Thanksgiving, American Style... (whatever that means...)

“All earlier pluralist societies destroyed themselves because no one took care of the common good. They abounded in communities but could not sustain community, let alone create it.”

--Peter Drucker (Austrian born immigrant to the United States)

One of the most cherished of traditions in American education is the presentation of a pleasant reconstruction of the “First Thanksgiving” – a celebration at Plymouth, Massachusetts supposed to have taken place in 1621, prompted by a good harvest in the aftermath of the 1620-21 Winter during which somewhere on the order of 50% of the immigrant population of Puritans had died of cold and malnutrition.  The good harvest is attributed (particularly in stories told to elementary school children) to the good relationship between the Puritans and the local aboriginal communities, the Wampanoag in particular, with local agricultural technology seemingly superior in every way to the inferior European understanding of how to scratch out subsistence from the American wilderness.

There are a few things glaringly wrong with the way the story is typically presented, of course.  For one thing, colonizers in Virginia several decades earlier, though unsuccessful in establishing a permanent community, had made a “Day of Thanksgiving” a part of their very charter.  The celebration of harvest festivals, in fact, is fairly universal, being a part of virtually every culture ever studied.  So what was being done at Plymouth was not really original.

Moreover, the particular celebrations in Massachusetts, though certainly inspired by thanks for survival, and aided strongly by the assistance of the locals, serve only to put in bas relief the cultural duplicity that has been part of the American character since the founding of our country.

The Puritan Pilgrims, you see, were not inventing a new holiday.   They were mimicking one – having abandoned Great Britain in search of a place in which they could live according to the strictures of their own rigid and exclusive religious views (sound familiar?  Sort of like Sharia Law, perhaps?), the Puritans did not immediately set out for “The New World” – no, first they made a stopover in Leiden, in what is today the Netherlands. 

And while in Leiden, they were on hand for the first several decades of what is a profoundly Dutch holiday.  Known as 3 Oktober Feest or simply 3 Oktober, this Leiden festival celebrates the anniversary of the 1573-1574 Siege of Leiden during the Eighty Years War, when the Spanish attempted to capture the city; conditions were so bad at the height of the siege that thousands of citizens starved; when William of Orange entered the city on October 3rd, 1574, he fed the people of the town haring en wittebrood (herring and white bread sandwiches).  Today, these sandwiches are handed out for free at De Waag (the weigh house); lots of beer is obviously also available, along with pretty much every festival attraction you can think of.  Think "Oktoberfest" except with an actual excuse.  Plus herring.

The Pilgrims placed their own stamp on this tradition, not being tied for any particular reason to the herring that saved the Dutch, but being immensely grateful for the venison, turkey, maize, turnips, squash, beans, fish, berries and what-not afforded by their agriculturally superior hosts (and we use that term loosely, given the land-grab they would make over the next few decades), and created the trappings we in this country now associate with “Thanksgiving” – though the advent of tofurkey would have to wait a few centuries, and the vast improvement of pecan pie over pumpkin pie would, sadly, have to wait for Mrs. Myrtle Maintenance to come along, but we digress.

In point of fact, the closest direct descendants (both genetically and culturally) of those earliest Puritan residents of Massachusetts are not, strictly speaking, American.  They are, in direct contradiction of the conceit American patriots like to cling to regarding the whole story, the Tory sympathizers who in the wake of the American revolution had fled to Canada, where they brought the Americanized version of the holiday with them, and superimposed it upon Canada’s own historical tradition of Thanksgiving.

Most students in the U.S., if they hear at all that Canada has a “Thanksgiving Day” on the first Monday of October every year, assume it is in mimicry of the American version of the holiday, and that it is in October because it is just too cold after that to celebrate a harvest festival. 

The reality, though, is that the Canadian holiday came first.

In 1578, the third voyage of Martin Frobisher from England in search of the Northwest Passage set out with the

intention of establishing a small settlement in the present day Canadian Territory of Nunavut.  His fleet of 15 vessels was buffeted by terrible storms, and the fleet was scattered in icy waters, and virtually all hands on all ships lost all hope.  Mayster Wolfall, appointed by Her Majesty’s Council to be the minister and preacher “made unto them a godly sermon, exhorting them especially to be thankefull to God for their strange and miraculous deliverance in those so dangerous places,” and the Canadian Thanksgiving was born.

Not to be outdone by the English Canadians, French settlers who arrived with Samuel de Champlain, from at least as early as 1604, also held huge feasts of thanksgiving on a more or less annual basis.

