A sense of bleak familiarity hangs over Thanksgiving

There have been bleaker Thanksgivings, to be sure, than the one Americans celebrate today. The storied first feast in 1621 in the Puritan colony on the Massachusetts shoreline actually took place in the ruined Indian village of Pawtuxet. The Wampanoag Indians who brought the little band of Puritans wild turkeys (a meat they themselves rather despised) along with some ears of corn and seasonal squashes had scant reason to rejoice since their numbers have been reduced by some 95 per cent by smallpox introduced in 1614 by an earlier British expedition.

If he heard the thanks raised to heaven by the Puritan leader John Winthrop, the English-speaking Indian known as Squanto probably declined to translate it for his fellows. Winthrop saluted the epidemic as a miracle. As he wrote later to a friend in England: "But for the natives in these parts, God hath so pursued them, as for 300 miles space the greatest part of them are swept away by smallpox which still continues among them. So as God hath thereby cleared our title to this place, those who remain in these parts, being in all not 50, have put themselves under our protection."

There were some gloomy Novembers in the 70s and 90s, but nothing like todayAfforded their toehold in the New World by the blessings of plague, the Puritans prospered and the hectic tread of land grabs and capital accumulation carried America on its great journey towards this 387th Thanksgiving, one marked by economic circumstances more frightening than most Americans have experienced in their entire lifetimes.

An American would have to be over 75 to remember as a child the desperate circumstances of the late 1930s when, after five years of Roosevelt's New Deal, there were still 20 million unemployed. The economic darkness only lifted with the arrival of World War Two.

Someone born in 1961, the year John Kennedy was inaugurated, would have been a seven-year-old amid the joyous Thanksgiving when the postwar boom crested. There were some gloomy economic Novembers in the late 70s, early 90s and the expiring balloon of the dotcom boom eight years ago, but nothing like today's grim landscape.

Down the road from where I write these lines, in the north-west corner of South Carolina, a friend of mine owns a small trailer park. By the late summer,