The first Thanksgiving

Annually, upon Thanksgiving, right-wing blogs will feature someone writing about how the Pilgrims landed here and established a system based on rudimentary socialism, which failed, sending the colony spiraling into famine, and then moved on to a “free market” model that allowed them to survive. This historical canard—which likely had its origins in a 1968 newspaper column, and Cleon Skousen, Glenn Beck’s favorite lunatic, promulgated it as well—may never die, but Kate Zernike of The New York Times did the best job of debunking it in 2010. The short version: The Pilgrims established the original system to increase their profits and abandoned it because internal bitching, not unlike that heard on modern-day talk radio, began to affect the colony’s political stability. There was no famine. Also, they got better at growing corn on the land they’d stolen.

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Before establishing themselves at the Plimoth Plantation, and thereby setting in motion the genocidal boosting of an entire continent from the human beings who already were here, the Pilgrims went first to Holland, where they found life very hard. The language barrier locked them out of the local economy and locked them into poverty. They also found the mercantile, sophisticated Dutch society full of immoral influences.

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Poverty is at the root of the holiday season on which we are now embarked, in what also happens to be one of the uneasiest years the country has seen in over a century. Poverty is an element in the true Thanksgiving story, and it certainly is a critical element in all Christmas narratives. That goes for both the ones in the gospel, and also the secular kin that have grown along the path first blazed by Charles Dickens, who fairly can be said to have invented the modern secular Christmas narrative, although I tend not to blame him for every new Hallmark holiday movie anymore.

  Charles P Pierce

Have a Hallmark holiday, pilgrims.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.