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First the chart: there a few bits of info. that support the case for Q's
having topped out, at least temporarily, here: (1) the NDX/SPX ratio hits
resistance, and (2) the A/D has been tracking sideways while the NDX climbs.
Unfortunately, both the long and short trades look 50/50.
The following (1999) Thanksgiving story is from the Daily Reckoning:
http://www.dailyreckoning.com.
The Daily Reckoning Presents: A DR Classique, first run
November 25, 1999
THANKSGIVING, ANNO 1999
by Bill Bonner
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 does that have 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...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
proclaimed 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 Massachusetts. 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 Massachusetts they proceeded to set up 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
before or following...as we do.)
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 and local ingredients here in France.
Americans have to use their yankee ingenuity to find
substitutes. Pumpkins are hard to announce - citrouilles
- and hard to find. Cranberry sauce is almost unknown.
My wife, Elizabeth, descendant of the Puritan fathers
and former resident of New York...does her best.
And we are thankful.
Bill Bonner
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