By Mitchel Cohen, Why I Hate Thanksgiving, November 14, 2011
The following is the introduction to Mitchel Cohen's essay "Why I Hate Thanksgiving." To read the entire essay click the link above or the link at the end of the introduction.
--KN
* * *
INTRODUCTION
On Thanksgiving morning 2003, George W. Bush showed up in Iraq before
sunrise for a photo-op, wearing an Army workout jacket and surrounded by
soldiers. He cradled a platter with what appeared to be a golden-brown turkey. Washington
Post reporter Mike Allen wrote
that “the bird looks perfect, with bunches of grapes and other trimmings
completing a Norman Rockwell image that evokes bounty and security in one of
the most dangerous parts of the world.”
As the world was soon to learn
(but quickly forgot), the turkey platter was a phony, a plastic decoration that Bush posed with for the cameras.
Bush shook a few hands, said a few “God Bless Americas,” and scurried back to
his plane as quickly as he had arrived.
Thus, in one fell swoop, the new
Conquistador had tied to history’s bloody bough the 511-year-old conquest of
the “New World” — whose legions smote the indigenous population in the name of
Christ — with the U.S. government’s bombardment and invasion of Iraq and the
torture-detentions of prisoners of war at U.S. military bases.
Under the presidencies of Bush 1,
Clinton, Bush Jr. and now Obama, U.S. policy blanketed the Iraqi and Afghan
landscapes with so-called “depleted” uranium armaments and poisoned the
agriculture and water supply for the next several billion years.
As I wrote in the first reprinting of
this pamphlet in 2004, U.S. troops at the time were blasting their way through
the town of Fallujah, and hundreds of dead civilians lay in the streets
everywhere. The military called them “corpses” and “collateral damage” — and so
too did the corporate media. U.S. and British journalists fled the carnage and
returned only as “embeds” — reporters planted in the safety of large army
squadrons. They embellished slightly on military press releases and faxed their
reports to their editors as “eyewitness news”. It was mainly through the photos
taken by Arab journalists and independent media that we learned of the actual
horror, of the children’s bodies lying in the street alongside the tanks as
American soldiers surveyed the scene.
The NY Post ran a picture of one of those
soldiers and captioned him the “Marlboro Man,” the generic embodiment of what
it means to be a “man,” rugged, oil-smeared face dragging on a U.S. cigarette.
It’s not the individual grunt’s fault that the corporate media needs to invent
its heroes in such caricatures, but forgive me if I look elsewhere — perhaps to
the Zapatistas, to the hundreds of military resisters, to the immigrants
rounded up for simply existing, to the Wall Street Occupyers and to political
prisoners like Lynne Stewart, Mumia Abu-Jamal, Leonard Peltier and Bradley
Manning for reclaiming what it means to be human in an era of robots and
banksters.
The corporate media in the U.S. “covers”
Palestine similarly, rarely questioning the huge wall the Israeli colonists are
building — basically, a concentration camp — around and through Palestine, paid
for by U.S. tax dollars. The Palestinians are to Israel what the Navajo are to
the U.S.
The mindset that created the first
Thanksgiving in the 17th century on the bodies of murdered Pequot Indians runs
through the same veins today four centuries later, over the corpses of murdered
Vietnamese, Salvadorans, Chileans, Somalians, South Africans, Iraqis, Afghanis,
and Palestinians.
* * *
In November 2003, as George Bush’s plane was landing in the pre-dawn
hours for his faux-dinner in Iraq, I wrote “Why I Hate Thanksgiving,” and it
ended up being published all over the place under various titles, such as Counterpunch’s “Genocide? Pass the Turkey.” Much has transpired
since then — two national elections were stolen, Fallujah invaded, tens of
thousands of soldiers and civilians have been killed for Big Oil and Empire,
and ignorant armies clash everywhere by night. At the same time, enormous
antiwar protests and now the occupations by the 99 percent rise up to deliver
blows against the empire, and they are shaking the world. The manufactured and
false history of Thanksgiving re-emerges this week in the Shopping Malls of
suburbia, and – all the way through Christmas – it becomes one perpetual Shop
till You Drop Night of the Living Dead. America’s true religion resurfaces,
even in these economically depressed times.
What is it about Thanksgiving that
makes normally reasonable and loving people join in the slaughter of tens of
millions of turkeys on that day? Why do we buy turkeys on cue? Yes, I fondly
remember the results of Aunt Dora’s secret recipe for her delicious turkey
stuffing that I enjoyed so much as a kid. But, stop and think: Aren’t you as
revolted as I am by the nationwide ritual of blood and slaughter that binds
this country together? Americans fetishize football and feast on turkey. The
networks broadcast sanitized images of blown-up Iraqi and Afghan children.
