Raising Wild

by Michael P. Branch

  Hannah’s critique reminded me of the debate we’ve been having about modern art since the early twentieth century. Does the display of an object—an African mask, a bicycle wheel, an antique milk jug—deprive that object of its life? When we put a vernacular object in a museum and declare it “art,” are we celebrating the meanings of that object, or are we impoverishing our understanding and enjoyment of it? And what becomes of the stick’s status as a natural object once we define and limit its use? Is a stick in a case just another elephant in a zoo, another butterfly with a pin through it, yet one more grown-up way of attempting to domesticate the wildness that is inherent to natural play and to the children who benefit from it? Is a stick on display in a museum even a stick at all?

  Hannah was still thinking hard, and she sat quietly for a while before reaching her conclusion. “Dad, since the stick isn’t made by people, it really is different than a Hula-Hoop and stuff like that. And I think natural things that belong together should stay together, so if the stick is in there, then it isn’t fair not to put in the whole tree, plus leaves, and rocks, and everything else around it.”

  “And bugs too,” added Caroline, “but it wouldn’t be nice to keep bugs inside like that.”

  “Right,” Hannah agreed. “I think they ought to just leave the stick outside. That way it can be in the wind and rain, which it’s used to, and bugs can use it to crawl on, and also kids can play with it.”

  I’m aware that we’ve been waxing rhapsodic about the wisdom of children since the romantic poets tromped euphorically around the Lake District (without children, I might add), but this struck me as a sensible verdict, rendered by a thoughtful judge and based on a sound interrogation of the facts. Caroline’s energetic nodding in support of her sister’s argument suggested that even a little kid could grasp the problem Hannah’s logic had exposed. We grown-ups had insisted upon turning the stick into everything from a three wood to a bazooka, but the girls’ imaginations had effortlessly, magically transformed it back into a stick.

  I suppose we could say that adults crave play, too, and that playing with the famous stick’s meanings is the grown-up way of trying to think up something as cool as using a stick as a cloud scratcher. By eliciting the two most powerful forms of nostalgia—the loss of nature and the loss of childhood—the celebrated stick had captured our adult imaginations. But while we were arguing over its meaning, turning its induction into the National Toy Hall of Fame into a cause for celebration or complaint, we also forgot to go outside and play. And I suspect that it is this failure to play—this atrophying of the ability to imaginatively engage nature and then also leave it as we found it—that somehow separates us from our childhoods and perhaps also from our children. Maybe we’ve been grasping at the stick because we need to recover something that we dropped on the ground a long time ago.

  Chapter 8

  8. Freebirds

  One afternoon a few days before Thanksgiving, Eryn came home from town with Hannah and Caroline, both of whom had been administered the traditional Thanksgiving myth at school that day. Three-year-old Caroline was as proud as could be of her paper turkey, made from a cutout drawing of her own little hand. And Hannah, the loquacious six-year-old, began blurting out her holiday lecture the moment she came through the door: “Dad, I bet you didn’t know that Thanksgiving comes from the Pilgrims and the Indians helping each other a bunch and then having a peace party and eating a really big supper with crazy colored corn and turkeys and those turkeys were wild!” With this she donned her construction-paper Pilgrim hat with its big fake buckle and gave me a huge smile.

  I took a long sip of my whiskey and tried to formulate a response. The Thanksgiving feast the girls had learned about did in fact occur—at Plymouth Plantation in 1621—but by the following year violent conflict between colonists and Native Americans had erupted, and devastating Indian wars soon swept New England. There weren’t many turkeys shared at Mystic River in 1637, for example, when the Pilgrims burned and hacked to death at least four hundred Pequot, mostly women and children, as they slept. The Pilgrim leader William Bradford—who had actually been present at that much-celebrated first Thanksgiving—had this to say about the slaughter: “It was a fearful sight to see [the Indians] thus frying in the fire and the streams of blood quenching the same, and horrible was the stink and scent thereof; but the victory seemed a sweet sacrifice, and [we] gave the praise thereof to God.” Just as I was pondering how best to explain this act of violence in a way that might somehow be compatible with the ennobling concept of Thanksgiving the girls had learned at school, Hannah pointed excitedly at the muted TV behind me and shouted, “It’s turkey time!” I turned to see that the news had given way to the image of a large white turkey. A turkey at the White House, in fact. A turkey that was about to receive a formal pardon from the president of the United States.

