Posted on 11/10/2001 4:00:05 PM PST by Pokey78
Next Thursday is Thanksgiving Day, that folksy moment when every American worth his salt makes for home and Mom's traditional dinner: roast turkey, stuffing, sweet potatoes with marshmallow, mashed spuds and pumpkin pie.
So it has been since the Puritans gave thanks to God for the harvest of October 1621; so it will be this year, too, though no doubt with more fervour than usual.
If we on this side of the pond know about Thanksgiving it's because our lives have been soaked all our days in American language and lore, art and artefacts. When Mrs John Bull wakes, she puts on her Maidenform bra, Playtex girdle and Max Factor lipstick.
She washes up with Fairy Liquid and Hoovers the house. Then she goes shopping in the family Ford. Meanwhile her husband . . . but this litany (a fragment from The American Take-Over of Britain by James McMillan) can be spun out till the crack of doom.
We've all heard of government of the people, by the people and for the people, even if we can't quite remember who said it and where. We know all about Oscars and we know exactly where Broadway and Brooklyn, Grand Central station and Madison Square Garden are even if we've never been in the city that never sleeps. We share the same jokes ("I don't want to belong to any club that will accept me as a member"), drink the same toasts ("Here's looking at you, kid") and murder the same songs (take your pick).
Even those who scoff loudest at the American Dream have had cause to give thanks for American bounty (lease-lend, Marshall aid, Fulbright fellowships).
When my nephew Ben was taking a degree in media studies, he had to spend his last summer holiday working in some studio or newsroom. I tried Granada, most liberal of our television companies, and was told that he could spend a day on a set watching; no more, because of union rules. I tried William La Jeunesse, then an able young television executive in Phoenix, Arizona. His reply was swift and unequivocal.
"Tell Ben [whom he'd never even seen] I'll meet the plane. Tell him to bring light clothes because it hits a hundred here in summer. Tell him, though, that we've got a pool and he can sleep in the hut in our back yard. Tell him I'll give him a cameraman and send him down to the court to start straight away on some stories for us." Ben went and, after recovering from the tequilas with which he was plied on his first night, arrived at the television station next day and never looked back.
There will always be some people - notably on what Orwell called the pansy left - to whom America is a nightmare. I prefer to believe in the possibility of the American Dream.
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