Happy Thanksgiving! Credit: Washington Secretary of State's Office

From 1951, back when Republican Governor Arthur B. Langlie liked to remind Washingtonians that they better express thanks for not living under “godless tyranny.”

Happy Thanksgiving!

  • Washington Secretary of State’s Office
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Eli Sanders was The Stranger's associate editor. His book, "While the City Slept," was a finalist for the Washington State Book Award and the Dayton Literary Peace Prize. He once did this and once won...

34 replies on “A Thanksgiving Day Proclamation”

  2. For some strange reason Slog STILL REFUSES to cover the story of the recent near-fatal attack on openly-gay salon owner Danny Vega.

    GEE I WONDER WHY SLOG WON’T COVER THE DANNY VEGA ATTACK?

    A GAY MAN IN SEATTLE LIES IN A COMA ON LIFE SUPPORT AFTER BEING VICIOUSLY ATTACKED AND SLOG REFUSES TO MENTION IT AT ALL.

    WHAT THE FUCK, Slog!!!!!

  3. Of course you have to put this proclamation in the context of the times. 1951 was right in the middle of the Korean War and the early stages of the Cold War. I’m sure the “godless tyranny” he was alluding to was the Soviet Union. In 1951, I would be thankful I didn’t live under the control of the Soviets as well.

  6. im thankful that over time views like the one expressed in the letter are viewed as more and more pathetic.

    we had hot buttered rum for breakfast. shit is fucking sticky rocket fuel. on to martini’s at grandpa’s… cheerio

  7. WHEREAS, the ever present menace of miscegenation with the Deep Ones endangers the genetic purity of the human race itself, and threatens the entire human race itself with the return from his deep abode of Cthulu himslef; and

  8. Mandrake, have you ever seen a Commie drink a glass of water? ….Fluoridation is the most monstrously conceived and dangerous communist plot we have ever had to face.

    A foreign substance is introduced into our precious bodily fluids without the knowledge of the individual. Certainly without any choice. That’s the way your hard-core Commie works.

    Your Commie has no regard for human life, not even of his own. For this reason men, I want to impress upon you the need for extreme watchfulness. The enemy may come individually, or in strength. He may even appear in the form of our own troops. But however we must stop him.

    Now why don’t you just take it easy, Group Captain, and please make me a drink of grain alcohol and rainwater, and help yourself to whatever you’d like.

  9. Alway great to see the minions of the Left ridiculing faith, while not acknowledging that comsiderable shares of the progress made in social justice has been made by committed people of same: Tutu, MLK, Maryknoll, Mandela, SCLC, Ghandi… And that the bulk of social services in our communities is delivered by adherents. But by all means, don’t take a day off from your intellectual vacuousness.

  10. What a great find! It inspired me to a bit of grinding: Historylink and random googling show Langlie was right in the thick of events in our state for decades. Cheerled the WWII internment of Japanese-Americans? Check. Got federal funding to build the goddam viaduct? Check. Implemented the first environmentally aware state forest policies? Check. When the private companies that owned the ferry system stopped service because he opposed their fare hikes, took over the entire system in the name of the public? Check. Innovated tolling to build bridges? Check. Whose ferry system’s then-practice of drawing operating funding from bridge tolling money got shut down by laws that Kemper Freeman tried to misuse in his latest challenge to light rail on I-90? Check. Got elected to one term, then thrown out, then elected again, a template from which our own dear McGinn might draw hope for his long term prospects? Check. His granddaughter Emily currently spokesperson for the U.S. Attorney here? Check.
    http://www.historylink.org/index.cfm?Dis…

  11. @2 a 60 year old Asian queer gets beaten into a coma in South Seattle in a vicious hate crime….all Sloggers want to know is whether he’s a bottom or top?

    Anti-gay hate crime = young, white queer on Cap Hill call ‘faggot’ by some Bellevue frat boys. Some old Asian queer beaten by black kids doesn’t fit the meme.

