Overcast this early Thanksgiving Day here on California’s north coast — heavy rain this afternoon and through the weekend.

Appropriate for the day seen in the protests on the Dakota Access Pipeline, as Native Americans experience a T-Rump history-burn — Lou Grassrope, head of a contingent of the Lower Brule Sioux (via Rolling Stone yesterday): ‘“We can see that what we’re facing here is National Guard and police officers that have have fallen back into the same pathway of cowboy and Indian wars. We’re having to face that it might result in all of our deaths, going forward.”‘

Thanks for an ugly flashback…

(Illustration: Vincent van Gogh’s ‘Old Man in Sorrow (On the Threshold of Eternity)‘ found here).

This particular holiday is always explained via the remarkable Mark Twain as the reality of hypocrisy and shit — via The New Yorker on Monday, as Twain’s 70th birthday fell on Thanksgiving, and thus a problem with the celebration:

It arrived on the 30th of November, but Colonel Harvey was not able to celebrate it on that date because that date had been preempted by the President to be used as Thanksgiving Day, a function which originated in New England two or three centuries ago when those people recognized that they really had something to be thankful for  — annually, not oftener — if they had succeeded in exterminating their neighbors, the Indians, during the previous twelve months instead of getting exterminated by their neighbors the Indians.
Thanksgiving Day became a habit, for the reason that in the course of time, as the years drifted on, it was perceived that the exterminating had ceased to be mutual and was all on the white man’s side, consequently on the Lord’s side, consequently it was proper to thank the Lord for it and extend the usual annual compliments.
The original reason for a Thanksgiving Day has long ago ceased to exist — the Indians have long ago been comprehensively and satisfactorily exterminated and the account closed with Heaven, with the thanks due.
But, from old habit, Thanksgiving Day has remained with us, and every year the President of the United States and the Governors of all the several States and the territories set themselves the task, every November, to advertise for something to be thankful for, and then they put those thanks into a few crisp and reverent phrases, in the form of a Proclamation, and this is read from all the pulpits in the land, the national conscience is wiped clean with one swipe, and sin is resumed at the old stand.

America has always had trouble with the actuality of history…