Americans had good reasons to celebrate Thanksgiving this year

By ROGER FRANKLIN

Thanksgiving, the founding father of America's gilded myths, came and went yesterday much as it always does: 238 million kg of turkey meat hauled from the oven, a post-feast loosening of the national belt, and the reappearance on cable TV of Jimmy Stewart in It's A Wonderful Life, which will continue in seemingly endless reruns until Christmas, when the annual season of saccharine sentimentality will have run its course.

Given what the country has witnessed since September 11, it's good to know things are back to normal - that lies, in other words, still work their comforting magic.

The sociologists tell us that myths matter, and even though the ones surrounding Thanksgiving represent some of the greatest whoppers in the history of manufactured "truths", this year's regurgitation of time-honoured fables boasts a greater significance than marking another record year for US poultry producers.

But we'll get to the bigger picture in a minute. First, those cherished fictions.

The quest for religious freedom is supposed to be what charted the Mayflower's course across the Atlantic, yet even a cursory review of America's early history deflates that revered conceit. As late as 1658, almost 40 years after they landed, the Pilgrims were locking up Quakers and anyone else who dared to disagree with the colony's ruling theocracy.

Free enterprise, that other American creed? Not at first. That came later, after the colonists tried communal ownership and almost starved. Only when land was assigned to individual owners did crop production meet the settlers' needs.

The Indians who are supposed to have been the first Thanksgiving's honoured guests? Well, if they were at the table - and many historians doubt it - let's hope they enjoyed it, because their lives soon took a turn for the worse, much to the satisfaction of the new arrivals. After smallpox carried off 90 per cent of the native population, the Pilgrims celebrated the epidemic as "a special dispensation of Providence", as one contemporary chronicler put it.

God apparently wanted the land cleared of heathens, and what He failed to achieve the settlers soon finished with a series of relentless wars on the debilitated survivors.

And the Thanksgiving meal? Well, the iconic turkey probably wasn't on the menu, since the wild variety is a shy bird and very hard to hunt. Deer and ducks were probably the day's entertainment, along with beer and that other great staple of American life - firearms. After the tables were cleared, the menfolk hauled out their muskets for target practice, which probably sent an additional and pointed message to any Indians who may have been in attendance.

From the belt-buckle hats (which Pilgrims didn't wear) to the holiday itself (which became one only when Abraham Lincoln declared it as a morale-booster during the Civil War) there is almost nothing about the Thanksgiving myth that survives scrutiny.

Except, ironically, for what the holiday purports to represent: the notion that muddling through, with the help of God or destiny or whatever guiding force Americans care to name, somehow sees everything come out all right in the end. This year, of the things to celebrate, it was that above all.

Two-plus years after the World Trade Centre went down, it's America's remarkable resilience that deserves to be toasted. Back then, when the smell of death and uncertainty hung over not only Manhattan but the entire country, it would have taken a brave soul to predict the surprisingly happy turn of events that has followed, the toll of casualties in post-war Iraq notwithstanding.

Even before September 11 the economy was shaky, with the bankruptcies and layoffs of the internet boom-turned-bust. Then the attacks made the nascent troubles so much worse. Wall Street plunged 2000-plus points, the travel industry collapsed, and the airlines would have gone broke if Congress had not forked out billions of dollars in emergency subsidies.

The anthrax letters were next, followed by more trouble on the Big Board - Enron, WorldCom, Tyco - and a slather of criminal prosecutions that is likely to go on for years.

And finally, just to add another bitter cherry to America's slumping cake, there were the exploits of the Washington snipers, who demonstrated that determined men don't need a hijacked jet to sow death and panic.

The commentators, especially the ones with no affection for the Bush Administration, were almost gleeful in plotting the dire times ahead: economic failure, terror delivered daily, a police state of midnight raids and vigilante vengeance against Muslims. Like Thanksgiving's turkeys, this President was said to need only a few more bastings before he was well and truly done.

Here's the thing, though: not only did those predictions fail to happen, in almost every case it was the exact opposite that came to be.

The terror attacks and anthrax letters turned out to be one-offs, though the fear lingers still. The snipers were caught and found to be just another couple of murderous morons. Mosques didn't burn, and the few rednecks who took potshots at foreigners in turbans were arrested, processed by the legal system, and in at least one case sentenced to death.

That's not to say that the threats have vanished. The deficit, although nowhere near as big as the gloomiest predictions anticipated, continues to grow, and unemployment, while down slightly, has yet to reflect the stock market's near return to its pre-September 11 levels. As for terror, that's something Americans have decided they must learn to live with.