Death of a salesman nation
Whatever its complicated and ambivalent historical roots, the ideal of Thanksgiving is offering gratitude for the grace of our creator, if you swing that way, or at the very least to others who came together to create even a moment of common purpose and bounty. It's about looking outside ourselves.
The problem of American holidays being ever more commercialized is old. But over the past decade, maybe longer, something else has overtaken us. We've gone from a nation with hucksters to being a nation of hucksters. Suffice it to say that this was not the great commercial republic that Hamilton had in mind. In God We Trust? No. Always Be Selling.
I thought of this as I read a Washington Post piece on how banking regulators were not actually regulating the industry, but rather acting as an advocate for it. Yes, ideology and its handmaiden deregulation are to blame for the financial catastrophe. But so is the perverse mutation of American optimism just as the economy became driven more and more by financial swindles.
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