The Helium Gas Shootout

Nothing like Thanksgiving and the advent of the holiday shopping season to put troubled times behind us. A few citizens tried to stage protests at shopping malls around the country, in response to the grand jury decision in St. Louis, but for the most part it was business as usual, as crowds thronged to take advantage of "Black Friday" deals.

Despite its retail struggles, Macy's still stages its annual Thanksgiving Day Parade, but it looks more and more like a dinosaur. The era of the big department store seems all but over as most persons shop by Internet these days. Count me as one of those. I have no desire to fight crowds at shopping outlets, no matter how good the deals. But, Americans still like their consumerist traditions.

I thought one of the funniest moments was Seattle enjoying the turkey repast at the 50-yard line of the new Levi's Stadium in Santa Clara, after whipping the San Francisco 49'ers. The turkey dinner was a new wrinkle in interviews with the stars of the game afterward, but former 49'er great, Jerry Rice, was none too pleased, as were the owner and managers of the team after their poor showing. They felt it was adding insult to injury.

Football is an indelible part of the four-day weekend with big games at the college and professional level scattered over all four days. This tradition goes back to the advent of the National Football League in 1920, but the concept stretches back even further to 1876 when Princeton and Yale took to the field in the inaugural Turkey Day gridiron match.

Princeton, 1876

It used to be that Texas and Texas A&M squared off during the weekend, with the winner earning a trip to The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas, but since the Aggies jumped to the SEC, this long-standing rivalry has been lost, with Texas suffering a humiliating loss to the Horned Frogs of Texas Christian.

Just to remind us once again, five St. Louis Rams players came onto the field holding their hands up in tribute to Michael Brown. There were protests outside the stadium as well. The St. Louis police were not happy with this gesture of solidarity. If there is any consolation for the SLPOA, there probably weren't too many persons watching this game, as the Rams pummeled the lowly Raiders. It will be interesting to see if the NFL takes any action. After all, it has an "image" to protect.

The world is changing right before our eyes. There isn't much we can do about it, but we still cling to our traditions as silly as they may seem to the outside world. One of my favorite movie scenes is in Broadway Danny Rose, when Danny gets stuck with the gangster's moll in the hanger of the Macy's floats outside New York, better known as the Helium Gas Shootout.

The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire

Welcome to this month's reading group selection. David Von Drehle mentions The Melting Pot , a play by Israel Zangwill, that premiered on Broadway in 1908. At that time theater was accessible to a broad section of the public, not the exclusive domain it has become over the decades. Zangwill carried a hopeful message that America was a place where old hatreds and prejudices were pointless, and that in this new country immigrants would find a more open society. I suppose the reference was more an ironic one for Von Drehle, as he notes the racial and ethnic hatreds were on display everywhere, and at best Zangwill's play helped persons forget for a moment how deep these divides ran. Nevertheless, "the melting pot" made its way into the American lexicon, even if New York could best be describing as a boiling cauldron in the early twentieth century. Triangle: The Fire That Changed America takes a broad view of events that led up the notorious fire, not...

Team of Rivals Reading Group

''Team of Rivals" is also an America ''coming-of-age" saga. Lincoln, Seward, Chase et al. are sketched as being part of a ''restless generation," born when Founding Fathers occupied the White House and the Louisiana Purchase netted nearly 530 million new acres to be explored. The Western Expansion motto of this burgeoning generation, in fact, was cleverly captured in two lines of Stephen Vincent Benet's verse: ''The stream uncrossed, the promise still untried / The metal sleeping in the mountainside." None of the protagonists in ''Team of Rivals" hailed from the Deep South or Great Plains. _______________________________ From a review by Douglas Brinkley, 2005

The Searchers

You are invited to join us in a discussion of The Searchers , a new book on John Ford's boldest Western, which cast John Wayne against type as the vengeful Ethan Edwards who spends eight years tracking down a notorious Comanche warrior, who had killed his cousins and abducted a 9 year old girl. The film has had its fair share of detractors as well as fans over the years, but is consistently ranked in most critics' Top Ten Greatest Films . Glenn Frankel examines the origins of the story as well as the film itself, breaking his book down into four parts. The first two parts deal with Cynthia Ann Parker and her son Quanah, perhaps the most famous of the 19th century abduction stories. The short third part focuses on the author of the novel, Alan Le May, and how he came to write The Searchers. The final part is about Pappy and the Duke and the making of the film. Frankel noted that Le May researched 60+ abduction stories, fusing them together into a nar...

James FergusonDecember 2, 2014 at 9:38 AM
The semantic battle over an "apology,"

http://www.sbnation.com/nfl/2014/12/1/7318029/rams-apologize-police-players-hands-up-gesture-ferguson-michael-brown

Meanwhile, Pres. Obama wants Congress to fund 250,000 cop cameras, which sounds like a much better alternative to surplus military equipment,

http://news.yahoo.com/obama-hold-white-house-meetings-ferguson-085841383--politics.html
TripplerDecember 7, 2014 at 6:10 AM
For years I used to watch the annual Thanksgiving Day football match between New Rochelle & Iona Prep. Great tradition. I wonder if they still play it.
James FergusonDecember 7, 2014 at 1:23 PM
It used to be sports networks would follow classic rivalries. Remember Lafayette v. Lehigh? It goes back 150 years and is played around Thanksgiving time,

http://www.rivalry150.com/

Dispatches from Vilnius

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