The captain reports glumly that they reflect the great increase in the past few years in the actually hungry, one of those baffling, preposterous mysteries in a country that has enough food to feed the six billion on Earth several times over. If you'd like to ponder a puzzle in economic geography, consider that while those mass meals were being given to the city's hungry, consider that in the Pacific northwest of America there is a new depressed area - the states of Washington and Oregon. Three quarters of their wheat goes to Japan but not now, so the wheat is stored or rots and the farmers begin to worry about their mortgage. Now in the last decade or so many cities have gone easy on celebrating Columbus Day since radicals of all nationalities, but especially the natives of some central and southern American countries, have threatened and in some places performed violence in memory of the man now considered far and wide a monster symbol of Europe the invader. But till now we've never been led to think of the pilgrims as such.
Time marches on with a nasty look.
There were no reported Indian protest marches in the Deep South or the Far West where some tribes have in federal courts reclaimed their ancient lands, raised money to build casinos and are now the legally affluent heirs of the mobsters who used to murder each other over disputed gambling territories in the desert. So there is also the new freakish fact of some millionaire Indians who could stage Thanksgiving feasts as sumptuous as any put on by, say, the wives of the old New York robber barons in the 1890s. Talking of which glittering scenes reminds me of Winston Churchill's encounter with an American turkey dinner. As a young soldier of 20 he pulled his mother's apron strings, who pulled other powerful strings to get him released from his regiment in order to go off to Cuba and watch the turn of century fighting there. On his way he passed through New York and was invited to dinner by a society hostess friend of his mother's.