And, much as in the U.S., Canada’s thanksgiving festivities were held on a wide array of dates, sometimes in April, sometimes in June, sometimes in October, sometimes in November – ultimately settling on the current date (more or less – November and October have flip-flopped a couple of times) since the mid-19^th Century.  In the U.S., Abraham Lincoln had affixed an official Thanksgiving Day in November, but the Confederacy (really, is there anything those people didn’t do wrong?!) refused to take part, so it was not until during Reconstruction in the 1870s that we finally had a national Thanksgiving Day.  And it was not until Franklin Roosevelt signed a joint resolution of Congress on December 26, 1941, that the current affixation of Thanksgiving as the fourth Thursday in November became official.

The one thing all this history makes abundantly clear is that Thanksgiving, so clearly and tautologically about being grateful has also been multicultural.  But it has also been beset by racism, nativism, ignorance, and fear.

Yes, in 1621, the Pilgrims at Plymouth Rock were saved by Squanto and Chief Massasoit, but the natives soon learned to hate the names of bloodthirsty men like Myles Standish, and betrayal, murder and deceit became the norm of relations between Europeans and Native Americans for the next several centuries.  And even the cultural heritage of fellow European contributors to the Puritans welfare were not merely whitewashed, but outright scrubbed from the record.

Moreover, we glean from history only that the Puritans “sought to worship in their own way” and yet, in modern America, we hear numerous cries from populist politicians decrying the incursion of alien cultures, most notably in calls to prevent the inclusion of Islam in codified American law – the so called “Sharia Law” debates, which, for those who actually look for any factual basis, consist of a whole lot of nothing – there is nothing there to fear, other than the mere fact of the presence of people whose culture is not the same as the one in which the fearful were raised.  The idea that American democracy can be swept away by immigrants holds about as much weight as fears of children that they will be pulled down the bathtub drain, or that the boogeyman will get them in the middle of the night.  There are plenty of anecdotal stories, but the problem is, none of them are real.

This is the month in which a tremendous amount of the trappings of American culture are on display – and yet the spirit in which those superficial elements are supposed to have been codified is on the verge of receiving a black eye.  Debate is currently raging over whether or not President Barack Obama can or cannot, should or should not, show leniency in issuing an executive order whose practical effect would be a dramatic reduction in the deportation of immigrants to this country who have arrived without documentation.

Great timing.  We are about to celebrate a holiday supposedly founded by people who, completely without any legal documentation or say-so from the local government, set up their little haven for illegal immigrants in the illegal immigrant town they called Plymouth.

We’re going to celebrate Thanksgiving Day this year, and we urge everyone else to do the same… but while being grateful for the blessings in our own lives, we are not going to begrudge anyone else seeking to be blessed, too.  So to those who oppose immigration, our message is really fairly simple:  grow up.  You are violating your own foundational mythology – attempting to beexclusively American is the surest way to be unAmerican.

We liken the attempt to co-opt the purity and innocence of the foundational myths surrounding American culture by those who would concomitantly seek to limit the benefits accrued by those previous forays into the world of pluralism and multicultural community to the behavior of fire ants in the presence of a carefully tended crop of sugar beets, or maybe maize, or some other sweet fruit or veggie.  Yes, the ants certainly display all the characteristics of a species on whom Darwinian Natural Selection has shone the most favorable of lights… but when they ravage the crop (as they surely will), there are only a limited number of possible outcomes – either the farmer liquidates the field in a fury of pesticidal apocalypse, or he plants something else which the ants can’t live off of (say, tobacco), or he gives up, moves away, and plants nothing.  In none of those scenarios do the ants thrive.  The farmer doesn’t fare so well, either.

And while we tend to think of ants as “alien” or “invaders”… and even accuse fire ants of being foreign… the reality is, there are four separate solenopsis invictus species, and two of them have been in the Continental U.S. longer even than the aboriginal “native Americans” – the farmer is the new guy on the block, not the ants.  In this story, we’re the bugs, not the humans.

Honeybees, in contrast, live alongside the farmer, pollinate her crops, and if she is the sort who is careful and thoughtful in her interactions, can even get the bees to give her some of their honey.  Too ham-fisted an analogy for you?  Think of it this way – when we work alongside immigrants, we can accrue all sorts of economic benefits.  Skilled labor or not, there is something they can provide (whether medical-degree carrying new doctors, or totally unskilled grapefruit pickers, and all skills and life experiences in between) which we would not have otherwise had.  Either we accept them and live in harmony with them… or life goes sour for all of us.  It’s not either or – it’s not “us or them” – it’s how will we all live?

