dominican
>Republic and Haiti). When some refused to be taken prisoner, they were run
>through with swords and bled to death. Then the Nina and the Pinta set sail
>for the Azores and Spain. During the long voyage, many of the Indian
>prisoners died. Here's part of Columbus's report to Queen Isabella and King
>Ferdinand of Spain:
>
>"The Indians are so naive and so free with their possessions that no one
>who has not witnessed them would believe it. When you ask for something
>they have, they never say no. To the contrary, they offer to share with
>anyone." Columbus concluded his report by asking for a little help from the
>King and Queen, and in return he would bring them "as much gold as they
>need, and as many slaves as they ask."
>
>Columbus returned to the New World -- "new" for Europeans, that is -- with
>17 ships and more than 1,200 men. Their aim was clear: Slaves, and gold.
>They went from island to island in the Caribbean, taking Indians as
>captives. But word spread ahead of them. By the time they got to Fort
>Navidad on Haiti, the Taino had risen up and killed all the sailors left
>behind on the last voyage, after they had roamed the island in gangs raping
>women and taking children and women as slaves. Columbus later wrote: "Let
>us in the name of the Holy Trinity go on sending all the slaves that can be
>sold." The Indians began fighting back, but were no match for the Spaniard
>conquerors, even though they greatly outnumbered them. In eight years,
>Columbus's men murdered more than 100,000 Indians on Haiti alone. Overall,
>dying as slaves in the mines, or directly murdered, or from diseases
>brought to the Caribbean by the Spaniards, over 3 million Indian people
>were murdered between 1494 and 1508.
>
>What Columbus did to the Arawaks of the Bahamas and the Taino of the
>Caribbean, Cortez did to the Aztecs of Mexico, Pizarro to the Incas of
>Peru, and the English settlers of Virginia and Massachusetts to the
>Powhatans and the Pequots. Literally millions of native peoples were
>slaughtered. And the gold, slaves and other resources were used, in Europe,
>to spur the growth of the new money economy rising out of feudalism. Karl
>Marx would later call this "the primitive accumulation of capital." These
>were the violent beginnings of an intricate system of technology, business,
>politics and culture that would dominate the world for the next five
>centuries.
>
>All of this were the preconditions for the first Thanksgiving. In the North
>American English colonies, the pattern was set early, as Columbus had set
>it in the islands of the Bahamas. In 1585, before there was any permanent
>English settlement in Virginia, Richard Grenville landed there with seven
>ships. The Indians he met were hospitable, but when one of them stole a
>small silver cup, Grenville sacked and burned the whole Indian village.
>
>The Jamestown colony was established in Virginia in 1607, inside the
>territory of an Indian confederacy, led by the chief, Powhatan. Powhatan
>watched the English settle on his people's land, but did not attack. And
>the English began starving. Some of them ran away and joined the Indians,
>where they would at least be fed. Indeed, throughout colonial times tens of
>thousands of indentured servants, prisoners and slaves -- from Wales and
>Scotland as well as from Africa -- ran away to live in Indian communities,
>intermarry, and raise their children there.
>
>In the summer of 1610 the governor of Jamestown colony asked Powhatan to
>return the runaways, who were living fully among the Indians. Powhatan left
>the choice to those who ran away, and none wanted to go back. The governor
>of Jamestown then sent soldiers to take revenge. They descended on an
>Indian community, killed 15 or 16 Indians, burned the houses, cut down the
>corn growing around the village, took the female leader of the tribe and
>her children into boats, then ended up throwing the children overboard and
>shooting out their brains in the water. The female leader was later taken
>off the boat and stabbed to death.
>
>By 1621, the atrocities committed by the English had grown, and word spread
>throughout the Indian villages. The Indians fought back, and killed 347
>colonists. From then on it was total war. Not able to enslave the Indians
>the English aristocracy decided to exterminate them.
>
>And then the Pilgrims arrived.
>
>When the Pilgrims came to New England they too were coming not to vacant
>land but to territory inhabited by tribes of Indians. The story goes that
>the Pilgrims, who were Christians of the Puritan sect, were fleeing
>religious persecution in Europe. They had fled England and went to Holland,
>and from there sailed aboard the Mayflower, where they landed at Plymouth
>Rock in what is now Massachusetts.
>
>Religious persecution or not, they immediately turned to their religion to
>rationalize their persecution of others. They appealed to the Bible, Psalms
>2:8: "Ask of me, and I shall give thee, the heathen for thine inheritance,
>and the uttermost parts of the earth for thy possession." To justify their
>use of force to take the land, they cited Romans 13:2: "Whosoever therefore
>resisteth the power, resisteth the ordinance of God: and they that resist
>shall receive to themselves damnation."
