Thanksgiving, Exploitation, Steinbeck and Some Other Goodies

I have to admit I have never liked Thanksgiving and I want to take a second here to meditate on the holiday's meaning for me. It is hard for me to like a holiday that celebrates America's settlement by Europeans and the birth of America's original sin. Steinbeck said it really well in The Winter of Our Discontent when he called America's founders puritans and pirates, being the same thing basically due to their desire to take property (land and people) for exploitation. 

It's such a great quotation bringing together both puritan - shining beacon on a hill - New England and Southern slave plantation settlement origins with nascent American capitalism and the appropriation of lands and peoples for exploitation. And then he turns around the racist trope of the Indigenous and African people as closer to monkeys and says that the Europeans are the real monkeys!! being less evolved in a presumably moral sense. And all of this in three sentences! 

More on The Winter of Our Disconent

The Winter of Our Discontent is by far Steinbeck's darkest novel with its critique of 1950s consumer driven capitalism, excessive shallow consumption and the character arc of its main character going from good man to bad. The seed of this transformation is in the American character itself, drawn from the American original sin mentioned above. It is a tragedy in the classical sense with a protagonist who falls due to an inherent flaw, and yet it it modern in its use of irony. Ethan Hawley is seen as a successful member of society because he becomes wealthy, even though he has sacrificed his own morality. And that brings us full circle to the title of the book: The Winter of Our Discontent is a line from Shakespeare's Richard III: "Now is the winter of our discontent / Made glorious summer by this sun [or son] of York," Richard III announces that the dark times of Lancaster rule over England have ended and a better reign by his brother is commencing. Of course Richard III has designs on the throne for himself, so there is irony in his words. The irony is similar for Steinbeck's book. Ethan Hawley comes out of his moral isolation, but being a part of this society means moral duplicity and exploitation. I think it is a gloomy yet spot on meditation on the American condition.