TABLE OF CONTENTS

TWO THANKSGIVING MESSAGES

by Rick Marschall

1. LET US GIVE THANKS

   (An Unconventional Reflection on Thanks)

2. THANKS-GIVING

   (But NOT for Revisionist History)

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1. LET US GIVE THANKS (An Unconventional Reflection on Thanks)

by Rick Marschall, Rare Jewel Magazine Managing Editor

Many are the times and many are the things whose passing many of us lament. Even Bob Dylan probably has come to regret that “the times, they are a-changin’.” Traditions, standards, manners, mores, basic civility: our perceptions of their imminent obsolescence somehow dampens the happy wakes that should be held for the growing scarcity of bigotry, slavery, oppression, and self-destruction.

Plus ca change, plus c’est la meme chose, the French remind us [The more things change, the more they stay the same]. Perhaps the quiet realization that mankind’s nature merely re-packages old sins and offenses makes us lament all the more that things we CAN more easily change, some of those quality-of-daily-life elements, are slipping through our fingers.

For example, take the category of Basic Civility. If this were Jeopardy, here would be a mere $20 answer. That’s what makes it so frustrating. Our mothers (oh, all right: our grandmothers) always used to tell us to say “Please” and “Thank You.” Those seem like ancient rites now.

Worse, have you noticed how few people say “You’re Welcome” any more? Where HAVE all the flowers gone?

The words and terms, once you really think about them, are shrouded in history if not anomalies to 20^th-century folks.

“Thanks,” the root of “Thanksgiving,” after all, is, according to the Online Etymology Dictionary, from the Old English pancian "to give thanks," and various cognates of related tongues: Primitive Germanic, thankojan; Old Norse, pakka, Old Frisian, thankia; the German danken, "to thank"). Further back in time we discover the actual base in Indo-European is thankoz, meaning "thought and gratitude," from the Primitive Indo-European base tong, "to think, feel." The whole group of “thank” words, we are told, is from the same root as “think.” That relationship seems kept alive only in lyrics of country-music songs, but we go astray.

“Welcome,” as in the ultra-rare (we’ll prove it below) “You’re Welcome,” we learn from the same source, can be found in Old English as wilcuma, an exclamation of kindly greeting, from the earlier vilacuma, "welcome guest," literally "one whose coming is in accord with another's will," from willa – "pleasure, desire, choice" – and we discover “will” of that meaning and “come” as roots of that tree. “Welcome” as meaning "entertainment or public reception as a greeting" is recorded from 1530, so we affirm the umbrella-concept of cordiality and comeraderie.

Love and marriage go together like a horse and carriage, although lyricists of an earlier day and statisticians of today would wrangle about that one. But this we do know: Thank You and You’re Welcome are filing for a virtual divorce. Worse, “You’re Welcome” is going the route of its Proto-Primitive-Ancient-Old-Dutch-Cleanser (or whatever) forebears. Dead of non-use.

The media both reflect and lead cultural trends, and this is a cultural trend. Little courtesies suggest big attitudes. Not every anchor, host, guest, and caller is a clean example. David Brinkley, for instance, clearly tipped the statistical scales in favor of civility, when, in his last years as host of ABC-TV’s “This Week,” he typically sent off guests with cascades of rhetorical rose petals: “Thank you. Thank you for being here. Thank you for coming in. Glad to have you. Wonderful to see you….” And it seemed like South American coups and Middle Eastern assassination-fests could start and end during one of those Thesauri of Thanks. It was civility on crack – nice as a gesture, but his bemused guests were unable, of course, to respond, “you’re welcome, you’re welcome, you’re welcome, you’re welcome…”

The other extreme is talk radio, specifically sports radio. Callers and hosts talk past each other, especially when the “talk” is ostensibly sincere. Maybe it’s a New York thing, but WFAN in New York City specializes in a bizarre rhythm: imagine most callers and hosts with Brooklyn accents, as the typical call begins and proceeds back and forth between, remember, only two people: “Eli.” “What’s up?” “How ya doin’?” “Not much.” “What’s goin’ on?” “How are you?” “Hey, ‘bout the same.” “You know.” Such oafish affability represents the contemporary trend toward superficiality in our social interaction. But, back to “Thank You” and “You’re Welcome” at Thanksgiving 2006 in America…

We get to gape at the official changing of the guard when members of the national media interview leading figures of the establishment. Our survey of a dozen conversations – totally random, on several networks and with varieties of guests, all from just before and after the recent elections – is interesting. Here is how they closed their chats:

E D Hill (on “Fox and Friends”): Thank you.