Towards the end of his life, William
Kunstler, bless his soul — now whirling in his grave furiously to generate the
energy needed to power all the indymedia websites worldwide — began to make the
links between the mass slaughter of animals, capital punishment and the history
of colonization … and, what we’d need to do to begin to change things. Kunstler
wrote that “Marjorie Spiegel, a neighbor of mine in Greenwich Village, has
written a most compelling book — The Dreaded Comparison — in which she details the
devastating similarities between animal and human slavery.” He continues:
Alice Walker, in her most eloquent
foreword, states that ‘The animals of the world exist for their own reasons.
They were not made for humans any more than black people were made for whites
or women for men.’ …
We owe it to ourselves and the animal
world as well to create, not merely a body of rules and regulations to govern
our conduct but a level of sensibility that makes us care, deeply and
constructively, about the entire planet and all of its varied inhabitants. If
we can accomplish this, then, perhaps, in some far-off day, those who follow us
down the track of the generations will be able to dwell in relative harmony
with all the creatures of the earth, human and nonhuman.
The ritual slaughter of turkeys; the
fact that each American’s average Thanksgiving dinner is 2000 calories, and that
we live in a country with 5% of the world’s people consuming 27% of the world’s
natural resources, while making 50% of its garbage — these present us with
strong arguments against factory farming. With its subjugation of animals (and
plants) to severe abuse, genetic engineering, pesticides, and a sewer of
antibiotics, the warm family ties that we long for on Thanksgiving too often
drowns out consideration of the torture and mass slaughter of animals and the
decline of human health. In fact, Americans are getting sicker in the U.S.
physically, as well as mentally. The two are related.
Speaking truth to power is not
enough. Justice will not necessarily prevail – not even “eventually,”despite idealistic
claims that “eventually” things have to change. How long is eventually? How
many people must be tortured and killed in the meantime? How can we stop it?
What do we need to do, NOW?
After reading the first printing of “Why
I Hate Thanksgiving,” one writer wrote: “Good Lord, I’m so depressed! I hope he
doesn’t write ‘Why I Hate Christmas’! His family must really look forward to
his arrival on Thanksgiving Day. For my sanity’s sake I think I’ll cling to the
revisionist version!”
Another writer asked me: “I’ve been
reading your posts for years and I wonder, is there anything you celebrate and
take joy in? We never hear about those things, but only about what you find
wrong with the world. What do you find right?”
I can answer in one word: “Resistance.”
Celebrate Resistance. That is what I take joy in, Resistance in its political,
artistic, social, economic, and sexual forms.
* * *
This Thanksgiving Day, like most
people in the U.S., I’ll get together with my family, friends and comrades. But
it will be with those who believe in and practice resistance. A few years ago I’d
decided to fast
for the holiday in front of U.S. Senator Chuck Schumer’s apartment in Park
Slope, Brooklyn, to protest his and the Democrats’ support and funding for the
wars against Iraq and Afghanistan, the U.S. financing of Israel’s occupation of
Palestine, and the detention and torture of immigrants and prisoners of war by
the U.S. government.
I was joined that year by 4 or 5
others. During the fast, we meditated upon the threads that bind U.S. policy
today to its colonial genocide of the Native people of Turtle Island.
We fasted for Leonard Peltier, Mumia
Abu-Jamal, and all political prisoners in the United States.
We fasted against the USA Patriot
Act, repression of immigrants, and the decimation of the Bill of Rights.
We fasted against global ecological
destruction, and to better contemplate what new forms the resistance will take.
This year, our resistance reclaims
and gives new and much-improved meaning to the word “Occupation.” We have begun
to turn the despair that permeates this country into resistance. We are
CREATING the alternative. BE the alternative.
Don’t allow yourself to experience
this holiday, its rituals and warfare, in the ways that this system tries to
impose on us. Resist! Please join me on Thanksgiving in collectively meditating
over the ways we are manipulated to actually yearn for the petty nationalisms
and trappings of empire that fill the hollowed shells we’ve become better than
any turkey stuffing, while capitalism goes about destroying the planet. For the
new and vastly creative energies that have been released this year, I give
thanks!
Resistance keeps you young, forever!
Mitchel Cohen
Please read the rest of the essay, and consider donating some
funds so I can circulate this essay in pamphlet form. Thanx. Continue reading »
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