>
> "David Oberman" wrote in message
> news:4dgek3de4th1vu7gto0aquakvh16raeh67@4ax.com...

>> John Jones aol.com> wrote:
>>

>>>What's 'thanksgiving'?

>>
>> On this day, United States Americans give thanks for the Pilgrims, who
>> founded Plymouth Bay Colony, outlawed light entertainment outside the
>> home, & drank turkey on the rocks.
>>
>> We commemmorate by doing all our banking that week by Wednesday -- or
>> pick it up again on Friday. Also, very few of us check our 401(k)
>> balances online on that day.
>>
>> It's a great holiday! It usually features a USC football game, too.

>
> My big gripe is 'Black Thursday'.
>
> I remember I first recognized the degeneration of this society way back
> in...geeze...can't remember off hand...sometime late 70's or early 80's.
> I suppose it had been coming long before that, but the first 'sign', that
> first noticeable difference whereupon I could recognize something awry
> with this society...well, it was the 'Price is Right' gameshow program.
> I'm not sure how it came about; if it was programming change that was
> intentional, or just an evolution of the sensibilities of people...but I
> turned on this daytime light TV fare one day way back when...and 'things
> were all of a sudden different'. There was an 'energy' that have been
> cultivated...an new excitement. The contestants were now dancing and
> screaming and doing cartwheels getting to the stage where the big prizes
> were possible. And that 'closest bid without going over' rule made for
> what I remember was the first signs of a new 'dog eat dog' competitiveness
> where people would bid one single dollar over the previous guy, locking
> that poor guy completely out of the game.
>
> But it was this commercial zaniness that had somehow catapulted from
> restrained, social dignity...to this 'rabid spectacle' that allowed people
> to dress up like clowns and slobbacious T-shirt tourists...and display a
> mindless abandon of pigout materialism for all to see. There had been
> plenty of game shows before, even the 'Price is Right' in an early
> form...but there was a 'reserve' met; people remained quiet, championing
> $64,000 questions with the stiffness of chess matches. But this was
> different...a new 'energy' had been unleashed...and Western Civilization
> was never to be the same. As Pink Floyd might have said, it was a 'crack
> in the wall'.
>
> I mention this 'mindless obsession' that many have since recompensed as
> 'corporate' whittling of the human mind in much the same way drug pushers
> might entice their victims before introducing them to the 'hard
> stuff'...as backdrop to the original post about how Thanksgiving in this
> once great land has now 'degenerated' as a mindset, as only a mile marker
> day before the great herded rush into the Christmas shopping season.
>
> And so...Black Thursday. For UK'ers here, this has become the real NEW
> American tradition. All it is, is a 'shopping day' where crowds line up
> at the department and electronic device stores in hordes starting the
> midnight before...many camping out in cold and rain in lines that can
> stretch several laps around the block. When the doors are unlocked early
> the next morning, people act exactly like starving cattle being herded
> into large corrals where the cowpokes can put their particular brand on
> their hides [Sony, Panasonic, or Toshiba etc].
>
> It is a sad sad day to our ancestors and to any human who can remember
> times when substance of the human heart was held intact under the musings
> of idealism that struck a chord upon the soul of what we are...as we sat
> around turkey dinner tables concluded in a solemness of a single tear bred
> on the backs of all who came and suffered and provided to get us here; and
> in this we gave thanks under that symbol of our creation by which we once
> stood. And we held hands as family. Ah well...that was the old tradition
> anyway [the one we still give public display to while actually living
> something entirely different]. Thankfulness is, after all, a show of
> humility; and corporate materialism can have none of that, since it
> promotes things like restraint and reserve [can't whip up frothy buying
> frenzy in people who are reserved].
>
> "The Price is Right". Actually, a very appropriate name of what might be
> the new model of the human condition. But what "Price" one may rightfully
> ask? We have TV's and pocket rockets galore now. Trinkets the Algonquin
> Indians might have eschewed.