Turkey Day - for Turkeys

THE BOGUS ECONOMIST
Eat Up

Thanksgiving Day. A day to go to your nearby place of worship - if that was your thing - or just think of all the blessings this country provides, like democracy, freedom or any of the others. If you were so inclined, you could reflect on the symbolism of people of different beliefs sitting down together in peace, sharing a meal and perhaps some rudimentary exchange of ideas. That was then.

Now we have Turkey Day, a holiday from work wherein you can stuff yourself to the point of nausea and then go out and start your Christmas shopping, despite the fact the ads have been going for over a month. Thanksgiving Day is all about reflection; Turkey Day is all about consumption. At the risk of destroying the reputation of the Bogus Economist as a jolly, humorous old fart, replacing it with the image of a dour, sour and humorless old fart, I want to point out this transformation is a metaphor for the whole transformation of the American economy from a wonderland of opportunity to the morass of greed in which we're currently wallowing.

Belatedly. even magazines like Time and Newsweek, to say nothing of Harpers and The Economist, are pointing out the failings of the supply-side laissez-faire philosophy of the Friedman-Reagan-Greenspan school while also noting the fundamental errors of trusting the "invisible hand of the market" to put America's welfare ahead of the stockholders' insatiable thirst for more profit or the incentive for CEOs to do almost anything to provide it. The cost of all this is becoming more obvious by the day. Sadly but predictably, the only answer we're getting from the gurus of the invisible hand is "Go shopping," the same thing we heard from George W. Bush after 9/11. Another way of expressing this sentiment is Turkey Day.

Instead of advising Americans to really get down to the ways we can curtail our endless appetites and start putting a little away, if not for the rainy day that's already here then for the hurricane that may be coming, we're hearing that without spending everything we have and then some, our business structure may well collapse.
I haven't read a lot about questioning the kind of structure that's built on such a phony, shallow and transparent foundation.

Turkey Day is a perversion of our history, a travesty of our culture and a creature of Madison Avenue advertisers in the same way the "American Dream" is a twisting of our ideals into a salt-water taffy vision of big houses, overly complicated electronics and cars too big for the carports. We've lost the capacity to distinguish between what we need and what we want and, worse, between what we want and what we're told to want.

I advocate celebrating this Thanksgiving Day by thinking of what kind of country we want Barack Obama to lead. This might mean junking a lot of what we've been led to believe America is all about in terms of consumables, but also recapturing what our grandparents were taught were the unique qualities of The Lady With the Lamp standing proudly in New York harbor.

Happy Thanksgiving Day.


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