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This blog is political satire and the opinion of one lonely dog at the back fence. Nothing written in this blog is to be taken seriously until tomorrow at the earliest. At that time you may consider taking the previous days' blog seriously if you choose, however careful consideration should be given to this decision as it is, after all, serious.



(For some reason if you Google Barking Labrador you get a bunch of dog training sites - Duh...- and one direct link to this blog. But it is a post from June 2011 and somewhat out of date. If you are telling any of your friends about the blog, please direct them via the full URL - http://www.barkinglabrador.blogspot.com/. Thanks)

Saturday, November 26, 2011

Reflection on a Thanksgiving weekend…(what a cliché…)

For a couple hundred years, Thanksgiving has been celebrated in American as a time of reflection and gratitude for the things we have and appreciation of family and friends.  Crisp fall days, the smell of burning leaves and roasting turkey, cheering crowds at football games and tossing back a few cocktails – these are the traditions associated with the holiday.  It’s traditionally had an inherent selflessness in its focus on giving thanks and generosity, both material and spiritual.  As such it was characterized by quiet nobility compared to the more garish American holidays like New Year’s Eve, the 4th of July, Halloween and Christmas.  And for a child anxiously waiting, it marked the beginning of the glorious Christmas season, as surely as the first snow fall and carols on the car radio. 

Today Thanksgiving Day has been hijacked by commercial interests who start to cram Christmas down our throats November first and who continue relentlessly and mercilessly right up to New Year’s Day, leaving Thanksgiving as just that day in late November when we super-size our routine gluttony and steal ourselves for the chaos, fist-fights and greed-fuel excess of Black Friday.  I am not clear who thought that was an appropriate name for a surge of herd-like shopping, parking lot-rage and desultory interaction with exhausted retail slaves bleary-eyed from starting work at 1:00 AM but it certainly seems to reflect the situation nicely.

I used to think it was funny; the eight hours of madness involved in preparing the Thanksgiving meal for the family, including relatives normally kept at arm’s-length during the rest of the year but who – due to the basic decency of my mother – ended up camped in our living room chowing down on chips and assorted celery and carrots sticks, swilling beers and watching the Detroit Lions lose to someone.   So much energy and angst went into making sure the stuffing wasn’t too gooey and the turkey wasn’t too dry, setting the big table with both leafs inserted and keeping everyone happy that my mother was practically on the verge of a nervous breakdown by the time everyone gathered to actually eat.  Then, in a flurry of clanking silverware and grunting noises, this huge feast was consumed, as if by locusts, in twenty minutes – an orgy of gravy and corn bread, green beans and mashed potatoes.   Throw in a few glasses of wine and the immediate aftermath looked as if everyone had been drugged; push back the chair, loosen the belt, belch discretely and slump in a daze, hoping for coffee and fearing the pie that was sure to follow.  This part of the ceremony is largely unchanged.

What’s different now is, that instead of gathering around the fireplace after dinner for some stilted conversation and shared lethargy, we now have the spectacle of people leaving the Thanksgiving table, grabbing the tent from the garage and heading down to wait overnight in line at Best Buy to get a crack at a $200 flat screen.  I will admit that this is motivated, not simply by greed, but also by our tenuous economic circumstances; almost everyone can relate to saving a few bucks.  But the enthusiasm and excitement exhibited by those queuing up in front of Target makes me think there’s more going on here than the intrepid hunter / gatherer going out into the cold to provide for his family.  No, this is also clear evidence of the toxin of consumerism coursing through our collective veins – the 21st century striving for an American Dream that has gradually become more and more difficult to achieve and which is beginning to be seen in the misty distance of memory more than in the reality of today.

These cheap consumer goods allow the illusion to persist a bit longer, enabled by the exploitation of workers who are far from America but who also strive for a dream of their own – who work for dollars a day in order to have an indoor toilet.  That’s to be expected and is admirable.  But when you have fistfights over two dollar waffle irons and people pepper-spraying line jumpers to get a deal on an X-Box the Thanksgiving Holiday has morphed into something surreal and dirty and noxious.   

The hyper-consumerism that fuels this weird behavior is a symptom of both an inevitable evolution towards a global economy and the dangers inherent in unfettered capitalism run amok.  Capitalism and democracy have been joined at the hip since WWII and in some sense continue to be thought of as an inevitable yin and yang.  This notion underlies – and undermines - contemporary American foreign policy.  The greed that not so obviously underlies it is the more destructive component – the poison in the system that leads an enormous and disheartening percentage of citizens to abandon the idea of us all being in this thing together for a self-centeredness that threatens to rend the fabric of the American psyche into pieces.  

If this is the inevitable result of the global economy, the wealthiest citizens watching in dismay as the rabble fights for the last scraps of leftovers, I think I want a turkey leg and a blanket and a quiet place to lie down.   Wake me up in January...

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