Multiculturalism sometimes doesn’t work, as when we try to act more like the ants, but sometimes it does.  And when it does, life is sweeter for everyone.  Let’s be more like bees, and have a happy Thanksgiving.

Happy farming!

Bright Lights, Big City (Hot Time in the Old Town Tonight?)

“Many clever men like you have trusted to civilization.  Many clever Babylonians, many clever Egyptians, many clever men at the end of Rome.  Can you tell me, in a world that is flagrant with the failures of civilization, what there is particularly immortal about yours?”

--G.K. Chesterton, The Napoleon of Notting Hill (1904)

We at Myrtle’s place do not believe in the cynical philosophies of survivalists, nor do we believe in the fatalist philosophies of nihilists.  Neither, however, do we believe in the supremacy of human beings central to the dominant moral, social, and economic philosophies of the Judeo-Christian capitalist West. 

People are great – don’t get us wrong.  It’s just that we aren’t the center of the universe, as you would be led to believe if you follow the teachings key to the ideological structures underpinning most of what we recognize as “civilization”.  There is a dichotomy in most systems of thought between “natural” and “man-made”.  We do not make that distinction.  As far as we are concerned… it’s all“natural” and is all subject to the immutable laws of physics.

In fact, in the World According to Myrtle, the inevitable truth of everything being interconnected is so obvious that we sometimes don’t think about the fact that not everyone shares this basic understanding.  Which is why we are so often astounded by things like global-warming-denialism, trust in petrochemical companies, and big grassy lawns.

One of the basic facts of life regarding how so-called “civilization” fits in to the natural world is something called the urban heat island, and though the concept has been around since the first decade of the 1800s, when an intrepid investigator named Luke Howard first described the phenomenon of cities being warmer than the surrounding countryside, there is a surprisingly large percentage of the modern population that is utterly unfamiliar with the idea.

Basically, not only do cities generate more “man-made” heat (though, again, we think this term is preposterous) than do areas outside the urban center, cities also retain more heat, owing to 1) more materials with heat retaining properties, such as asphalt, cement, insulating materials in houses and commercial properties, vertical structures with large volumes of retained non-externally-circulated air (i.e. “buildings”); 2) fewer radiating surfaces such as open fields, tall trees with upward-facing surfaces of high albedo (i.e., glossy leaves); 3) numerous heat-generating entities such as power plants, automobiles, street lamps, etc. and 4) lots of houses with central heat in winter, and air conditioners in summer (which, since most people are short-sighted, they don’t realize put out more heat than cold, only the heat goes outside, not in).

There are a number of secondary effects generated by heat islands, most of which people simply choose to ignore.  Monthly rainfall, for example, is much higher downwind from most cities, in large measure because the urban heat island effect causes a change in the windflow around cities.  In Bryan-College Station, people sometimes humorously refer to the “Aggie Dome” which causes large storm systems to “magically” break up shortly before hitting the city-proper, only to reform once they move South and East of town.  Guess what?  It’s not magic… it’s civilization.  The “Aggie Dome” is a locally obvious manifestation of a very well known scientific principle.  It is a real thing, and it is a direct response of the environment to the activities of human beings.

Conservative blogosphere types frequently decry the possibility of macroscopic versions of this same phenomenon – to wit, they refuse to accept the possibility of anthropogenic climate change – but this strikes us at Myrtle’s place as not only wrong, but downright infantile.  Of course humans have an impact on the environment.  Everything has an impact on the environment, and the last time we checked, human beings are a subset of “everything”.  We promise we will update you the first time we encounter any evidence to the contrary.

The only question is not “do we have an impact on the environment” but “how big an impact do we have?”  There is certainly plenty of room to discuss this question on the macro level (we have done so before, and will unquestionably do so again), but equally important, we think, is a discussion of the micro level, which generally goes unexamined.  Regardless of what is going on in the climate generally – and rest assured, that is certainly a massive question – what is going on in the microclimates of individual human habitations is just as important.

So, to begin with:  what causes the urban heat island?  Long story short, the principle cause is the fact that short-wave radiation absorbed during the day by asphalt, concrete and buildings of wood, glass, ceramic, and various other modern construction materials is released as long-wave radiation during the night, making cooling a much slower process in urban areas than in the pastoral surroundings.  Basically, stuff people build generally cools down more slowly than stuff Mother Nature built.  There are plenty of counterexamples, but basically the “slow-to-cool-down” stuff in nature is concentrated in the hands of homo sapiens because we feel more comfortable in houses and office buildings made out of such stuff, and such stuff is also easier to drive on/more resilient to store still-other-stuff on.

