I’m a big fan of Thanksgiving, one of our few widely and seriously celebrated Holidays that hasn’t been successfully commercialized (unless you count the whole Black Friday thing, which I consider more under the Christmas than the Thanksgiving penumbra).
The discordant note, for a moderately morally conscientious person like me, is the whole history-of-callously-displacing-the-Indians aspect of the holiday, which lefty journalist (and UT professor) Robert Jensen wrote about a few years ago in his classic buzzkill of an essay, "No Thanks to Thanksgiving." He writes:
One indication of moral progress in the United States would be the replacement of Thanksgiving Day and its self-indulgent family feasting with a National Day of Atonement accompanied by a self-reflective collective fasting.
… That the world’s great powers achieved "greatness" through criminal brutality on a grand scale is not news, of course. That those same societies are reluctant to highlight this history of barbarism also is predictable.
… Simply put: Thanksgiving is the day when the dominant white culture (and, sadly, most of the rest of the non-white but non-indigenous population) celebrates the beginning of a genocide that was, in fact, blessed by the men we hold up as our heroic founding fathers.
Jensen is also the author of Getting Off: Pornography and the End of Masculinity, presumably (my review copy is on the way) a buzzkill of a book in which he does his thing of reminding us how one of the things we love (pornography) is built on an edifice of exploitation and cruelty. And as with all of these kinds of arguments, I’m somewhat stymied. My instinct is that there’s something toxic about a politics premised on guilt and shame, but at the same time there’s no question that it’s also impossible to have a humane politics without a sense of responsibility and a movement toward atonement.
Jensen writes, and I think this is almost undeniable:
In the United States, we hear constantly about the deep wisdom of the founding fathers, the adventurous spirit of the early explorers, the gritty determination of those who "settled" the country — and about how crucial it is for children to learn these things.
But when one brings into historical discussions any facts and interpretations that contest the celebratory story and make people uncomfortable — such as the genocide of indigenous people as the foundational act in the creation of the United States — suddenly the value of history drops precipitously and one is asked, "Why do you insist on dwelling on the past?"
I don’t know what the answer is. It’s useful to have uncompromising moral puritans like Jensen calling us to account, but my guess is that a successful politics of atonement will have to offer more to people, in exchange for losing their Thanksgiving, than a slight lessening of the burden of guilt.
Happy Thanksgiving.
