This week we fondly recall our fake president on a surprise Thanksgiving visit to Iraq (2003)
to present our brave young soldiers with a fake turkey to promote his fake war.
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Remember when Bush pardoned a turkey?
And, speaking of turkeys…
Benjamin Franklin, one of the most forward thinkers of his time, wrote a letter to his daughter in Jan. 1784, in which he expressed his disappointment of the eagle being chosen to represent America. He preferred the turkey over the eagle. The bald eagle is “like those among men who live by sharping and robbing and is generally poor and often very lousy.” “Besides he is a rank coward: the king bird not bigger than a sparrow attacks him boldly and drives him out of the district”, “therefore by no means a proper emblem for the brave and honest.” He goes on further to say, “the wild turkey is in comparison a much more respectable bird, and withal a true original native of America.”
The Real Origin of Thanksgiving
.We all know the sweet Thanksgiving story taught to us in school, but a few years ago old official Dutch records revealed the dark side of our great American tradition:
In late November of 1637, a force of colonists (with the help of a bunch of Blackwaterish paid Dutch mercenaries) trapped an entire tribe of seven hundred Pequot Indians celebrating their corn harvest in their long house near the mouth of the Mystic River.
Captain John Mason shock and awed the camp with “fire, sword, blunderbuss, and tomahawk.”
Compassionate conservative Christians set the windowless building on fire and slaughted these peaceful Native Americans (unarmed men, women and children) one by one as they tried to escape the blazing inferno. “To see them frying in the fire, and the streams of their blood quenching the same, and the stench was horrible, but the victory seemed a sweet sacrifice to the great delight of the Pilgrims, and they gave praise thereof to God,” said the Cap.
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Each year thereafter the Pilgrims celebrated the date as a Day of thanks.
In 1704 Massachusetts Governor Dudley declared a “General Thanksgiving” state holiday to celebrate the Holocaust/Genocide of Red Man and Woman:
“[God’s] infinite Goodness to extend His Favors… In defeating and disappointing…. the expeditions of the Enemy [Indians] against us, And the good Success given us against them, by delivering so many of them into our hands,” said the Gov. Link to article
Would it be too much to ask that you include a brief shout out to the Pequots in Thanksgiving grace?
Thanksgiving dinners take eighteen hours to prepare. They are consumed in twelve minutes. Half-times take twelve minutes. This is not coincidence. ~Erma Bombeck
I celebrated Thanksgiving in an old-fashioned way. I invited everyone in my neighborhood to my house, we had an enormous feast, and then I killed them and took their land. -Jon Stewart
I love Thanksgiving turkey. It’s the only time in Los Angeles that you see natural breasts. ~Arnold Schwarzenegger
The Puritan fathers believed they were the Chosen People of an Infinite God and that this justified anything they did. They were Calvinists who believed that the vast majority of humanity was predestined to damnation.
The Puritans embraced a line from Psalms 2:8, “Ask of me, and I shall give thee, the heather for thine inheritance, and the uttermost parts of he earth for thy possession.”
Contrary to popular mythology the Pilgrims were no friends to the local Indigenous People (“Indians”). A company of Pilgrims led by Miles Standish actively sought the head of a local chief. Standish eventually got his bloody prize. He beheaded an Indian named Wituwamat and brought the head to Plymouth where it was displayed on a wooden spike for many years.
Thanksgiving Day, a function which originated in New England two or three centuries ago when those people recognized that they really had something to be thankful for - annually, not oftener - if they had succeeded in exterminating their neighbors, the Indians, during the previous twelve months instead of getting exterminated by their neighbors, the Indians. Thanksgiving Day became a habit, for the reason that in the course of time, as the years drifted on, it was perceived that the exterminating had ceased to be mutual and was all on the white man’s side, consequently on the Lord’s side; hence it was proper to thank the Lord for it and extend the usual annual compliments. ~Mark Twain
Published by Greg at 05:33 PM on November 23, 2008