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Thanksgiving Day Open Thread

KBCO in Boulder is playing Arlo Guthrie's Alice's Restaurant at noon and 6pm, MT. You can listen live here. It was November 28, 1965 that Arlo was convicted of littering in Stockbridge, MA. You can read the backstory here.

Why is Alice's Restaurant such a ritual, especially for those of us who remember the '60's? Ira Chernus, Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Colorado at Boulder, explains: [More...]

Out here on the left fringe of '60s-style activism, we don't go in much for ritual. We lefties are about freedom, innovation, always finding a new and better way to do things. Still, there is something to be said for ritual. It creates an illusion that things never change, that we can turn back the clock for a moment and pretend things are still the way they used to be. Maybe it's having dinner with the same folks every Thanksgiving, or fixing the trimmings in the same way each year. In my house, it's turning on our local public radio station and waiting for that magic moment when we can start singing along with Arlo.

No, we don't really believe that we can get anything we want at Alice's Restaurant, excepting Alice. But it takes us back to a time when we believed we might get anything we wanted, even though we wanted the world, and we wanted it now!. Everyone we knew really could imagine fifty people a day walking into the draft board, singin' a bar of Alice's Restaurant and walking out, creating the Alice's Restaurant Anti-Massacre Movement. And all we had to do was sing along the next time it came around on the guitar.

....Isn't that why so many of us wait eagerly each Thanksgiving for it to come around on the guitar? It isn't just to recapture our lost youth (though perhaps there is nothing wrong with that). It's also because we were young at a very special time, when it seemed that the whole world would soon shed its aging body, worn down by war and greed and dehumanization, and regain its lost youth.

Never again, we believed, would anyone be arrested by Officer Obie for littering. Never again would anyone be fined fifty dollars and have to pick up the garbage. Never again would anyone be injected, inspected, detected, infected, neglected and selected by their government to join the army, burn women, kids, houses and villages. Soon, we believed, the whole world would be full of loving people who would take out the garbage whenever it needed to be taken out, bring it down to the city dump, then go back home to have a dinner that couldn't be beat.

....Well, it hasn't worked out quite that way, yet. But kid, it's never too late to rehabilitate yourself, to start creating enough of a nuisance and sing loud enough to end war and stuff. ... Unfortunately, though, the world will keep doing all kinds of mean, nasty, ugly things, at least for a while. And we'll all be just having a tough time here, on this road of activism. It may be a good idea to remember the comfort and rejuvenation we can get from an old familiar ritual now and then. So don't forget to sing along when it comes around on the guitar. Because it is, indeed, a movement: The Alice's Restaurant Let's Give Thanks and Remember Why We Started Doing This and Why We Keep On Keepin' On Movement.

Have a wonderful Thanksgiving, everyone. This is an open thread, all topics welcome.

< Weds. Night Open Thread: The Group W Bench | Thursday Evening Thread: Winding Down With Music >
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  • Display: Sort:
    Happy Thanksgiving everyone. :) (none / 0) (#1)
    by byteb on Thu Nov 25, 2010 at 10:36:23 AM EST


    Happy Thanksgiving to all (none / 0) (#2)
    by glanton on Thu Nov 25, 2010 at 11:45:47 AM EST


    Happy T-day to all! (none / 0) (#3)
    by desertswine on Thu Nov 25, 2010 at 11:46:47 AM EST
    Random fact of the day...

    When President Franklin D. Roosevelt moved Thanksgiving to the next-to-last Thursday in November to prolong the holiday shopping season, many Republicans rebelled. The holiday was temporarily celebrated on different dates: November 30 became the "Republican Thanksgiving" and November 23 was "Franksgiving" or "Democrat Thanksgiving.


    Is this a true story? I don't want to (none / 0) (#5)
    by oculus on Thu Nov 25, 2010 at 01:39:53 PM EST
    dispense false info at Thanksgiving dinner!

    Parent
    Random ... (none / 0) (#6)
    by desertswine on Thu Nov 25, 2010 at 03:20:22 PM EST
    Fact of the Day.

    35.The Friday after Thanksgiving is called Black Friday largely because stores hope the busy shopping day will take them out of the red and into positive profits. Black Friday has been a tradition since the 1930s.


    Parent
    The Thanksgiving turkey originated (none / 0) (#4)
    by oculus on Thu Nov 25, 2010 at 01:39:17 PM EST
    in Mexico.  How's that for irony?  LAT

    TL sidebar re Dec. report re Afghanistan: (none / 0) (#7)
    by oculus on Thu Nov 25, 2010 at 04:29:16 PM EST
    Loved the Chernus piece (none / 0) (#8)
    by LongmontKathy on Fri Nov 26, 2010 at 01:12:58 PM EST
    Great to see Ira Chernus' Alice Restaurant piece re-printed here.  Arlo himself wrote the Professor how much he liked it.

    Let's keep on singing, Sixties folks (including those not born until the 90s)!