National Holidays make me suspicious. It may be something Anglican in me that leads me to approach Thanksgiving and its noble Pilgrims with trepidation. An apocryphal story is told about the Bishop of South Carolina, Fitz Allison. Bishop Allison when confronted with his child dressed as a Pilgrim for the Thanksgiving Pageant is reported to have asked, "Why are you dressed like the enemy?" As a preacher, the annual Community Thanksgiving Commemoration (complete with the mayor's intonation of the presidential proclamation) gave me the creeps.
H. L. Menchen's definition of Puritanism as "the haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy," takes me to a place I would not rather go either. The problem with Thanksgiving is not gratitude, nor is it the pursuit of happiness. My problem with thanksgiving is empire. It is the same kind of avarice that has transformed Mother's Day from a lament over wholesale destruction in our own Civil War into a Sentimental Hallmark Day. It is that greed that makes of the end of the carnage of World War I in an Armistice into a happy little "support our troops" day. Empire does that. It takes the deeply painful and transforms it into a cartoon that serves its own ends.
Nowhere have I read work as keenly sensitive to the dynamics of American Empire than the new book, The Wordy Shipmates. Sarah Vowell uses Thanksgiving themes to explore what has happened to us in these days since the winter of 1620. She does it with depth and great good humor. What fascinates me most is the intentional meeting of politics and religion in the Pilgrm narrative, manipulating both our politics and our faith. That modern day t. v. evangelists and even Roman Catholics more resemble each other than those long ago renegade protestants is quite astonishing. As the groaning Thanksgiving table invites all to eat too much, the religious fare invites all to talk too much. Vowell's explorations give some important hints about all that religious yammering on the multiplying religious channels. Television, it turns out was not the first of the genre of overheated one way communication in American history. Pious New Englanders had mastered the craft fully three centuries before t. v. showed up. So, if you like to talk back to the one way politics and religion of our day, you'll love a day spent in Vowell's company.
On the subject of Empire, in an accidental juxtaposition of texts, brought unexpected insight during this past week. I had picked up copies of two books in one trip to the library, reading one right after the other, quite by accident. The first was a recent translation into English of Agnes Humbert's well know French Diary, Resistance. In it Humbert chronicled her days in the French resistance. Then she wrote in painful detail about her imprisonment and use as slave laborer in the Third Reich. These descriptions of life in first prisons, then camps were genuinely repulsive. I had thought I would read a book about the glories of a resistance group, successfully subverting its Nazi occupiers. I had no idea that I would be slogging from prison to camp to factory in a dismal tale of unimaginable human misery and degradation. Next on the book pile was My Guantanamo Diary, the story of Mahvish Khan's quest to provide legal representation to detainees housed at Gitmo under our supervision and flag.
My mind went back to an evening with the grandfather of a young German woman of our acquaintance. Sharon and I were visiting the woman's family when it was announced that grandpa was coming over for a chat with the Americans. As we talked, it unfolded that grandpa had spent a good part of World War 2 in a prison camp stateside. I was not sure what to think. Should we ask about it? Should we change the subject. It turned out that grandpa was treated very well in American Custody. He looked back on his imprisonment with fondness, with laughter and with admiration for his captors.
Hearing Khan tell it, a lot has happened in American internment camps in the 60+ years since WW2. The change is not the sort of thing one wants to look squarely in the eye. My little experience peeking inside Nazi interrment camps and then into Gitmo did our Empire no favor. I was astonished to find, in this little informal comparison, that resistance fighters in Nazi Germany, while suffering horribly, held not a candle to the horror inflicted on Gitmo detainees in Kandujar or Abu Ghraib or in the one of many of the Empire's sites of extraordinary rendition sites.
National Holidays make me suspicious because Empire never insists on National Days of Contrition. In the Empire, it is always Easter and never Ash Wednesday. C. S. Lewis described one such haunted land as "always winter, but never Christmas." We are living there on Thanksgiving, 2008.
This holiday, maybe we can be grateful for the distraction of a Detroit Lions game. Otherwise, we could drive ourselves batty in search of the contrition that is required of us. But, please do not blather on about how those Germans did not pay attention to what was happening in the Camps. Pay attention and tell someone you are watching.