>
>The Puritans lived in uneasy truce with the Pequot Indians, who occupied
>what is now southern Connecticut and Rhode Island. But they wanted them out
>of the way; they wanted their land. And they seemed to want to establish
>their rule firmly over Connecticut settlers in that area.
>
>In 1636 an armed expedition left Boston to attack the Narragansett Indians
>on Block Island. The English landed and killed some Indians, but the rest
>hid in the thick forests of the island and the English went from one
>deserted village to the next, destroying crops. Then they sailed back to
>the mainland and raided Pequot villages along the coast, destroying crops
>again.
>
>The English went on setting fire to wigwams of the village. They burned
>village after village to the ground. As one of the leading theologians of
>his day, Dr. Cotton Mather put it: "It was supposed that no less than 600
>Pequot souls were brought down to hell that day." And Cotton Mather,
>clutching his bible, spurred the English to slaughter more Indians in the
>name of Christianity.
>
>Three hundred thousand Indians were murdered in New England over the next
>few years. It is important to note: The ordinary Englishmen did not want
>this war and often, very often, refused to fight. Some European
>intellectuals like Roger Williams spoke out against it. And some erstwhile
>colonists joined the Indians and even took up arms against the invaders
>from England. It was the Puritan elite who wanted the war, a war for land,
>for gold, for power. And, in the end, the Indian population of 10 million
>that was in North America when Columbus came was reduced to less than one
>million.
>
>The way the different Indian peoples lived -- communally, consensually,
>making decisions through tribal councils, each tribe having different
>sexual/marriage relationships, where many different sexualities were
>practiced as the norm -- contrasted dramatically with the Puritan's
>Christian fundamentalist values. For the Puritans, men decided everything,
>whereas in the Iroquois federation of what is now New York state women
>chose the men who represented the clans at village and tribal councils; it
>was the women who were responsible for deciding on whether or not to go to
>war. The Christian idea of male dominance and female subordination was
>conspicuously absent in Iroquois society.
>
>There were many other cultural differences: The Iroquois did not use harsh
>punishment on children. They did not insist on early weaning or early
>toilet training, but gradually allowed the child to learn to care for
>themselves. And, they did not believe in ownership of land; they utilized
>the land, lived on it. The idea of ownership was ridiculous, absurd. The
>European Christians, on the other hand, in the spirit of the emerging
>capitalism, wanted to own and control everything -- even children and other
>human beings. The pastor of the Pilgrim colony, John Robinson, thus advised
>his parishioners: "And surely there is in all children a stubbornness, and
>stoutness of mind arising from natural pride, which must, in the first
>place, be broken and beaten down; that so the foundation of their education
>being laid in humility and tractableness, other virtues may, in their time,
>be built thereon." That idea sunk in.
>
>One colonist said that the plague that had destroyed the Patuxet people --
>a combination of slavery, murder by the colonists and disease -- was "the
>Wonderful Preparation of the Lord Jesus Christ by His Providence for His
>People's Abode in the Western World." The Pilgrims robbed Wampanoag graves
>for the food that had been buried with the dead for religious reasons.
>Whenever the Pilgrims realized they were being watched, they shot at the
>Wampanoags, and scalped them. Scalping had been unknown among Native
>Americans in New England prior to its introduction by the English, who
>began the practice by offering the heads of their enemies and later
>accepted scalps.
>
>"What do you think of Western Civilization?" Mahatma Gandhi was asked in
>the 1940s. To which Gandhi replied: "Western Civilization? I think it would
>be a good idea." And so enters "Civilization," the civilization of
>Christian Europe, a "civilizing force" that couldn't have been more
>threatened by the beautiful anarchy of the Indians they encountered, and so
>slaughtered them.
>
>These are the Puritans that the Indians "saved", and whom we celebrate in
>the holiday, Thanksgiving. Tisquantum, also known as Squanto, a member of
>the Patuxet Indian nation. Samoset, of the Wabonake Indian nation, which
>lived in Maine. They went to Puritan villages and, having learned to speak
>English, brought deer meat and beaver skins for the hungry, cold Pilgrims.
>Tisquantum stayed with them and helped them survive their first years in
>their New World. He taught them how to navigate the waters, fish and
>cultivate corn and other vegetables. He pointed out poisonous plants and
>showed how other plants could be used as medicines. He also negotiated a
>peace treaty between the Pilgrims and Massasoit, head chief of the
>Wampanoags, a treaty that gave the Pilgrims everything and the Indians
>nothing. And even that treaty was soon broken. All this is celebrated as
>the First Thanksgiving.
>
>My own feeling? The Indians should have let the Pilgrims die. But they
>couldn't do that. Their humanity made them assist other human beings in
>need. And for that beautiful, human, loving connection they -- and those of
>us who are not Indian as well -- paid a terrible price: The genocide of the
>original inhabitants of Turtle Island, what is now America.
