Thanksgiving Day became a habit, for the reason that in the course of time, as the years drifted on, it was perceived that the exterminating had ceased to be mutual and was all on the white man's side, consequently on the Lord's side; hence it was proper to thank the Lord for it and extend the usual annual compliments. —Mark Twain

It is altogether a day of memory, and not all the memories are good ones, and if we're true to ourselves and our heritage, we admit that in our hearts even before cranberry salad gets passed. The epigraph that David Remnick chose for Lenin's Tomb, his essential account of the fall of the Soviet Union and the rise of whatever it is that came after, is a now-famous quote from Czech novelist Milan Kundera:

The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.

The original occupants of this continent didn't have to be told that. Thousands of years of traditions, religious and otherwise, embedded the truth of it in their minds and in the character of their people. They held onto it even while being crushed by a new nation dedicated to reinvention and second chances—for white people, anyway.

H. Armstrong Roberts/ClassicStock Getty Images

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The Pilgrims came here for a second chance. So did the Puritans, and they built their shining city on the hill in Boston and then set about constructing a vicious theocracy that hung Quakers, persecuted Catholics, and ran Roger Williams all the way to Rhode Island. Slaves fought to keep their memories alive as a way to keep their families together when they were no longer intact. And so did wave after wave of immigrants who, remembering what they'd fled—For the Irish, famine. For the Germans, failed revolution. For Jews, pogroms and persecution. And today, for the Hondurans, gang violence and civil war—helped them build new lives in a new place.

And the Native people, pushed and crowded and eventually ground up in the wheels on endless reinvention, remembered what had happened to them and why. And, in November, two Native American women were elected to serve in the House of Representatives in the Congress of the United States, and their memories will come with them as they help to write the laws for the country that slaughtered their ancestors.

Sharice Davids, left, celebrates with her mother, Crystal Herriage, after defeating incumbent Kevin Yoder to become one of the first two Native American women to be elected to Congress. Whitney Curtis Getty Images

So, this Thanksgiving, I'm thankful for memories, good and bad, and for the common history they comprise, good and bad, peaceful and bloody. They are the best weapons against a politics gone mad and a president* gone mad with it. We find even our collective short-term memory overwhelmed by events, day after day. The president*'s main refuge is the constant present tense, and it is a redoubtable one. But it's not an impregnable one. The arsenal of history, individual and collective, is becoming arrayed against it, and that arsenal's primary weapon is our memory, of who we are and what we were, so we can define whom we want to become. It is still there, waiting to be used, and I give thanks for that.

And I give thanks for all here at the shebeen. Have a great holiday. Be well and play nice, ya bastids. Stay above the snake-line, and remember, always remember, even when the wide world tells you it's futile.

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Charles P. Pierce Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976.

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