Hell yes, have a fight for Thanksgiving

It beats pretending

I don’t know if they told you guys but we’re all supposed to be at war against this holiday. Fox News:

Trump vows not to change the name of Thanksgiving despite cries from the ‘radical left’

“As we gather together for Thanksgiving, you know, some people want to change the name Thanksgiving,” Trump began Tuesday night. “They don’t want to use the term Thanksgiving. And that was true also with Christmas. But now everybody's using Christmas again. Remember this?”

Whither came this particular crop of brain worms? Rick Moran at PJ Media:

There has been a growing movement in the country to change the Thanksgiving Day holiday to “Indigenous People's Day.” Listening to leftists bloviate about how Native Americans have nothing to be thankful for and white people should be ashamed of themselves has become as much a Thanksgiving tradition as football games.

“Indigenous People’s Day”... is he actually talking about the lefty alternative to Columbus Day as a substitute for Thanksgiving?

Moran’s customary confusion is amusing, but as we all know Trump gets his talking points from two sources: Secondarily from the Steve Bannon/Stephen Miller/Hitler-Via-Ouija-Board axis, and primarily from Fox News, which as this Media Matters video shows has been pumping this bilge for all it’s worth:

But to what specific anti-Thanksgiving drive are they referring? The pre-Thanksgiving shitfit from National Review’s Alexandra DeSanctis gives us a clue as to where they’re stretching from:

Over the last several years, media outlets — progressive ones in particular, but increasingly mainstream ones as well —...

That’s a clue, that.

...have begun to treat the holiday as yet another chance to focus on politics. Often, that takes the form of encouraging readers to use the holiday to educate their less intelligent (read: conservative) family members about what’s actually going on in politics and correct their various bigoted opinions.

DeSanctis has her mainstream/ progressive order-of-importance backwards. She cites one pro-abortion tweet as evidence of the “progressive” push to make Thanksgiving a slugfest, but the rest of her citations are from CBS, the Huffington Post, the Associated Press, and other “mainstream” sources. And these aren’t even about beating up Uncle MAGA — one’s about the environmental impact of Thanksgiving travel and waste, but most of the rest are about how to defuse political tensions over the holiday.

In other words, they’re not giving advice about how to spoil the holiday for your relatives; in the spirit of traditional holiday editorial-calendar space-fillers, they play on the reader’s fears that their relatives will spoil their turkey dinner for them, and offer touchy-feely tips for preventing it, with affirmations like “Science has determined that both incivility and kindness are contagious.”

DeSanctis is forced (maybe by a grumpy editor) to acknowledge that a lot of this stuff is “advice for handling Thanksgiving’s political debates” rather than socialist indoctrination. But propagandists have to do holiday space-fillers, too, and where the normies’ audience seeks protection from bad vibes, DeSanctis’ audience seeks justification of their hatred of libtards, so there’s guff about “progressives’ inability to concede that conservatives might have anything of merit to add to a political discussion” and how “a group that is vastly overrepresented in our media” — she’s not talking about Trump voters in diners, amazingly, but about liberals — think that “absolutely everything must be focused on politics.”

However: One thing the mainstream press is too busy filling columns inches to consider, and the conservative press is too busy feeding resentments to consider, is that some of us like to argue. In many families, a heated discussion takes the place of a touch football game or a bonfire, or is enjoyed in addition to. Some may even end in drunken brawls or fist-shaking family ruptures.

I remember when that sort of thing was taken as one of America’s leisure traditions. Remember Errol Flynn fighting his brothers in Gentleman Jim? (“The Corbetts are at it again!”) This obstreperousness was often laid to the Irish, but as with many our antique American bigotries I think it was a back-door way for the rest of the nation to celebrate the tendency: We may have come a ways as a nation and assumed daintier manners, but sure an’ begorrah them Mickies love a good donnybrook, and we know just how they feel!

But that was before the therapeutic revolution, which encouraged us to reexamine and reverse such violent and contentious approaches to interpersonal relations. This has been good in a lot of ways, and I shudder to think how much deadlier our gun-crazy age would be if we didn’t have some tradition of anger management and conflict resolution.

But while it has spared us some senseless violence, it has not kept us from violent disagreement — obviously! Our tempers still flare, but we have learned some restraint, at least face to face. Which may explain why many of us retreat to the cover of social media to act like total psychos — and why many of us use that same social media to insulate ourselves from conflicting opinions. We suffer not only from our disagreements, but from confusion as to how to cope with them.

So I say that, if you love your family — whether it’s the gooey sort of love you see in Hallmark movies, or more like the conficted-but-convicted kind I suspect is more common — it’s better that you fight and get it all out in the open than sit around stifling it like it’s a bad fart you don’t want to let out at a funeral. I don’t give a fuck about the pilgrims — fucking sanctimonious roundheads were the ruin of this continent — but I do love America and one of our freedoms that I cherish most is the right to tell your old man he’s a fucking fascist asshole and what’s he got to say to that. Hopefully you and he have the smarts to get that over with during the appetizer course. But in any event don’t let the civility cops ruin your Thanksgiving.