What is the significance of Thanksgiving?
Possibilities:
1) We rejoice in the harvest and thank God for our survival, yet another year, in the vast, dark, and inhospitable North American forest.
2) We observe that moment of the year when, with the coming of the cold, we have to go inside and stay there for several months. From now on, if we venture out, we must wear gloves. Thanksgiving, with its bleak, drizzly gemutlichkeit and warm, unventilated smells of cooking, makes us as sleepy as bears and accommodates us to the idea of winter quarters in the cave. That's why the Chicago Bears always play the Detroit Lions on Thanksgiving afternoon on a flickering TV set somewhere off on the margins of the cooking.
3) Thanksgiving always falls on or around November 26, my niece Katie Brind's birthday, which is always cause for rejoicing, especially this year, which will be quadruply wonderful because she is turning four.
4) We give thanks that the Supreme Court of Florida has taken the matter in hand and, although its methods are a little partisan, has addressed itself to one of the gravest threats to the Republic since Fort Sumter.
I refer to the very real danger that if George W. Bush were to be installed in the White House, Barbra Streisand, Whoopi Goldberg, Alec Baldwin, Susan Sarandon and other irreplaceable Americans would make good on their threat to move to another country.
Abraham Lincoln, faced with the breakup of the Republic, suspended habeas corpus. What could the Florida Supreme Court do, when confronting a similar threat, except to tell the vote counters to keep on counting, and to count until they had found sufficient votes to cause Barbra and the rest to unpack their bags and redirect their drivers from the international terminal at LAX to Bel-Air for lunch?
The Florida court sprayed its decision with fragrantly pietistic aerosol to the effect that "the right of the people to cast their votes is the paramount concern," but what the Justices meant was that such dynastic masters of electoral arithmetic as William Daley, of Cook County, Illinois, should be permitted to continue with their interpretive foraging amid the chads until they come up with the total they need.
But it would be a shame to allow this fascinatingly weird election to intrude upon the holiday. Thanksgiving is supposed to be amiable, bloated, and somnolent. No doubt it will be so, all over America — in those sections of America (the coasts, the upper mid-West) that are colored blue for Gore, and in those vast stretches everywhere else that are red for Bush. But the peace of Thanksgiving tables will inevitably be troubled — red uncles in full howl against blue in-laws. We vacillate between indignation and resignation, and we play with a perplexing intuition that the loser wins and the winner loses.
Yeats said the center cannot hold. A computer expert tells me the punchcards cannot hold. The cards are "prepunched" at the factory that makes them — that is, scored in dozens of places with tiny blades to make it possible for the voter to push them through with relative ease. Even the most stringent quality control at the punchcard factory, the expert says, cannot prepare the much-bladed punchcards to survive all the manipulation they are getting now.
"My point," says the expert, "is that we're in the 'noise' [meaning in an inarticulate zone of error where the truth is unknowable] if we get down to a few hundred votes separating Bush and Gore. The technology simply cannot be expected to correctly represent the count, no matter what 'rules' you come up with for counting hanging and dimpled chads."
So that's where we are — waiting, and eating turkey, in the noise.