Happy Thanksgiving Diabolical Fam!

A secular, universalist holiday that celebrates unity, togetherness and gratitude and asks only that friends and family come together and feast. I dig it.

Matt Taibbi’s Thanksgiving post today is all about the negative Thanksgiving headlines popping up these days—scolding our nation’s premiere holiday because the much-embellished history of Pilgrims and American Indians feasting together hundreds of years ago has a tragic ending.

This is true, of course. After that fabled feast, the following centuries of European settlement and American expansion into the New World is a sordid tale of land-grabbing and genocide and misery, littered with brutality and betrayal. Manifest Destiny wasn’t all sunshine and roses for the people whose lands were taken, who were carted off to reservations, whose children were sent to boarding schools so they would forget their native tongues and religions and have English and Christianity foisted upon them.

But do we need to make Thanksgiving itself a memorial to all that? We can’t change the past, but we can still use this day to come together and celebrate unity and compassion. We can share pizza with our political rivals and spend an afternoon with family and loved ones, stuffing our faces and playing cards or watching sports.

Winter is coming, after all.

Here’s Matt:

Thanksgiving Day is here, and as is the fashion, it’s taking a beating. “What is Thanksgiving to Indigenous People? ‘A Day of Mourning,’” writes the onetime daily Bible of American mass culture, USA Today. The Washington Post fused a clickhole headline format with white guilt to create, “This tribe helped the Pilgrims survive for their first Thanksgiving. They still regret it 400 years later.” Even the pundits who didn’t rummage in the past in search of reasons for Americans to flog themselves this week found some in the future, a la the Post’s climate-change take on Turkey Day menus: “What’s on the Thanksgiving table in a hotter, drier world?”

He continues:

Where’s all this headed? In the space of a generation America has gone from being a country brimming with undeserved over-confidence, to one whose intellectual culture has turned into an agonizing, apparently interminable run of performative self-flagellation.

Whether or not to enjoy Thanksgiving is not the hard part of the American citizen’s test. Thanksgiving is awesome. Everything about it, from the mashed potatoes to the demented relatives to the pumpkin pies to the farts, is top-drawer holiday enjoyment.

Matt is right. Thanksgiving is awesome!

It’s a lot like Christmas but without the presents and commercialism bogging it down (the real “war on Christmas” is waged yearly by corporations, not by cabals of atheistic secularists).

Better still, it’s a holiday for everyone who wants to take part in it (hell, even Canadians have Thanksgiving, though on the wrong day and in the wrong month).

There’s no religious component to Thanksgiving beyond whatever scraps of American exceptionalism still cling to the vestiges of its feathered past. And while it is essentially a chapter of American folklore, it’s a rather gentle one, like the legend of Johnny Appleseed or Paul Bunyan. (Now I want to watch Disney’s American Legends).

We don’t celebrate wartime victories or mourn defeats on Thanksgiving. We celebrate the dream of unity; it’s a feast day where we raise our glasses to the idea that people from radically different cultures can still break bread together, can still forge ahead together, live in this country together peacefully. Maybe we’ve done a bad job at that over the years, but it’s not a bad dream. It’s important to remember the atrocities of history, absolutely, but it’s just as important to remember the moments of grace, the acts of kindness and peace. All the small triumphs in the face of human nature.

All these depressing, overly-serious hot takes are missing the point and none of them tell us anything new.

Writes Taibbi:

“All this is just a come-down from the high of Reagan-era exceptionalism. The drug has worn off and we’re realizing, in the cold light of sobriety, that we suck every bit as much as other nations. So we’re swinging, as all people with hangovers do, to an opposite extreme.”

Indeed. Perhaps we could strike a balance someday?

Let’s be aware of, and honest about, our history. Like the history of every nation, it’s a mixed bag. Let’s acknowledge the many horrible things that our ancestors did to the indigenous people of the Americas, not just here but in South America and all across the Western hemisphere. Let’s work toward justice and an end of racism and bigotry (and make no mistake, there is still plenty of anti-American Indian bigotry, not to mention enormous challenges facing tribal people on and off reservations).

But let’s also remember that the spirit of Thanksgiving isn’t about bloodshed or bigotry. It’s about the hope for a better world, where nobody goes hungry or suffers alone. It’s about family and friends and turkey and mashed potatoes.

Go be with your loved ones. Overindulge. Bring antacids if you happen to be an unfortunate soul like me who loves stuffing more than any other Thanksgiving dish, even though stuffing is the one dish that gives you heartburn each and every time.

This has been an enormously difficult two years for pretty much everyone not named COVID-19, but here we all are still. I’m thankful that I’m alive to write this post and that my family has pulled through it mostly unscathed, even if we’re all a little worse for wear. I’m thankful we have the miracle of modern medicine and the marvels it produces, like these insanely effective vaccines. We’ve come this far, through the hell of a pandemic that is still raging, and we have much to be thankful for despite how hard it can be at times. Be thankful today, not bitter about a history you had no control over. And be excellent to each other, my droogies.

I’m certainly thankful to everyone who reads and subscribes to this newsletter. Thank you so much for your support. It means the world to me.

Peace.