Thanksgiving

'Germ of an idea' that's what I have a germ of an idea about Puritans. Thanksgiving is a big deal, right? More people travel, I've read in the newspaper, on Thanksgiving weekend than at any other time of the year. It's family time, and with good reason. We love Thanksgiving but do we really love Puritans, the people we celebrate in theory with Thanksgiving dinner? We eat, but we don't say thankyou, and that's a fact.

I got this 'idea' yesterday listening to a NPR review and interview on the subject of a published reexamination of the poetry written by the wife of a Puritan leader, whose name I forget. One of her poems, unkown to me, is famous. The poet expresses her love for her husband (now there's a novel subject, how often do we hear about a wife's love for her husband these day, ha! Never!) and very great fear that if she dies in childbirth she'll never see her beloved husband again. The interviewed author of this book told us that 50% of Puritan mothers died in childbirth.

The poet mother did not die and left a record, in her poetry, about the rigors of being a Puritan. When they set sail from Europe they literally didn't know where they were going. Most of them fully expected to die before they arrived anywhere.

There's no need to belabor what we have to be thankful for. I'll stow that.

He's where I'm going. I'm madder 'an Hell at the absurd play that purports to be about the Salem Witch trials, The Crucible the play by the recently deceased Arthur Miller, more deservedly famous for Death of a Salesman which is oft produced still. The Crucible is supposed to be an analogy, mirroring the Congressional 'witch hunt' during the Red Scare of the 1950s led by crazed Senator McCarthy and his henchman Roy Cohn, the criminal made palpable by Al Pacino in Angels In America. 

My 'Idea': The Crucible has nothing about it that in any way is like the McCarthy hearings. Also, The Crucible in no way, not even indirect, says anything worth knowing about the Salem Witch trials.

We need to get off it about the Puritans. They gave us America. Luckily the native Americans, when the 1500s Spaniards travelling North from Mexico to take a look, were not wearing gold ornaments or Spain would have gobbled North America as well as Mexico, Central and South America. The Puritans weren't looking for gold, they were looking for God's will and how to be obedient to the Bible. Take your pick, gold grubbing sadistic Spaniards, or over zealous lovers of goodness and obedience? I'll take the latter anyday. You know what the Spaniards did to Mexican Indian temples? Built Churches on top of them, and used the building materials of that plunder to make their walls. The Puritans too made grave mistakes with respect to the Indians but that came much later.

To understand the Puritans it is necessary to imagine the terror of coming to a totally foreign place, virtually alone, with almost nothing except their love of each other and their love of God to support them.

They came to worship not to plunder. And they gave us North America, except for Canada. Ah, that's another topic for another time. The French, and presumably Catholic part of Canada still wants to be separate. The French, by the way were much smarter with the Indians than were the Puritans (and Quakers?).

Barry