>
>Let's look at one example of the Puritan values -- which were not, I
>repeat, the values of the English working class values that we "give
>thanks for" on this holiday. The example of the Maypole, and Mayday.
>
>In 1517, 25 years after Columbus first landed in the Bahamas, the English
>working class staged a huge revolt. This was done through the guilds. King
>Henry VIII brought Lombard bankers from Italy and merchants from France in
>order to undercut wages, lengthen hours, and break the guilds. This
>alliance between international finance, national capital and military
>aristocracy was in the process of merging into the imperialist
>nation-state.
>
>The young workers of London took their revenge upon the merchants. A secret
>rumor said the commonality -- the vision of communal society that would
>counter the rich, the merchants, the industrialists, the nobility and the
>landowners -- would arise on May Day. The King and Lords got frightened --
>householders were armed, a curfew was declared. Two guys didn't hear about
>the curfew (they missed Dan Rather on t.v.). They were arrested. The shout
>went out to mobilize, and 700 workers stormed the jails, throwing bricks,
>hot water, stones. The prisoners were freed. A French capitalist's house
>was trashed.
>
>Then came the repression: Cannons were fired into the city. Three hundred
>were imprisoned, soldiers patrolled the streets, and a proclamation was
>made that no women were allowed to meet together, and that all men should
>"keep their wives in their houses." The prisoners were brought through the
>streets tied in ropes. Some were children. Eleven sets of gallows were set
>up throughout the city. Many were hanged. The authorities showed no mercy,
>but exhibited extreme cruelty.
>
>Thus the dreaded Thanatocracy, the regime of death, was inaugurated in
>answer to proletarian riot at the beginning of capitalism. The May Day
>riots were caused by expropriation (people having been uprooted from their
>lands they had used for centuries in common), and by exploitation (people
>had no jobs, as the monarchy imported capital). Working class women
>organizers and healers who posed an alternative to patriarchal capitalism
>-- were burned at the stake as witches. Enclosure, conquest, famine, war
>and plague ravaged the people who, in losing their commons, also lost a
>place to put their Maypole.
>
>Suddenly, the Maypole became a symbol of rebellion. In 1550 Parliament
>ordered the destruction of Maypoles (just as, during the Vietnam war, the
>U.S.-backed junta in Saigon banned the making of all red cloth, as it was
>being sewn into the blue, yellow and red flags of the National Liberation
>Front).
>
>In 1664, near the end of the Puritans' war against the Pequot Indians, the
>Puritans in England abolished May Day altogether. They had defeated the
>Indians, and they were attempting to defeat the growing proletarian
>insurgency at home as well.
>
>Although translators of the Bible were burned, its last book, Revelation,
>became an anti-authoritarian manual useful to those who would turn the
>Puritan world upside down, such as the Family of Love, the Anabaptists, the
>Diggers, Levellers, Ranters, and Thomas Morton, the man who in 1626 went to
>Merry Mount in Quincy Mass, and with his Indian friends put up the first
>Maypole in America, in contempt of Puritan rule.
>
>The Puritans destroyed it, exiled him, plagued the Indians, and hanged gay
>people and Quakers. Morton had come over on his own, a boat person, an
>immigrant. So was Anna Lee, who came over a few years later, the Manchester
>proletarian who founded the communal living, gender separated Shakers, who
>praised God in ecstatic dance, and who drove the Puritans up the wall.
>
>The story of the Maypole as a symbol of revolt continued. It crossed
>cultures and continued through the ages. In the late 1800s, the Sioux began
>the Ghost Dance in a circle, "with a large pine tree in the center, which
>was covered with strips of cloth of various colors, eagle feathers, stuffed
>birds, claws, and horns, all offerings to the Great Spirit." They didn't
>call it a Maypole and they danced for the unity of all Indians, the return
>of the dead, and the expulsion of the invaders on a particular day, the 4th
>of July, but otherwise it might as well have been a Mayday!
>
>Wovoka, a Nevada Paiute, started it. Expropriated, he cut his hair. To buy
>watermelon he rode boxcars to work in the Oregon hop fields for small
>wages, exploited. The Puget Sound Indians had a new religion -- they
>stopped drinking alcohol, became entranced, and danced for five days,
>jerking twitching, calling for their land back, just like the Shakers!
>Wovoka took this back to Nevada: "All Indians must dance, everywhere, keep
>on dancing." Soon they were. Porcupine took the dance across the Rockies to
>the Sioux. Red Cloud and Sitting Bull advanced the left foot following with
>the right, hardly lifting the feet from the ground. The Federal Agents
>banned the Ghost Dance! They claimed it was a cause of the last Sioux
>outbreak, just as the Puritans had claimed the Maypole had caused the May
>Day proletarian riots, just as the Shakers were dancing people into
>communality and out of Puritanism.
>
>On December 29 1890 the Government (with Hotchkiss guns throwing 2 pound
>explosive shells at 50 a minute -- always developing new weapons!)