  For many people, Thanksgiving is about bringing together family and friends; for some, it is centered around the ancient autumnal harvest festival; for others, it is an opportunity to count and express our most precious blessings; for yet others, it is a holiday devoted to copious amounts of football and alcohol. I believe deeply in all these versions, but for me Thanksgiving is very much about the pardoning of turkeys.

  The tradition of the presidential turkey pardon is wonderfully rife with distortion, ambiguity, and error—as all good stories should be—but what is most perplexing about this bizarre ritual is our uncertainty about its origins. Some claim that the turkey pardon began with President Lincoln, who, hoping to promote national unity amid the social fragmentation of the Civil War, did in fact declare our first official day of national thanksgiving in 1863. That same year Lincoln’s ten-year-old son, Tad, so the story goes, became so attached to a Christmas turkey that the president relented and agreed to spare “Jack” from the family table. More common is the claim that Harry Truman was the first president to save a turkey, but while Truman was indeed the first commander in chief to receive a holiday gift bird from the National Turkey Federation—a custom begun in 1947 and continued to this day—the evidence suggests that Truman, like most presidents who followed him, hadn’t the slightest compunction about eating his gift. It was President Kennedy who first broke with his predecessors by declaring, just four days before he was assassinated, that—despite the sign reading GOOD EATING that the National Turkey Federation had hung around the bird’s neck—he would let his fifty-five-pound gobbler live.

  Even though President Reagan delivered a few respectable one-liners about sparing his turkey (he was every bit as charismatic with his bird as he was with that cute chimp in the movie Bedtime for Bonzo), the Gipper promptly gobbled up all of his gobblers. And it is here that bird-pardoning lore moves from speculation to historical fact, for in 1989 George Herbert Walker Bush had the honor of becoming the first president to formally issue a pardon to a turkey—an innovative leadership move that no doubt helped to secure his legacy. Since Bush Senior, every president has participated annually in this strange ritual—which held special pleasure for Presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush, each of whom embraced the event as an occasion for the kind of political theater that offered welcome distraction from the kind of political theater that occupied them at all other times.

  It seemed to me that President Clinton always shot his birds an amorous look while pardoning them, and his uncharacteristic restraint in looking but not touching may have been indirectly attributable to our old friend William Bradford, who, in his seventeenth-century page turner Of Plymouth Plantation, carefully documented the execution of one of his fellow Pilgrims for the unpardonable sin of sodomizing a turkey. Bradford’s troubling account leaves me with three questions: Can there be anything more disgusting than having sex with poultry? How, exactly, would you go about doing it anyway? Is this really something you ought to kill a guy for? I think it would have been more humane, more punishing, and also more entertaining to simply make fun of him for the rest of his life. It wouldn’t take much—yo
u could just gobble a little under your breath as he passed your pew in church. Of course, none of the Pilgrims’ distasteful Indian killing or turkey raping stopped President George W. Bush from executing a 2007 pardon for “May” and “Flower,” birds whose names offered a clear allusion to Bradford’s intrepid congregation.

  The tradition of the presidential turkey pardon has continued to evolve in surprising ways. In the early years the exonerated gobblers were sent to Kidwell Farm, a petting zoo in northern Virginia where, as turkey rock stars, they lived a life featuring excessive drug use and constant media attention, but only the brief fame their overbred and steroid-addled condition would allow. Since 2005, however, the ritual has become more surreal: the pardoned bird is now immediately flown to Disneyland or Disney World, where it serves as grand marshal of the Thanksgiving Day parade at the self-proclaimed “Happiest Place on Earth.” And if the idea of Americans spending their Thanksgiving holiday at a theme park watching a fat bird lead a Mickey Mouse parade seems depressing, it is encouraging to note that the birds are flown to their new posts first class, so while in transit they enjoy comfortably wide seats and a lot of free gin and tonics. It beats the hell out of that cramped poultry yard with its hormone-dusted cracked corn, and since the birds are so overbred as to find it barely possible to waddle (pardon the pun), much less fly, their trip to the Happiest Place on Earth is in fact the only flight they will ever know.

