A Traditional ‘Straight Up’ Thanksgiving

Our Thanksgiving team of William S. Burroughs and Norman O. Mustill
has been a longtime happy pairing. It still is. So here they are again, sweetened
by Heathcote Williams’s words in a narration-cum-montage by Alan Cox.

And here are Burroughs’s words of gratitude with a couple of collages by Mustill. Listen. It’s delish:

Thanks for the wild turkey
and the passenger pigeons,

destined to be shit out
through wholesome American guts —

thanks for a Continent to despoil
and poison —

thanks for Indians to provide a
modicum of challenge and
danger —

thanks for vast herds of bison to
kill and skin leaving the
carcasses to rot —

thanks for bounties on wolves
and coyotes —

thanks for the AMERICAN DREAM
to vulgarize and to falsify until
the bare lies shine through —

thanks for the KKK,
for nigger-killin’ lawmen,
feelin’ their notches,
for decent church-goin’ women,
with their mean, pinched, bitter,
evil faces —

thanks for “Kill a Queer for
Christ” stickers —

thanks for laboratory AIDS —

thanks for Prohibition and the
War against Drugs —

thanks for a country where
nobody’s allowed to mind his
own business —

thanks for a nation of finks — yes,

thanks for all the
memories … all right let’s see
your arms …
you always were a headache and
you always were a bore —

thanks for the last and greatest
betrayal of the last and greatest
of human dreams.

Thanksgiving Day, Nov. 28, 1986
© 1986 by William S. Burroughs