God bless the turkey!
God bless the turkey!
You know I am no expert on any
subject, and least of all, matters of the US of A, so when questions on the US
president's decisions pop up in my mind, I do not have the answers. Maybe one of you can help
me. One such thing which stoked my curiosity this week, I am sharing with you.
US President Donald J Trump came
out of his silent existence of the past some days to perform a non-political,
non-official duty. I do have a couple of issues which I could have clarified
with Mr. Trump i.e., if he was approachable and had the patience to lend an
ear, but that is not my immediate concern right now. In fact, this Thanksgiving
I am thankful that he was in that position so that for four years every morning
when I woke up, I heard and watched how the most powerful person in the world
had chosen to show his might (the whole of USA is half a day behind us in time),
and wondered - What/Is that possible/How can he do that? This convinced me that
there has to be some power beyond us which makes us do things and take actions
which seem to the point of being bizarre to the others.
But what disappointed me this week was that he merely walked the beaten path and gave Presidential pardon to Corn, the turkey reared and presented to the White House for Thanksgiving dinner.
Photo:https://twitter.com/FLOTUS/status/1331395867069325315/photo/1
"Corn,
I hereby grant you a full pardon,” the words have gone into the annals of
history.
“Thanksgiving is a special day for turkeys,” the president said.
“I guess probably, for the most part, not a very good one.”
Pardoning a turkey, is usually one of the most farcical things a
president does in a year, but Trump granting clemency to a corpulent bird in
the Rose Garden is somehow the most normal thing that’s happened in Washington
all month…. And then he turned to the turkey. “Look at that beautiful, beautiful bird. Oh, so lucky. That is a lucky
bird,” he said.
The back-up bird was called Cob. Perhaps the officials, on the basis of their own intelligence, did not let go unanswered the eternal question: Who came first the chicken or the egg, and decided that in this case it should be Corn first, and not Cob, which was to be presented for the President’s table.
For everyone’s information, according to Wikipedia : A flock of turkeys fed a grain-heavy fortified diet to increase their
weight, are also ‘trained’ in handling noise and flash photography. 10 to 20
best-preened and best-behaved are chosen and eventually narrowed down to two
finalists, whose names are chosen by the White House staff from suggestions by
school children from the state where they were raised. The two finalists
are then transported to Washington, where they stay at the Willard Inter Continental Washington Hotel at National Turkey Federation expense before the ceremony. The turkeys for
the National Thanksgiving Turkey Presentation are usually 21 week-old males
weighing 45 pounds by the time of their White House visit, compared to the
shorter growing period for turkeys destined for market.
Why this preferential treatment to the turkey, while the other edible members of the zoological world reappear in the burgers and nuggets Shrimaan Trumpji is reported to enjoy?
https://www.britannica.com/story/why-do-we-eat-turkey-on-thanksgiving
By the turn of the 19th century, however,
turkey had become a popular dish to serve on such occasions. There were a few
reasons for this. First, the bird was rather plentiful. One expert estimated
that there were at least 10 million turkeys in America at the time of European
contact. Second, turkeys on a family farm were almost always available for
slaughter. While live cows and hens were useful as long as they were producing
milk and
eggs, respectively, turkeys were generally raised only for their meat and thus
could be readily killed. Third, a single turkey was usually big enough to feed
a family.
Some people have credited Charles
Dickens’s A Christmas Carol (1843) with bolstering the idea of
turkey as a holiday meal. But another writer, Sarah Josepha Hale, in her 1827 novel Northwood, devoted an
entire chapter to a description of a New England Thanksgiving, with a roasted
turkey ‘placed at the head of the table.’ At about the same time, she also
began campaigning to establish Thanksgiving as a national holiday in the United
States, which she believed would help unify the country as it teetered toward
civil war. Her efforts finally paid off in 1863 with a presidential
proclamation by Abraham Lincoln.
William Bradford did refer to a ‘great store of wild Turkies at
Plymouth that fall, in a journal that was reprinted in 1856. Before long, the
cultural links between Pilgrims, turkeys, and Thanksgiving became an
inextricable and integral part of American schoolchildren’s education.
Every country has food preferences which may seem curious to people from other parts of the
world. Since we Indians have thousands of them, and of course I nurse my very
own, it would be impolite and thoughtless to comment on them. After all, don’t
we have particular foods for particular days of celebrations? Poori (fried Indian bread) and chana (chickpeas) for ashatmi, dhaniya panjeeri for Janamashtami,
non-grain vegetarian food during navratras,
Sivain (vermicelli) for Id and mutton
for Bakrid. This is what also makes
the day special. Why, a close friend even insisted that leaving kheer (rice pudding) outside in moonlight
on Sharad poornima (full moon night of Hindu month of Ashvin) infuses healing powers in it.
