Pass the Myths and the Mashed Potatoes, Please!

I remember the Alamo... as decreed by the Daughters of the Republic of Texas, that is.

13 days of glory and all that jazz.

You had to remember the Alamo if you grew up in Texas: it was on the test every damned year you were in school; and you had to pass Texas History in order to graduate (maybe kids still do).

If you're lucky, though, your teacher injected a little reality somewhere along the line: Davy Crockett and those other "heroes" were mercenaries, hired to hold the fort-- or mission, if you will... in return for a shitload of free land.

And those mercenaries brought women and children along for the standoff. Good one, guys! Great way to use loved ones as bargaining chips.

Pass the cranberry sauce, please. The story of the "heroic stand" at the Alamo is just one of our great American myths... spoon fed to our children annually.

Which brings us to Thanksgiving...


"I don't go so far as to think that the only good Indians are dead Indians; but I believe nine out of ten are, and I shouldn't inquire too closely into the case of the tenth."

Theodore Roosevelt

Squaw-the true meaning of this world is 'Indian whore' or an obscene term referring to female genitalia.

Idaho Lawmaker Harwood said," I don't think the word "squaw" is derogatory. It's the way it's being said that would make 'em take it that way."

Representative Twila Hornback said, "Just because people take it (squaw) as offensive doesn't make it offensive."

Tonto- the Spanish word for FOOL, Kemosabe.

iQué hombre más tonto! What a fool of a man!

Myles Standish pretended to be a trader and beheaded an Indian man named Wituwamat-he brought his head to Plymouth where it was displayed on a wooden spike for years as a symbol of "white power." Standish had the Indian man's young brother hanged from the rafters for good measure.

"To see them frying in the fire, and the streams of their blood quenching the same, and the stench was horrible; but the victory seemed a sweet sacrifice and they GAVE PRAISE THEREOF TO GOD."

"It pleased God to visite these Indeans with a great sickness, and such a mortalitie that of a 1000 and a halfe of them dyed, and many of them did rott above ground for want of burial."

Governor William Bradford (Entries from his diary)

Every treaty (350) with the Indians has been broken.

Abraham Lincoln declared Thanksgiving Day to be a legal national holiday during the Civil War---on the same day and at the same time he ordered troops to march against the Sioux in Minnesota. He subsequently ordered 38 Santee Sioux hung on Christmas Eve for leaving the 'reservation' in search of food.

Pass the Myths and the Mashed Potatoes, please.

After lunch, read this "Thanksgiving" story to your older children:

From The Black Commentator:

Celebrating the unspeakable

White America embraced Thanksgiving because a majority of that population glories in the fruits, if not the unpleasant details, of genocide and slavery and feels, on the whole, good about their heritage: a cornucopia of privilege and national power. Children are taught to identify with the good fortune of the Pilgrims. It does not much matter that the Native American and African holocausts that flowed from the feast at Plymouth are hidden from the children’s version of the story – kids learn soon enough that Indians were made scarce and Africans became enslaved. But they will also never forget the core message of the holiday: that the Pilgrims were good people, who could not have purposely set such evil in motion. Just as the first Thanksgivings marked the consolidation of the English toehold in what became the United States, the core ideological content of the holiday serves to validate all that has since occurred on these shores – a national consecration of the unspeakable, a balm and benediction for the victors, a blessing of the fruits of murder and kidnapping, and an implicit obligation to continue the seamless historical project in the present day.

Read the rest and ask yourself...

What the hell am I really celebrating today?

And pass me that totally tasteless dessert toon that's so popular this year...





Heaviest of sighs.