Maureen Dowd with her caustic with and biting sarcasm is one of my most favorite op-ed writers but today, she outdid herself with this opening paragraph in her NYT op-ed:
After the Thanksgiving Day Massacre of Shiites by Sunnis, President Bush should go on Rupert Murdoch’s Fox News and give an interview headlined: “If I did it, here’s how the civil war in Iraq happened.”
He could describe, hypothetically, a series of naïve, arrogant and self-defeating blunders, including his team’s failure to comprehend that in the Arab world, revenge and religious zealotry can be stronger compulsions than democracy and prosperity.
Iraq has rapidly descended into a worse chaos (if such a thing was even possible) and it looks more and more like a country that will end up being partitioned. If it does happen, it will be another blow to the notion of so called pan-Islamic identity, just like the partition of Pakistan and Bangladesh.
It is a fool’s errand to try and get Shias and Sunnis to come to terms with one another. After all, in Pakistan, they are still at it after 55 years of freedom from the British rule. And it does not help that a fool of a person is trying to do it with a foolish cabinet. I think that the best course of action for the US now is to get the hell out of Iraq, let Sunnis and Shias slaughter each other, let their proxies, the Saudis, the Syrians and the Iranians duel it out. What about the oil you say? Well $5 a gallon in Detroit, Mi will probably be the best thing that can happen to the US and to the environment.
Harvest festivals are celebrated all over the world and Thanksgiving Day, celebrated on the fourth Thursday in November is one of them. However, there is something special about the way this harvest festival is enjoyed in modern day US. While harvest festivals in other countries tend to take regional and religious tones (for example, Baisakhi and Onam in India), Thanksgiving remains a uniquely secular festival enjoyed by Americans of all ethnicities, color and religion. It has evolved from its origins of early settlers giving thanks for the bountiful harvest and freedom of religion to an occasion when families get together to eat and give thanks for the simple pleasures in life.
Of course, everything is not hunky dory from coast to coast on Thanksgiving day and this day is capable of evoking different emotions in different people. For some, it is a day to sit on the couch, drink some beer and watch a couple of football games on the TV, while for some, this is a day when they are stuck in traffic or at the airport making that yearly trip back home to their families while for some guys, this is a day when they would be running around trying to find an open grocery store just because the night before, the wife forgot to put that crucial ingredient to prepare that special Thanksgiving meal on the shopping list (yes, that happened to yours truly last year). Of course, in an ultimately ode to Capitalism in the land that almost worships the concept, for most Americans, this day is inexorably linked to the Macy’s Thanksgiving parade and the early morning shopping deals the day after Thanksgiving. And then, for many native Americans, this day probably evokes mixed reactions. While on one hand, the entire country celebrates a tradition that started at the table of their ancestors and the first settlers, it is also linked to the tragedies and massacres they suffered at hands of the descendants of those very settlers.
Coming from a country that celebrates hundreds, if not thousands of festivals, I am always game to add a few new ones to my repertoire and I have taken to Thanksgiving like a fish takes to water (as Will Ferrell says in Anchorman, “When in Rome….”). Last year, we hit upon this brilliant idea that a bunch of Indians should dress up as, well, Indians on this day and the result was a lot of fun. While I don’t have any such plans for this year, I can’t wait to put an Indian spin (pun intended) on this uniquely American festival and contribute my own bit to this continually evolving tradition. I would love to know how other Desis visiting and reading this post plan to celebrate Thanksgiving.
After the 2006 mid-term elections, a lot of people in the US, including yours truly feel this way.
Yes, that is the headline that the New York Times is leading with tonight. I never thought that I’d see that headline, or if I did, it would include a couple of more sentences, like the pigs are flying, and Rush Limbaugh is off his drugs.
But no, the impossible has happened and the voters of this country have dealt a resounding and a totally well deserved whack to the Republicans for their shenanigans. Bravo!
If you are a keen observer of politics like I am and if you’ve seen political campaigns in India, specially in the Hindi belt, you know how dirty the election campaigns can get. But even I am surprised at the muckraking, the dirt, the under-the-belt attacks that have taken place in this election campaign in the US, specially from the Republicans. And the title of muck-raiser-in-chief certainly belongs to no other than George W. Bush.
This little cartoon sums it up pretty well:
