Most of us will spend today expressing Thanksgiving Day by spending time with our families. Few of us truly ponder the purpose of the holiday, or what it really means to be American in the world today. Go ahead and enjoy Thanksgiving with your family, or by yourself. But if you are one with more of a cynical mind these days, what follows is William S. Burroughs' take on the holiday.
There are plenty of people who aren't in a fortunate-enough position to have a day of feasting, and our government is engaged in creating world-wide instability. Frankly, this is an historic low point for the experiment that is America. There is hope this country is waking up to what we've done to ourselves and maybe the rest of the world.
William S. Burroughs' 1986 Thanksgiving Day Prayer (QuickTime video) resonates today as exposing what has gone horribly wrong in this country, or maybe what has always been wrong:
Thanksgiving Day, Nov. 28, 1986
William S. Burroughs
For John Dillinger
In hope he is still alive
Thanks for the wild turkey and the Passenger Pigeons, destined to be shit out through wholesome American guts --
thanks for a Continent to despoil and poison --
thanks for Indians to provide a modicum of challenge and danger --
thanks for vast herds of bison to kill and skin, leaving the carcass to rot --
thanks for bounties on wolves and coyotes --
thanks for the AMERICAN DREAM to vulgarize and falsify until the bare lies shine through --
thanks for the KKK, for nigger-killing lawmen feeling their notches, for decent church-going women with their mean, pinched, bitter, evil faces --
thanks for "Kill a Queer for Christ" stickers --
thanks for laboratory AIDS --
thanks for Prohibition and the War Against Drugs --
thanks for a country where nobody is allowed to mind his own business --
thanks for a nation of finks -- yes,
thanks for all the memories... all right, let's see your arms... you always were a headache and you always were a bore --
thanks for the last and greatest betrayal of the last and greatest of human dreams.
Hat tip to Boing Boing.