Thanksgiving is not really celebrated here in Thailand
(except for amongst some expat Americans – such as my oldest friend here, Gary
Dale, who invited me to his place in the city for his annually offered full-out
feast, but I had to decline because I was not feeling well enough to fight my
way into town during Bangkok’s brutally insane rush hour, and I had a very
important visit to my provincial Immigration Office to attend to).
So I celebrated by myself while Tuk was at work. My aged DVD player cranked out some classics
as I tried to stay cool under the fans and feeble a/c units. My morning visit to Immigration had gone
better than usual, although I arrived back home completely drenched in sweat
because I “went formal”, wearing long trousers instead of my usual everyday
shorts. Being Thanksgiving (with the
implied expectation of gluttony and throwing out all constraints), I gave in
and stopped at a local store before coming home and bought up some of my
favorite junk food: potato chips, salty
and laced with hot Thai spices! (I
usually only eat these favorites on my birthday while binge-watching the entire
corpus of Firefly/Serenity. But I
was weak today. And I crave salt when I
sweat profusely. It will take me over a
day to recover.)
I watched the DVD of a film I had not seen in years, Robin
Hood: Prince of Thieves (1991) with
Kevin Costner, Alan Rickman, Morgan Freeman, et al. This is a great film, not only for its grand
re-telling of the Robin Hood romantic legend but also for its excellent cast
and extraordinary cinematography. This
newer DVD I got recently has a Special Features disc that I’d never seen before,
and it included glimpses of some of the great classic artwork connected with
various illustrated books of Robin Hood through the years. (My sister and her husband could identify
this art tradition in more detail.) A
great legendary hero is portrayed here very well, and it fits into a long
tradition of fine poems, songs, novels, plays, and films. We need heroes and heroines, who help us
visualize Virtue Ethics. We need
romantic glimpses of what life “might be and ought to be” (Aristotle). We crave inspiration.
This movie also has one of my all-time favorite portrayals
of a villain: the late Alan Rickman
plays the Sheriff of Nottingham. As an
actor brought up on the Shakespearean stage, he can get all the nuances
right. My favorite quote of his from the
film is when, in an utterly villainous rage, he orders:
“Cancel the kitchen scraps for lepers and orphans!
No more merciful
beheadings! …
And call off
Christmas!”
I love it.
-Zenwind.
And remember, the Pilgrims' first bountiful Thanksgiving was only possible after they abandoned their original socialist economic scheme of communal property. After extreme starvation and social ruin, they quit socialism and instituted a private property system and a free market, and then they thrived and only then could they feast. (See William Bradford.)
