You just know, as surely as the sun rises in the east, that when Thanksgiving Day rolls around (and Columbus Day as well) the usual malignant scolds will be hard at work, planting turds in the harvest-festival punchbowl. They have become pinch-faced, joyless neo-Puritans, ruthlessly seeking out any hint of happy celebration and thankfulness for bounty of harvest and generous fortune, jumping on any display of human fellow-feeling even just having a pleasant time doing things that make the heart glad insisting that such occasions and people are to be condemned as earnestly as Savonarola ever did, piling up works of art to be burnt in the public square. As HL Menken observed, it’s the haunting fear of such people, that “someone, somewhere, may be happy.” It is their grim, chosen, killjoy duty to stamp out such emotions and celebrations, wherever they may be found. So sayeth the current crop of student activists, as reported here: Thanksgiving is “a celebration of the ongoing genocide against native peoples and cultures across the globe.”
Which is a breathlessly sweeping condemnation. Let’s just pound it in relentlessly, with trip-hammer insistence: we actual or spiritual descendants of Pilgrims are “Bad, Bad People, Who Stole Everything From the Indians, and Celebrating Thanksgiving is As Bad as the Holocaust, Almost!” The 20th century practice of allowing elementary school children to dress up as Indians or Pilgrims these days, reenacting a peaceful feast and celebration of a bountiful harvest together seems in the eyes of the censorious to be about on par with dressing up as SS officers and concentration camp inmates. Never mind that dumping on the poor Pilgrims for three hundred years and a bit of warfare with various Indian rather misses the point of you know, celebrating a bountiful harvest as well as grandly oversimplifying history. Never mind the fact that Indians in North America warred on each other with keen enjoyment and no little inventive brutality for centuries. Never mind that according to some accounts, the Wampanoag village and fields adjacent to the Plymouth colony was abandoned, as an epidemic of some kind had depopulated the place two or three years previously. And never mind …
Oh, never mind. Isn’t it more nuanced or is nuance out of style among the ill-educated inhabitants of the educational-industrial complex to consider that on that long ago Thanksgiving, two very different peoples, whose descendants would be at each other’s throats for three hundred years, were yet able to join together for a great feast, to be courteous and friendly with each other, for at least a little while? Can we not settle at table with friends and relations, and simply enjoy a good meal, and appreciate those blessings which we have received, deserved or no? At the very least, can we just smile gently at the censorious scolds and ask them to pass the cranberry relish?
Have a happy Thanksgiving Day. Tell the scolds to get bent. Be happy and have another slice of pumpkin pie – that will annoy them more than anything.
A Happy Thanksgiving to you & yours, Sgt. Mom!
It is strange how joyless those activists have become — and how lacking they are in any sense of personal responsibility. If they believe it was wrong for Europeans to emigrate to the Americas (just as the “native” people themselves had emigrated to the Americas several thousand years earlier), surely it is incumbent on those activists now to get on the boat and go back to Europe? Please!
Since we are not allowed to laugh at anything else these days, let’s laugh at the activists. It is a real hoot to see demonstrators agitating for a $15/hour minimum wage while wearing clothes made by very poor people in faraway lands getting $1/day. Whatever happened to their sense of irony?
Same here. I especially like Congress critter Occasional Cortex with her $3500 suits.
Happy Thanksgiving.
If those activists had an audience it would be one thing but I believe hardly anyone is paying attention to them. See what a college education buys these days?
I wonder about the psychology of those people – is as if they aren’t wracked with guilt over (pick your cause) they aren’t really happy.
This guy was so obnoxious it would take all my restraint to not smack him.
I think the follow up is that police came and he was fined $500 in court.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UwGFgRhJM48
I live in a CD that just elected a Dem because the entire local GOPe hates the Trumpy incumbent and endorsed her opponent. He said over and over and over he would not vote for Pelosi, and won by a few thousand votes after a recount. And I assume if he has a brain he’s looking at the Dem behavior already and not planning to buy real estate in DC, because his chances of re-election after two years of their lunacy is going to be zero.
Brian, I have a theory about the election we just had. I’ll use Orange County as an example. The last two Republican Congress people were defeated by a late surge of absentee ballots. Orange County now has no Republican in Congress.
OC now has a big Asian population and the Vietnamese are two generations from the war which sent their grandparents to California as refugees. Their parents were Republicans remembering how Democrats abandoned them. I have not seen an analysis of Vietnam ethnics’ voting since I don’t live there anymore but I suspect the kids are going left. UC, Irvine, which has a big Vietnamese student population is a center for pro-Palestinian agitation.
Second, there are lots of Hispanics and I would not be surprised if some illegals voted.
Third, there are a lot of GOPe types there. Probably lots of employees of multinationals with connections to China. There are Trump voters like my son and his wife but the GOP is part of the Uniparty in DC. Hillary carried OC in 2016, which shocked me. We moved to Arizona in January 2017. We had already bought our Tucson house but let the seller stay over the holidays.
Lastly, I think we saw a new strategy using absentee ballots. Democrats, I suspect, have targeted absentee ballot voters and have figured out ways to make sure their ballots are filled out and submitted. Technically, that is legal as long as they don’t fill out the ballot and submit it for the voter. I think some of this is going on.
Quite a few of these elections were won narrowly by late absentee votes. In Arizona, the GOP governor was elected with 200,000 more votes than the GOP Senate candidate, Martha McSally. Why ?
After reading a fair amount about AZ there are non-fraud reasons why McSally ran well behind Ducey. Fraud may be pervasive but hundreds of thousands of votes seems a stretch. In no particular order –
Many observers and locals say McSally ran a poor campaign, too heavy on the War Hero angle and too negative. She appears to have been advised by the McCain camp.
Sinema was better known in the Phoneix area than McSally who was from southern AZ. Sinema also had done a good job positioning herself as a moderate in the House. McSally was not the conservative favorite and was lukewarm on Trump.
There’s some statistical evidence that Flake/McCain supporters voted for Ducey then switched to Sinema, probably as a means of blocking Trump.
Christopher B, I agree with most of your comment. I suspect that many Flake voters just did not vote on the Senate at all.
In my post on Bannon, in one video he praises the Democrat GOTV campaign, saying they were more motivated. Of course, in Chicago for 100 years the dead have been motivated.