Transmuting pain into goodwill
Happy Thanksgiving. Some tidbits on Vince Guaraldi, Charlie Brown, Planes Trains and the spectre of genocide.
Ahoy! Nothing says “the holidays” quite like Vince Guaraldi’s music for the classic Peanuts specials he scored in the ‘60s and ‘70s. His soundtrack for A Charlie Brown Thanksgiving was just released in its entirety for the first time ever to mark the 50th anniversary of the special, which aired on November 20, 1973. Not as well-known as Guaraldi’s iconic music for the Peanuts Christmas special (which was reissued in an exhaustively thorough 5-disc deluxe package last year and continues to dominate sales figures year after year), A Charlie Brown Thanksgiving is a looser, somewhat choppier affair that is nevertheless stuffed with treasures.
(YouTube playlist here.)
Being blunt for a moment, America has yet to come to terms with the bloodshed of its past. Overcompensating with orgiastic rituals of race-consciousness isn’t helping. The truth is that conquest, imperialism, slavery and — yes — rape and genocide are a staple element of the human migration story all over the world. Not to mention the fact that the settlement of North America vis-a-vis slavery is a much more complex story than we’re often told.
Still, the United States, in my opinion, is a nation that suffers from a particularly deep, pervasive and perverse form of collective psychosis as a result of our tendency to deny the ugly truths of our past, which loom over our annual Thanksgiving celebration like a poorly-kept family secret. Where the truth is ugly, we tend to aggrandize ourselves more — much like a parent that simply can’t access the memory of abusing their children when the parent reaches old age. We need to face our past and heal from it.
That’s why I think we should celebrate Thanksgiving anyway — as a way of transmuting suffering into something higher. Of integrating the brutality at the heart of the founding of this nation (which, by the way, is hardly unique to the American story) and letting that brutality nurture a sense of our complete humanity.
Now, if you know people of Native descent or you’re of Native ancestry yourself, you probably want to reach in their direction to see how they might experience this day. Perhaps we can try to do so as a nation, but I don’t think it’s healthy to throw the baby out with the bathwater. The expression of gratitude lies at the core of many spiritual and transformative practices. We should preserve it — not as a means of papering-over the truth, but of allowing ourselves to recognize it in the knowledge that the human family continues to aspire anyway, even when it doesn’t appear that way.
Of course, you could always just choose to opt-out of family gatherings entirely:
Lastly, I wasn’t able to get my video ready in time about how I thought I was about to get robbed the other night — and why I’m grateful for the experience, so I’ll let Siskel & Ebert, Steve Martin and the late John Candy take it away from here. Planes, Trains & Automobiles is easily the film that most epitomizes Thanksgiving for me. A comedy with a surprisingly touching undercurrent, I was lucky enough to see it in the theater when it was originally released.
I just discovered this excellent podcast episode on the movie:
Hope you’re having a good one wherever you are…
Watch the whole film here:
<3 SRK