Thanks, But No Thanks

I've always been a Thanksgiving Grinch. I hate Thanksgiving. I especially hate the bit where we're all supposed to sit around an obscenely over-laden table of food and thank God for feeding us so well, while starving children in Third World countries everywhere likewise thank God for feeding the fat Americans so well.

[Right: A Vatican tract warns of the Grinch in regard to Christmas.]

Then, there's the bit where, for one day a year, White People admit that the Native Americans weren't bloodthirsty savages -- that is, not all the time -- because, as I've been told so often, God so loved the Puritans that He used his Godly magic to make the Indians act as if they were Christians in the Puritans' time of need.

Then, there's the tradition of Day After Thanksgiving Day, when White People buy stuff. I believe it began as Buy Your Local Natives a Pendleton Blanket Day, and evolved into Buy Yourself And Friends And Relatives Whatever Day as there were fewer and fewer local Natives to give blankets to.

Lately that tradition has been replaced by Buy Nothing Day, which, I am not making this up, is seriously intended as a worthwhile protest against consumerism. So poor people, who look forward to the sales on the day after Thanksgiving to get some relief from being gouged into poverty the rest of the year, are told by middle-class activists to feel guilty for it. Then, when that day is over, the middle-class activists buy all the stuff on Saturday they were going to buy on Friday, proud to have set a good Christian example before the unwashed heathen masses.

This year, though, I want to turn over a new leaf. Rather than continue on as a Grinch, I want to do something positive to correct the hateful holiday and make it better. Something in line with how Frank Costanza improved Christmas by creating Festivus (for the rest of us!), so no one, since that episode of Seinfeld first aired on December 18, 1997, has ever again had to be distracted by tinsel.

Since I know how attached you all are to your vile Thanksgiving and your vile annual turkey and gravy wallow, I won't suggest an alternative to Thanksgiving on the day of it, but recommend that the Saturday after each year's Thanksgiving be given over to celebrate our good sense not to be thankful for everything in the world. A Nothanksgiving Day.

Let's be Not Thankful this year for the fact that the only way the Senate Democrats can exercise their power to reject Bush nominees is to keep the Senate open pro forma over the holiday, because Bush would install already rejected nominees as soon as the Senate shut down. No Thanks goes to Bush for doing the BS that makes this BS necessary. One more nail in the coffin of the Republic.

Let's be Not Thankful this year for OJ's trials and tribulations. Talk about your distractions. I'd take the tinsel.

There's so much not to be thankful for! I could go on for pages!

Let's be Not Thankful for HUD's pernicious abuse of statistics earlier this month to cover up their failure to reduce the impact of homelessness. In a report issued earlier this year, HUD announced that from 1996 to 2005 permanent housing beds for the homeless have increased a whopping 83% to 208,700, in contrast to only a 35% drop in shelter beds, to 217,900. Looks like justification to keep on keepin' on doesn't it?

But hold up. If you believe their numbers and do the math, that would mean there were 335,230 shelter beds to begin with, back in '96, while there were at that time 114,043 permanent beds. Add those '96 numbers up and you get 449,273. Add the 2005 numbers up, you get 425,600.

The impressive percentages are tinsel, hiding a net loss in those categories of 23,673 beds.

We are not thankful for the way HUD tries to mislead us.

[Left: The HUD seal -- your assurance of quality bunk.]