  13. Over ONE HUNDRED MILLION PEOPLE were MURDERED BY COMMUNISM in the last century.

    Fuck communism and FUCK YOU TOO, Eli Sanders.

  17. #10 – all of the things achieved by the people you mentioned could have been achieved just as easily without believing in invisible sky-beings. And there are many charitable organizations that don’t predicate their charity on belief in invisible supernatural creatures. But by all means, don’t take a day off from your blind adherence to first-century fairy tales.

  20. Considering the attitudes of the Republican candidates for President about America being a conservative Christian country, Langlie’s proclamation isn’t terribly outmoded. This was only 6 years after Hitler was defeated with the help of the Soviet Union, which then grabbed (or was given before the end of the war, at Malta, by America and Britain) half of Europe, so anticommunism was kind of popular. There really was rational worry that the Soviets would move across the world, which worry Stalin didn’t try to appease. Langlie was a jerk, yes, but not at all unusual for that (or this) time.

  25. Always great to see minions of the right cast aspersions on, and attempt to undermine non-religious social progress while cutting the important safety nets that do the most good w/out the concomitant helping of fairy tale dogmas…

  27. @21 See? By even saying “dogma of diversity” like that, you prove that you don’t believe in the equality of all people, that you don’t believe that all people have the same rights and deserve the same protections as you do.

    So, why is it exactly that you think you deserve respect for your beliefs? For that matter, why is it you think that on an objective scale your beliefs aren’t bankrupt, corrupt and hypocritical? Faith is more than membership in some club, you know. Actions, not words. Live it.

  28. @9 – my town doesn’t fluoridate. It makes me so mad that they are failing to protect my precious bodily solids.

  30. @29

    Always curious to see what constitutes ‘proof’ in the mind of the closed-minded… I was merely pointing-out the hypocrisy of the diversity-mongers on the Left, who are then unfailing in their disregard of any organizing principle for beliefs that is not their Statism.

    Liberalisms cancer is the exterior veneer of tolerance, and an inward hate for anything that isn’t conforming to a regulated social narrative.

    @27

    Hilarious to see your coopting of the word “progressive” in association with leftish social tinkering. Everything that’s “new” about the allegedly progressive body politic is — in fact — a regurgitation of failed and corrupted societies in the past. There is nothing “progressive” about anything favored by the Left today. It’s simply warmed-up leftovers of the past, served-up and packaged as new and exciting to newer generations of the gullible, misinformed or intellectually addled. Sucker.

  31. @32 wrong wrong wrong wrong

    you really have a poor, shallow understanding of the Left, Liberalism, and Progressivism. the best way to be persuasive is to state someones case as well as or better than they can, and then explain why it’s wrong, not to completely get it wrong based on your own lack of understanding and biases.

    anyway, if you beleive in a desert tribe religion you are to be laughed at, pitied, and feared, but we on the left will defend your legal right to worship the great spaghetti monster, as long as you dont inflict your superstitions on anyone else.

  32. How quaint that you presume — almost neccessarily — that someone’s faith is a “first century” (@19) or “desert tribe”.

    How worldly and diverse. Dumb fuckers

  33. by standards of plain reason what and who should be rightly described as quaint, gullible, misinformed and intellectually vacuous/addled is faith and its’ adherents;
    but reason and rationality seem to have little traction in the spin zone of “belief”.

  34. @35 Belief is a personal matter, and is not necessarily useless, hypocritical, or worthy of scorn. For some people it can be a valuable personal organizing principle that helps center them, that makes them less anxious, less selfish and more loving. But the only way for others to judge that belief is by its effects, on an individual basis, by its outward manifestations, by how one behaves, how one lives their life, how one treats one’s fellow man. In other words, by their actions, by the expressions of their heart, and not by their verbal expressions of belief.

    By that measure, I’ve met a number of believers I would be pleased to call friend. These, however, are a minority and are vastly outnumbered by those who evangelize, who criticize others for their beliefs or lack thereof, or are public in their piety, or who are smug about their self-perceived superiority.

    Zok, by the way, is an excellent example of the latter.

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