>massacred more than 300 men, women and children at Wounded Knee. As in the
>Waco holocaust, or the bombing of MOVE in Philadelphia, the State
>disclaimed responsibility. The Bureau of Ethnology sent out James Mooney to
>investigate. Amid Janet Reno-like tears, he wrote: "The Indians were
>responsible for the engagement."
>
>In 1970, the town of Plymouth Rock, Massachusetts held, as it does each
>year, a Thanksgiving Ceremony given by the townspeople. There are many
>speeches for the crowds who attend. That year -- the year of Nixon's secret
>invasion of Cambodia; the year 4 students were massacred at Kent State and
>13 wounded for opposing the war; the year they tried to electrocute Black
>Panthers Bobby Seale and Erica Huggins -- the Massachusetts Department of
>Commerce asked the Wampanoag Indians to select a speaker to mark the 350th
>anniversary of the Pilgrims' arrival, and the first Thanksgiving.
>
>Frank James, who is a Wampanoag, was selected. But before he was allowed to
>speak he was told to show a copy of his speech to the white people in
>charge of the ceremony. When they saw what he had written, they would not
>allow him to read it.
>
>First, the genocide. Then, the suppression of all discussion about it.
>
>What do Indian people find to be Thankful for in this America? What does
>anyone have to be Thankful for in the genocide of the Indians, that this
>“holyday” commemorates? As we sit with our families on Thanksgiving, taking
>any opportunity we can to get out of work or off the streets and be in a
>warm place with people we love, we realize that all the things we have to
>be thankful for have nothing at all to do with the Pilgrims, nothing at all
>to do with Amerikan history, and everything to do with the alternative,
>anarcho-communist lives the Indian peoples led, before they were massacred
>by the colonists, in the name of privatization of property and the lust for
>gold and labor.
>
>Yes, I am an American. But I am an American in revolt. I am revolted by the
>holiday known as Thanksgiving. I have been accused of wanting to go
>backwards in time, of being against progress. To those charges, I plead
>guilty. I want to go back in time to when people lived communally, before
>the colonists' Christian god was brought to these shores to sanctify their
>terrorism, their slavery, their hatred of children, their oppression of
>women, their holocausts. But that is impossible. So all I look forward to
>the utter destruction of the apparatus of death known as Amerika -- not the
>people, not the beautiful land, but the machinery, the State, the
>capitalism, the Christianity and all that it stands for. I look forward to
>a future where I will have children with Amerika, and … they will be the
>new Indians.
>
>
>------------------------------------
>Mitchel Cohen is co-editor of "Green Politix", the national newspaper of
>the Greens/Green Party USA, www.greenparty.org, and organizes with the
>NoSpray Coalition, www.nospray.org and the Brooklyn Greens.
>
>-------------------------------------
>
>
>In memorium. Lest we forget.
>The First Thanksgiving
>
>From the Community Endeavor News, November, 1995,
>as reprinted in Healing Global Wounds, Fall, 1996
>
>
>The first official Thanksgiving wasn't a festive gathering of Indians
>and Pilgrims, but rather a celebration of the massacre of 700 Pequot
>men, women and children, an anthropologist says. Due to age and illness
>his voice cracks as he talks about the holiday, but William B. Newell,
>84, talks with force as he discusses Thanksgiving. Newell, a Penobscot,
>has degrees from two universities, and was the former chairman of the
>anthropology department at the University of Connecticut.
>
>"Thanksgiving Day was first officially proclaimed by the Governor of the
>Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1637 to commemorate the massacre of 700 men,
>women and children who were celebrating their annual green corn
>dance-Thanksgiving Day to them-in their own house," Newell said.
>
>"Gathered in this place of meeting they were attacked by mercenaries and
>Dutch and English. The Indians were ordered from the building and as
>they came forth they were shot down. The rest were burned alive in the
>building," he said.
>
>Newell based his research on studies of Holland Documents and the 13
>volume Colonial Documentary History, both thick sets of letters and
>reports from colonial officials to their superiors and the king in
>England, and the private papers of Sir William Johnson, British Indian
>agent for the New York colony for 30 years in the mid-1600s.
>
>"My research is authentic because it is documentary," Newell said. "You
>can't get anything more accurate than that because it is first hand. It
>is not hearsay."
>
>Newell said the next 100 Thanksgivings commemorated the killing of the
>Indians at what is now Groton, Ct. [home of a nuclear submarine base]
>rather than a celebration with them. He said the image of Indians and
>Pilgrims sitting around a large table to celebrate Thanksgiving Day was
>"fictitious" although Indians did share food with the first settlers.
>
>
>- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
>- - -
>“Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired,
>signifies in the final sense a theft from those who hunger and are not fed,
>those who are cold and are not clothed.” Dwight D. Eisenhower
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