The common refrain is aaj ke din yahi
khate hain (only this food is eaten on his day). We even offer our gods
particular foods, but I should talk about that some other day. So, in their
defence- umreekan log Thanksgiving ke
dinner mein khaas taur se turkey hee khate hain. (The Americans have turkey
especially for the Thanksgiving dinner).
A traditional Thanksgiving dinner Photo: thespruceeats.com
My question is : When this turkey is especially grown for the President’s feast, what is the point of pardoning it? (Although president George W Bush who started turkey pardon as a ceremony in 1989, in his first year in office, also chose the words ‘reprieve’ and ‘keep him going’).
https://www.foxnews.com/lifestyle/meet-corn-and-cob-thanksgiving-2020-turkeys-pardoned-by-trump
The turkey would spend its uneventful life in the Iowa State University, in the care of the
animal science and veterinary medicine department. The turkeys will welcome
visitors and invite the public to learn about the university’s animal science
programs, according to the National Turkey Federation.
All the while, Corn sure did
not have an inkling that after the super-important, once-in-a-lifetime
turkeywalk at the White House, he would have to exist as an object being peered
at by a stream of ooh-aahing unknown visitors. What a comedown for the poor
bird! Won't it think (quoting Amitabh Bachchan from Mr Natwarlal) -Yeh jeena bhi koyi jeena hai?
(Is this a life worth living?)
My thought was- Why didn’t somebody in Mr. Trump’s staff suggest that like thousands of Indians who do not eat animal and birds on particular days of the week or month, he go vegetarian the day of Thanksgiving? It would have saved not only Corn and Cob but the poor nameless creature too who (probably) ended on the platter dressed (in fact undressed of its feathers), trussed with backside stuffed anyway!
Like the other shock
treatments Mr. Trump tends to give to the world, this too would have caused a considerable
stir. It would have won the hearts of the vegetarians, shaken up the turkey-eaters
and ardent turkey-must-for-Thanksgiving groups. I cannot think of any other
action which could elicit varied reactions on this occasion.
Else, he could have
revolutionised Thanksgiving by pardoning all the millions of turkies which the grateful
humans sacrificed to thank for their good fortune. What was so good about the
year anyway, I wonder!
Unfortunately Thanksgiving has been quiet and low key this year
Socially distanced at Thanksgiving
Photos: Dr Sunanda Gaur
And imagine how he could have marinated in this holier-than–thou feeling in comparison to the earlier presidents who carried on with the clichéd convention of pardoning the turkey and probably gobbling up another poor bird already slaughtered for them.
By the way like normal
people did this super-rich POTUS also use up the leftover turkey for soup and sandwiches
the next day?
Do turkeys respond to names
give to them? I don’t know. The president could have renamed one Michael Flynn, after his former security
advisor, whom he pardoned on Wednesday or even after people he did not want to
give pardon to, and made it into a political statement. The Washington Post
newsitem had also mentioned- Margaret
Love, a D.C. attorney who represents applicants for presidential pardon and
commutation of sentence, used to watch the turkey pardon with disgust. The
president, she believes, should be pardoning people, not birds. “I took it all
kind of seriously and thought, this is a silly, stupid exercise that does not
befit the dignity of the presidency,” says Love.
He could have followed in the footsteps of Ronald Raegan who avoided the questions on pardon to Oliver North by
joking about turkey pardon.
Ah! Too late for him now to
have an armchair advisor!
Curiously enough https://in.yahoo.com/news/lame-duck-president-pardons-turkey-210514378.html
says
In 2018, the president had made remarks at the turkey pardon that
now appear prescient, if ironic. “This was a fair election,” he told Carrots,
who had lost the online vote to Peas. “Unfortunately, Carrots refused to
concede and demanded a recount, and we’re still fighting with Carrots,” he
said. “Carrots, I’m sorry to tell you, the result did not change. It’s too bad
for Carrots.”
Reached at “Gobbler’s Rest,” the Virginia Tech retirement home
for several pardoned presidential turkeys, David Linker, the university’s
agricultural program coordinator, says that Carrots, now 2½ years old, has
lived out a mostly uneventful retirement. The turkey may identify with the
president who pardoned him in other ways, though.
(The turkey pair pardoned that year was
named Carrots and Peas.)
…
Pretty informative...there were so many things I was not aware of about the Thanksgiving traditions.
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