| THANKSGIVING, ANNO 1999 PARIS, FRANCE THURSDAY, 25 NOVEMBER 1999
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In Today's Daily Reckoning: ***Markets in the United States closed for the holiday ***Internet Mania Spreading Worldwide ***Gold inches up * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *** The big headline in today's Herald Tribune --
U.S. Economy Surges Ahead…America in
"Overdrive." *** The news that GDP grew at an annual rate of 5.5%
in the third quarter caused the dollar to rise
to a 4-month high against the Euro. Could the dollar
be at a cyclical high? It's hard to imagine
the news that might send it higher. *** The Dow was subdued in response. Investors couldn't
tell if this was good news or bad. The Dow
edged up 12 points. Transports, oil, utilities…all
moved marginally in one direction or another. *** But the tech spike continues to push upward at an
astonishing pace. Nasdaq was up a big 77.56.
Internets were up similarly…with even AMZN up 5. *** This Internet mania is spreading. Rafael reports
that the few Internets listed on the French
market trade a multiples similar to those in the United
States. And today's headline from the
Financial Times tells us…"Techs Push Tokyo above
19,000." *** And in Italy, where they tend to exaggerate trends,
they had to stop trading on a new Internet-
related IPO for a company called Finmatica after shares
rose 500% over the offer price.
*** Another little note from Italy…the government just
sold $4.74 billion in bonds backed by
uncollected, delinquent tax obligations. Government
bonds are always backed, implicitly, by the
government's power to squeeze blood out of its population
of turnips. But this marks the first time
a government has securitized the reluctant beets. *** However fast the U.S. economy is growing, the European
Commission says Europe will grow faster.
They're forecasting a growth rate of 2.9% for the next two
years, a rate that is expected to be
higher than that of the US and Japan. *** Gold moved higher…it is at $299. Gold is still very
cheap by historical measures…and it
appears to me to be in a bull market. *** "Computers make everyone write a lot more, and
a lot longer," said April Bernard, who teaches
literature at one of those charmingly expensive little
colleges in Vermont. "But they're absolutely
not making them write better." More writing, as readers
of this letter know all too well, is not a
good thing. Writing is like giving gifts-it's the thought
that counts, not the verbosity
accompanying it. * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * THANKSGIVING, ANNO 1999. I turned to my trusty assistant…Beirne White…
this morning. "Beirne," I said gravely, "tell me about Thanksgiving
in Mississippi." Beirne proceeded to tell me about a Mississippi
bluesman named "Son" House, who lived to be 102 by
doing what bluesmen tended to do…chasing bad
luck, bad liquor and bad women. "What has that to do with Thanksgiving?" "Nothing," he replied…whereupon he drew on the
resources generously provided by Britannica.com,
formerly of Chicago, lately of cyber space, to get
me the research I requested. Beirne hails from Mississippi. And while Mississippians
will sit down with the rest of the
nation…and tuck into their turkeys with equal relish…
perhaps only substituting Bourbon Pecan pie
for the sweet potato or pumpkin pie enjoyed in Maryland…
it was not always so. Somewhere deep in
the most primitive part of his medulla oblongata, the part
of the brain where race memories are
stored, Beirne resists Thanksgiving. It is, after all, a
Yankee holiday. In the middle of the war between the states, both sides
would proclaim days of "thanksgiving,"
following the progress of the war as we now follow the
progress of the stock market. After each of
the first and second battles of Bull Run-which sent the
Yankees fleeing back to Washington-the
Confederates proclaimed days of thanksgiving. But it was
Lincoln's day that stuck. Declared after
the battle of Gettysburg-the last great Napoleonic charge
of military history-Thanksgiving was set
for the third Thursday in the month of November,
commemorating the Northern victory. Beirne doesn't say so…but this fact must stick in his craw.
It doesn't help that the original celebration took place
in Massachussetts. And that it was hosted by
a dour bunch of Puritans, who probably wouldn't have
been able to enjoy a good dinner if their lives
depended on it. But they certainly had a lot to be
thankful for. As the Wall Street Journal reminds
us annually, they nearly exterminated themselves in
typical Yankee fashion-by wanting to boss each
other around. They had arrived in Massachusetts by
accident and bad seamanship, intending to settle
in the more hospitable climate of Virginia, which had
been colonized more than 10 years before. Once
in Massachussetts they proceeded to set up a such
a miserable community that surely most of them,
had they lived, would have longed to return to England.
The Soviets could have learned from their
example and spared themselves 70 years of misery.
Only after the "witch burners and infant damners"
abandoned their communal form of organization, and
allowed people to work for themselves, did the
colony have a prayer of survival.
But victors write the history books. And now this
precarious celebration by a feeble group of
religious zealots has turned into the most American
holiday. After Appomattox, the South was helpless.
Its natural leaders, the plantation aristocrats, were
either dead, bankrupted and/or discredited. Many
of them went to Northern cities, like New York or
Baltimore, where, Mencken tells us, they "arrived
with no baggage save good manners and empty
bellies." They enriched the North. But back home,
they were sorely missed. "First the
carpetbaggers," says Mencken, "ravaged the land…
and then it fell into the hands of the native white
trash…" Scars of war can take a long time to heal.
But 130 years later, the South is the most
economically and culturally robust part of the nation.
Thanksgiving was declared a national holiday in 1931.
Through the Depression, and then WWII,
Thanksgiving grew in importance. In a country where
roots meant almost nothing, where people were
ready to pick up and move at the drop of a hat, where
there were huge differences in what people
thought and how they lived, Thanksgiving served to
provide a unified, national myth…most popularly
expressed in Norman Rockwell's Thanksgiving cover
for the Saturday Evening Post.
Roots mean more in Mississippi than they do in California.
"No man is himself," said Oxford,
Mississippi's most celebrated alcoholic, "he is the
sum of his past." Unlike so many other American
writers of the 20th century, Faulkner stayed home.
The forward to the "encyclopedia of southern
culture" has a passage from Faulkner, saying:
"Tell about the South. What's it like there. What do
they do there. Why do they live there. Why do they
live at all." Even in Faulkner's Mississippi…Thanksgiving is
now part of everyone. Where Beirne goes…it goes
too. And so, all over the world, Americans, gathering
in small groups, like pilgrims on distant
shores, celebrate the holiday (if not on the actual day…
perhaps the weekend following…as we will
do.) This can require a little ingenuity. Americans in France
have to search for the ingredients.
Pumpkins are hard to pronounce-citrouilles-and hard to find.
Cranberry sauce is unknown. Art Buchwald has translated the Thanksgiving story for
the French, deftly turning Captain Miles
Standish into Le Capitaine Kilometre Deboutish. But
no one has refashioned American Thanksgiving
recipes for the metric measuring cups here in France.
My wife, Elizabeth, descendant of the Puritan
fathers…former resident of New York…a Yankee-in
other words-will do her best. And we will be thankful. Bill Bonner | 