Rep John Shadegg (R-AZ): You bet.

Amy Robach (MSNBC): Thank you.

Jim Nicholson, Commissioner of Veteran’s Affairs: Thank

YOU. Thank you. Thank you for having me.

Wolf Blitzer (“CNN Late Edition”): Thanks for coming in.

Seymour Hersh, The New Yorker: Sure.

Nora O’Donnell (MSNBC): Thank you so much.

Chip Reid, Congressional Correspondent: You bet.

Bob Schieffer (“Face the Nation”): Thank you very much, and

we’ll be back in a moment.

Josh Bolten, White House Chief of Staff: [no chance to respond]

Jeffrey Brown (substitute host, PBS “News Hour”): All right.

Frank Ahrens of the Washington Post. Thanks for the update.

Ahrens: Absolutely.

Chris Matthews (“Hardball”): OK. Thank you. Jack Murtha.

Rep. Murtha (D-PA): Nice talking to you.

Chris Wallace (“Fox News Sunday”): Thank you so much for

coming in today.

Sen John Kerry (D-MA): Proud to be here.

Tim Russert (“Meet the Press”): We thank you for coming in.

We thank you for your time.

Sen Joe Liebermann (I-CT): Thank YOU, Tim.

Alex Witt (MSNBC): Thanks for being with us.

Steve Forbes, Forbes Publishing: Good to be here.

Chris Wallace (“Fox News Sunday”): Mr Speaker, thank you.

Thanks for joining us today. Appreciate it.

Newt Gingrich: You bet.

Finally, Wolf Blitzer (“CNN Late Edition”): Senator Hutchison,

thanks to you as well.

Sen Kay Bailey Hutchison (R-TX): You’re welcome.

One out of twelve. A fair average? I think it’s more like 1/20, five out of a hundred, or even a smaller percentage. Listen yourself to radio and TV; listen out in public; listen to yourself. Note that we haven’t included the other common replies to “Thank you”… notably “yup,” “sure thing,” “OK,” and “yeah.” Even “hey.”

A century ago, one of the most popular comic strips was F. Opper’s “Alphonse and Gaston.” The heroes were a pair of dippy Frenchmen, afflicted with terminal politeness. As freight trains bore down on them, or raging bulls charged, they exchanged endless invitations to the other to escape first or to choose the fancier life vest. Up in a tree after an explosion, or in adjacent hospital beds, they would end each cartoon adventure with fusillades of such lines: “No, I insist. It is YOU who is to be thanked.”

Several of the evasive responses to expressions of thanks – how else can they be described? – that we have charted have the same number of syllables as “You’re Welcome,” and a few have more syllables. If we added up all the extra time and needless aspiration of these curious subversions of manners and language, our nation could attend to more important things.

THAT would be welcome indeed, thank you very much.

2. THANKS-GIVING (But NOT for Revisionist History)

by Rick Marschall, Rare Jewel Magazine Managing Editor

 “…receiving a kingdom which cannot be moved, let us have grace, whereby we may serve God acceptably with reverence and godly fear.”-- Hebrews 12:28

In our companion column, we throw a light-hearted hissy-fit about the corruption – the loss of meaning and substance – of the phrases “Thank you” and “You’re welcome” at this time called Thanksgiving. Now a more serious message, but it starts with another grammatical observation: “Thanksgiving,” which we know in its American manifestation as exercised by the Pilgrims and institutionalized as a quasi-religious governmental observance by Abraham Lincoln, has profoundly changed.

Its transformation can be characterized by this etymological observation: Thanksgiving in America is no longer a noun; it is an adjective. Here is what I mean:

The Pilgrims gave thanks to God for their safe passage, for the establishment of a colony, for peaceful intercourse with aboriginal neighbors on the land, for a harvest that sustained them. They knew the source of their blessings, and they gave thanks to their God. President Lincoln, in the midst of the Civil War, month by month evinced more powerful spirituality – humble submission to God’s will, helpless reliance on His mercy, hopeful in pleas for His wisdom. The natural expression of Lincoln’s growing faith was his Thanksgiving Proclamation, a call to the American nation entire to offer thanks to the Almighty for bounties and favor… gratitude even amongst carnage.

Thanksgiving, noun: what you do, how you act. A decision.

Thanksgiving 2006 in America, however, has become an adjective. It invariably is part of a phrase – Thanksgiving break; Thanksgiving sales; Thanksgiving football games; Thanksgiving dinners.

The distinction is not insubstantial. Not only does America scarcely acknowledge God or thank Him in corporate, official manners any more; but, as with so many other elements of our heritage, we have been victimized by the most violent rapine of things sacred. That is, our history and foundations, both Christian and civil, have been perverted, twisted, denied, and – successfully – transformed.

Commercials for a major television documentary on the Pilgrim’s passage this year have featured celebrities endorsing not just the program but the “idea” of the colonists in question. But their “idea” is a fantasy, a politically correct, new-age, 21^st-century secularist caricature of the genuine article. The assorted gallery of tabloid-paper stars (one of whom is William Shatner: ‘nuff said?) refer to their backgrounds, assert their own versions of propriety, and graft the pious Pilgrims onto their contemporary value-systems.

Let us realize that this documentary and these ideological hucksters neatly represent what is happening – has happened – in our classrooms, in our courts, in our children’s impressionable heads. A number of the shills point out their Jewish backgrounds; strange that the producers display an obsession to suggest consanguinity, although one actress also refers to pagans on the branches of her family tree. But the main thrust of all the commercial announcements is dedicated to the proposition all men are created secular. “Let us honor what they came here to establish,” the rogue’s gallery of liberals, secularists, and relativists proclaim. No different – just a little more bling-bling – than classrooms, courts, and textbooks, in the year 2006 “of the Common Era.” Who writes history molds the future.

In honor of the Pilgrims who inaugurated the method of giving thanks to God in this institutional fashion, and in memory of those spiritual and civil leaders – the guiding lights of our American heritage from Washington through Lincoln, and not least the untold multitudes of warriors, whether they fought on battlefields or in town meetings – let us include, in our thanks to God this year, some truth. May we rescue it before it is totally erased and submerged and transformed by the enemies of our cultural heritage:

The Pilgrims did not flee religious persecution.[1] They sailed to the New World to worship in freedom, but also to establish organic communities of Christian values. Not “caring communities,” whatever that means; Christian communities.

Colonists, whether Puritans, Pilgrim, or others, did not come to these shores with the intention to establish societies where people could follow their “own feelings.” Quite the contrary, they all came to serve God in obedience. Indeed, America became a place where people would do that.

Pilgrims did not trust governments that were not established upon the Word of God.

Pilgrims rejected leaders, from governors to humble schoolmasters, who did not base their duties and standards on biblical principles.

Pilgrims, if they ever speculated on the evolution of attitudes, would never have longed for the time when abortion, pornography, same-sex marriage, and restrictions on Christianity would be the descendents of their sacrificial work. To think that America would have championed those “values” some day – much less, unbelievably, be done in their names! – would have disgusted them. Some would have returned to their previous lands, if they could have foreseen America 2006; some would have immolated their dwellings first; some would have cursed the experiments that held such promise but ultimately were perverted.

In our verse from Hebrews (12:28), we realize that the “kingdom” is not of this world. Let us not think that America is, or was, or can be, that kingdom “that can never be moved” or shaken. Neither did the Pilgrims think so. That is the New Jerusalem that God promises faithful believers.

Yet to be “a shining city upon the hill,” in William Bradford’s words, is quite good enough. St Augustine, many centuries earlier, spoke of the “City of God” not as something of perfection attainable in this life… but as a model, an ideal, a foreshadowing inspiration by which to order our lives, and please Him.

The United States was that shining city upon a hill, and for that we give thanks to God.

The United States can again be that shining city upon a hill, and

for that, also, we give thanks to God.

The United States of 2006 is nothing like that shining city upon a hill, and for that we tremble and ask God’s mercy. We give thanks to God that He is staying His hand of Justice, and ask His strength that we may be instruments of revival and repentance.

[1] For further information about the real reason the Pilgrims came to America, read: “When Truth Trumps Tradition” at:

http://www.rarejewelmag.com/articles/view_by_group.asp?group=2005-03%20(Mar/Apr):%20Christophobia#id_426