What are the impacts of this basic reality?  First, night time temperatures in the city are mostly higher than they are in the country.  The people to first notice this truth are gardeners… especially tomato gardeners.  Fruit set for virtually all vegetables, but for tomatoes in particular, depends upon sufficiently warm day time temperatures for energy creation (critical for growth and development) coupled with night time temperatures low enough for consolidation of sugars (a process in large measure dependent upon the differences in fluidity of various chemical components at different temperature gradients which then utilize gravity – basically, the stuff that solidifies at lower temperatures sinks faster than the stuff that solidifies at higher temperatures) in order to create a “fruit” (aka a tomato) which has the proper nutritional value to ensure the germination of its progeny (aka a seed).

As finicky as tomatoes are, it becomes apparent quite quickly to connoisseurs that Fall tomatoes taste better than Summer tomatoes in the Brazos Valley, because while the daytime temperatures stay high enough well into the Fall… during the Spring and Summer, the night time temperatures get too high far too quickly.  Sure, the plants still set fruit… but the flavor is just, well… wrong.  And it’s wrong because it’s too hot at night.

There are other, more dramatic impacts, of course.  You will occasionally hear stories of large tornadoes hitting urban areas.  However… your everyday, ordinary garden-variety tornado almost never hits an urban area.  The trailer park on the edge of town, sure.  But town square?  No way! 

Why?

Because small thunderstorms almost never happen in urban areas.  The urban heat sink causes lower-level temperature inversions that most cumulonimbus constructs simply cannot penetrate – they hit the heat island and “poof!” The system may (if it is strong enough) recreate itself once it moves past the interfering heat source (see:  “Dome, Aggie”), but otherwise it just disappears in a puff of disappointed agricultural chappiness.  Only a very large storm system is likely to be able to penetrate the urban heat island, and as a consequence only a very large tornado is likely to impact an urban environment.

So… what should people do about this phenomenon that we have created?

The answer to this question depends upon the answer to a vast number of other questions, not least of which is “What do we want?”

If what we want is to control nature, then, hey, do whatever you want.  You’re not going to succeed, so you may as well go down swinging with whatever ridiculous philosophy you were wanting to pursue in the first place.  If you’re going to be a failure, you should at least be a self-satisfied failure.

If, on the other hand, what we seek is a way to live in a more sensible, survivable equilibrium, then there are several steps we can take, some of which have plenty of empirical support, and others of which make good sense based on what we know about the laws of physics, in addition to several decades of meteorological evidence.

One of the first cities in North America to take this problem seriously was Atlanta, Georgia, which in the 1990s instituted several statutes related to building and development aimed at lowering the urban temperature.  Rooftops and roadways in Atlanta must be built of certain materials and of certain colors which increased the city’s albedo considerably.  White or grey replaced black and brown… and the citywide average temperature dropped by nearly 3° Fahrenheit over a decade.  Given that during that same decade the global average daily temperature rose… yeah, Atlanta was on to something.

In addition to cool roofs (about which we have written before – if you haven’t yet painted your roof white, hey, get on it!), cool road surfaces, permeable asphalt, increased greenways, replacing lawns with herb gardens, shrubberies, and tall trees (capable of both absorbing heat, and reflecting any unused solar energy so as to avoid heat pollution) are all effective mediators of urban heat.  Replacing combustion engines with electric vehicles is another obvious reduction urban dwellers can implement… and better still, getting rid of engines altogether (also known as “ride your bike to work, ya bum!”)

Sometimes we are accused by traditionalists of taking glee in the idea that Western civilization is going to crumble.  Note that we didn’t say in the possibility that Western civilization will crumble – that is an inevitability, as an serious student of history would know.

Well… we have to confess to being more or less guilty to this charge.  The thing is, the fall of one form of civilization has always led to the institution of another.  And we are not pessimists, focused on what we will be losing when the status quo comes to its inevitable conclusion.

No, we are optimists.  We see that the way of life to which the vast majority of our species has become accustomed is unsustainable, and cannot last.  And we look at the possibilities and realize… you know what?  We can do better.

In fact, we are quite sure that, even though we’ll be dragged there kicking and screaming, humanity will do better.

Happy farming!