  Soon after he took office, President Obama recognized the surreal quality of the ceremony when he remarked, “There are certain days that remind me of why I ran for this office. And then there are moments like this, where I pardon a turkey and send it to Disneyland.” Now that the pardoned bird is a national celebrity, it has become necessary to pardon an alternate bird each year, in case the National Turkey is unable to fulfill its duties—as occurred in 2008, when “Pecan” fell suddenly ill and required his understudy, “Pumpkin,” to receive the honors.

  In our family it is a hallowed tradition—one as sacred and as ceremoniously performed as cheering on the opening day of baseball season—to witness and celebrate the annual presidential pardoning of the turkeys. Although Hannah and Caroline are necessarily recent participants in this annual custom, I consider myself the Cal Ripken of turkey pardoning, having never missed one since the initiation of the ritual more than twenty years ago. As is the case with other Thanksgiving traditions, I find it helpful to drink while participating in this one, so I annually toast the birds’ reprieve with stout tumblers of what I call Meleagris gallopavo cocktail, which is Wild Turkey straight up, the “cocktail” mixed in only as an avian pun to sweeten the experience of watching the president talk turkey. After all, nothing is more threatening to one’s mental health than to be caught uncomfortably sober when it comes time for the leader of the free world to issue a televised and legally binding pardon to a bird.

  Although I have long found the pardoning of the turkeys to be among the more entertaining things to transpire in our nation’s capital each year, the levity of this ritual has become compromised by politics. In particular, the vegetarian lobby has complained that the annual pardoning amounts to free advertising for the poultry industry, and it has suggested that the president would set a better example by accepting a cruelty-free Tofurky, whose life before being pressed into a shimmering loaf of gelatinous curd presumably consisted of cavorting innocently through fragrant bean fields while in absolutely no danger of being sodomized. The Humane Society has also objected, making the hard-to-dispute point that turkeys produced by industrial poultry farming have about as unpleasant a life as one can imagine, and while two birds do get to fly first class to Anaheim or Orlando each year, 250 million others aren’t so lucky. Each year following the pardoning, PETA is served a generous slice of free media pie when it describes in gory detail the miserable lives of these factory-farmed birds.

  My objection to such complaints is certainly not that they are groundless—they must be at least as compelling as the idea that the leader of 300 million people should not waste his time, not to mention his political capital, pardoning a turkey—but rather that they are unpardonably lacking in humor. It is not, after all, a Supreme Court deliberation we are talking about, but rather a turkey pardoning. So here, perhaps, is a useful rule of thumb for animal rights activists: if the president and a turkey are more entertaining than you are, it can hardly be surprising that your client is headed for decapitation. With a little creativity, such activists might dramatize their objections in ways that would be more in the spirit of the event. How about staging a parody of the turkey pardoning in which a PETA activist, costumed as a giant turkey, pardons the sitting president for his misdeeds?

  The potential for humor here is also suggested by the comic irony of an actual event involving none other than the media superstar and former governor of Alaska, Sarah Palin. Back in the days before her Fox News stint and failed reality shows and her rewriting of the history of the American Revolution, the governor, having just pardoned a turkey (yes, many state governors also participate in this tomfoolery), waxed rhapsodic on camera about the virtues of compassion and forgiveness, while unbeknownst to her a worker in the background was busy decapitating and bleeding out turkeys. The YouTube video of this interview, which is far funnier than any Saturday Night Live send-up of it could possibly be, has been watched more than a million times.

