THIS IS REAL. IT'S NOT A JOKE
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?”
MSNBC meanwhile kept us all festive by reminding us, with regard to the now-infamous Pilgrims, that “Instead of bringing stuffing and biscuits, those settlers brought genocide and violence”.
In the space of a generation America has gone from being a country brimming with confidence, to one whose intellectual culture has turned into an agonizing, apparently interminable run of performative self-flagellation.
But the historical self-mortification has gotten out of hand. We’re now living through the moronic inverse: America is such a unique evil, we’re told, so much the standard-bearer for the oppression of innocent peoples everywhere, that human suffering before 1776 is hardly worth mentioning. Or before 1492.
Such mental habits are the fashion now and will definitely put you in a bind on Thanksgiving.
How can I eat turkey and stuffing with a smile, when Columbus massacred the Arawaks?
When the English forced the Wampanoags off their land and made many convert to Christianity?
When Lincoln told Horace Greeley, “If I could save the Union without freeing any slave, I would do it”?
How?
Maybe because you’re more than three years old, and don’t need fairy tales to be real in order to enjoy dinner with family and a football game?
We don’t ask Russians how they can sit around the yelochka every New Year and open presents knowing that Ivan the Terrible used to roast prisoners in giant frying pans, or how they can smoke Belomorkanal cigarettes knowing the White Sea canal is filled with the bones of slave laborers. I think even most MSNBC anchors would agree, that would be stupid.
But we do this to ourselves all the time now, and every year it gets worse.
THIS IS REAL, TOO. IT'S NOT A JOKE EITHER
https://taibbi.substack.com/