The Spoilers

In reaction to the bumper crop of newspaper opinion pieces telling us why Thanksgiving is such a horrible holiday, Matt Taibbi has written well. Here’s the meat of his piece:

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 real 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.

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.

We’ve lost touch with our real story, which is about us, not the centuries-old adventures of toffs in wigs. The Founding Fathers may have been scum, but they didn’t just steal a continent from the indigenous residents, they stole one from a British King, which is, come on, hilarious. These revolutionaries — Kurt Vonnegut called them “Sea Pirates” — then drew up a document sanctifying their own pursuit of obscene wealth, flying flags that were strikingly like “Let’s Go Brandon” in sentiment while reveling in the horror they inspired in aristocrats all over Europe. Then, in a move that secured their heist while providing the manpower they needed for expansion, they started opening their doors to castoffs, screwups, and cultists from other countries.

Almost none of us are related to Pilgrims or Founders. Nearly all of us descended from those subsequent waves of weirdos and refugees who came from all over, some not by choice, and forged the real character of our stolen nation. Many of our ancestors had their hands forced elsewhere, from Jews in the Pale fleeing pogroms to Irish escaping famines to Armenians running from Ottoman genocides. Once they got here, they happily planted Sea Pirate flags on their front doors and set about inventing everything from cat litter to alternating current, while mostly refraining from murdering one another. It was an insane setup, but they made the whole thing work, which is a pretty amazing story even figuring in the horribleness, and really what we’re celebrating every November. You have to reduce the American experience to a few ridiculously grim variables, and remove everything from movies to rock n’ roll to monster dunks, to spend today sulking.

I agree with his basic message: Thanksgiving is awesome. But I think he’s being far too kind to Thanksgiving’s detractors. Those who only know Howard Zinn’s version of history are doomed to misunderstand that history and ourselves. What the American colonists and their descendants created was a country that operated without an aristocracy. Implicitly, when you condemn our history you’re nostalgic for the good old days when the local laird did pretty much what he wanted to do. No thank you.

And, frankly, there’s a lot of misplaced romantic claptrap in those reimaginings of American history. I don’t defend genocide by anybody but the reality is that when Columbus first caught sight of the Americas, there were people living there in distinct nations of their own. Contra Rousseau and his Romantic descendants those nations weren’t living at peace with nature and each other. They practiced slavery, rape, murder, human sacrifice, and environmental despoliation without learning them from Europeans. Some of those nations, far from being pastoral (cf. the Navaho and the Apache) lived by preying on their neighbors. Here’s what’s disappeared since the European settlers arrived: slavery, human sacrifice, and slash and burn agriculture. You cannot attack Columbus, Junipero Serra, or Thanksgiving without defending those abominations.

I think there’s a middle ground between romanticizing the Founding Fathers (and European settlement in general) and romanticizing life in the Americas before them, that middle ground consists in embracing the good and understanding the bad, and it’s in that middle ground that we should strive to place ourselves.