  If I were to object to the turkey pardoning—which, of course, I haven’t the slightest intention of doing—I would do so on the grounds that to render a turkey a fit subject for pardon, we must presume the bird’s guilt. To be pardoned, one must first be in violation of some communal law or code. While enjoying Thanksgiving dinner, for example, we don’t “beg your pardon” unless we belch, fart, or otherwise violate the community ethic by which the ritual meal is conducted. A pardon is both an expression of mercy and a certificate of absolution; it is both amnesty and exoneration. To pardon, after all, is to forgive. And if we’re talking about a turkey, it becomes difficult to discern what criminal or immoral behavior on the bird’s part may be said to establish the necessary preconditions for its forgiveness.

  Now if Benjamin Franklin had won the argument and the turkey had become our national symbol, the case might be different. You may recall that wise old Ben claimed that the bald eagle made a poor national symbol because “he is a bird of bad moral character.” This, incidentally, from a man who advocated choosing for a mistress an older woman because “there is no hazard of children, which irregularly produced may be attended with much inconvenience”; who invented bifocals so he might focus on prostitutes both up close and from slightly farther away; and who is credited with proffering the timeless verity that “beer is proof that God loves us and wants us to be happy.” So much for moral character. Unfortunately, Ben’s failed lobbying prevented the fat gobbler from making it onto the presidential seal, though I do still like to imagine a plump tom turkey with an olive branch in one scrabbly claw and a sheaf of gleaming arrows in the other, as if to say: “I’m a jolly, peaceful old bird, but don’t fuck with me.” I would argue that, given its failure to achieve the status of national icon, the turkey—being innocent of everything save its cowardly squandering of the rare opportunity to peck viciously at the president of the United States—cannot in fact be legally pardoned. And if the annual pardon is both presidentially sanctioned and demonstrably illegal, then it is also necessarily unconstitutional and therefore constitutes legitimate grounds for impeachment.

  My point here is not that a US president should be impeached for pardoning a turkey—though I won’t stand in the way if that’s how it ultimately goes down—but rather that we might benefit from asking what human vanity or lust for power inspired the presumption that we could pardon a bird. On his final day in office, Bill Clinton pardoned 140 people, including a few whose deeds might lead you to conclude, by comparison, that even the turkey sodomizer wasn’t such a bad guy. Although most industrialized democracies on the planet have long since abolished c
apital punishment, more than two-thirds of US states continue to respond to violent crime with the awkwardly violent response of sending people to the death chamber—not to mention the excruciating frequency with which these killings are not even executed properly. And we still aren’t done quibbling about what constitutes torture and whether our nation should sanction its use in extreme circumstances. But, as Thomas Jefferson well knew, it is the political expediency of those in power that defines the extremity of the circumstances. As Jefferson’s buddy James Madison wisely observed, men are not angels.

  I realize this is pretty heavy stuff to include in an essay about pardoning turkeys—and for that I hope I too may be pardoned—but the plain truth that we are so flawed, so very far from being angels, is directly relevant to this story. It is we who burn the village, justify the torture, execute the criminal. How is it that we are so sure of ourselves, so certain about the infallibility of our judgment and authority? I wonder if there is some relationship between our presumption of power and this desire to pardon—even the desire to pardon an innocent, feathered, nonhuman being. I wonder if perhaps we have a vague sense that it is some guilt of our own that must be assuaged: that we, whose power is so often used to judge, might be redeemed by some corollary power to forgive, that exoneration might at the eleventh hour become the bright shadow of a looming condemnation.

  Of course the National Turkey—which, for all we know, might wisely prefer death to Disney World in any case—doesn’t require our mercy in the slightest. It is we who need the bird, desperately so, for through its salvation we are permitted to express our deep human desire to grant amnesty to those who would otherwise suffer. From where I sit it is difficult to determine whether the granting of a pardon constitutes an assertion of power or a relinquishment of it. But for allowing us a momentary, if symbolic, reprieve from our role as judge and executioner, we have ample reason to give thanks to these turkeys—so many thanks, in fact, that it probably is a good idea to be on the safe side and pardon one every now and then.