Wednesday Addams judges your holiday’s history.
Madeline Crabb, Rød America:
Thanksgiving — A time for gratefulness to God
Thanksgiving is a really fucking weird holiday. I mean, I’m not the first one to note this shit, but Thanksgiving has always been more than a little fucked up.
Like many holidays its a pagan feast day run through the xerox machine a couple of times and given vaguely Christian and/or capitalist overtones. It’s supposed to be a day of mindfulness and being thankful for what you have, but the retail orgy that is Black Friday is spilling more and more into it and everyone seems to be trying to do their best to not think too much about the holiday and its implications.
And then, we’ve got the official history, which, yeah, snarky title, but that is kind of how that whole thing ended up, with hundreds of years of genocide, broken promises, and just generally being a dick to the people who had actually been living here.
And that official history gets even more dark when you start to think about why this official history is even raised as “important”. I mean, at best, the much vaunted “first thanksgiving” was just a day (the whole “thanksgiving” thing was an already long established christianization of “harvest feast days” that were supposed to complement fasting periods) largely caused by a bunch of natives justifiably nervous about all the gunfire around their camps and wanting to check up on this “feast” the settlers were saying it was for.
At worst, it was a colony of religious assholes who believed they were entitled to anything good that ever happened to them, so fuck the people who actually kept them from dying. As they were saved from certain death caused by them being religious lunatics who knew nothing about preparing a new settlement for winter by sympathetic natives, they responded largely by many years of just utterly dicking around with the nearby settlements and blaming them for all ills when they weren’t busy blaming them on witches (which often translated to anyone who had favorable land and was speaking out about their being a dick to natives policies).
And then we get to the part where this holiday is used as the excuse to focus on Pilgrims as the “first Americans” and the “true Americans”, blessed by the very natives whose land they stole to represent what we think of as “America”. Despite the fact that they weren’t the first Anglican settlers and weren’t even that remarkable outside of the random importance given to this day.
A day whose modern interpretations are like most holidays products of 1950s suburban advertising. A day by Norman Rockwell painting are supposed to be about family and diversity but just end up meaning anyone who is in anyway non-normative is asked to sit down and shut up and lie about their life so that those who most fit the status quo can go on and on about their regressive bullshit without socially approved counter in the name of “family togetherness”.
But then, even though it’s this whole institution with so much stress and nasty history, it’s got good food and no one seems to care that much, so what use is it getting upset with the whole rigmarole?
As I said, it’s just a weird fucking holiday.
So let’s go to Renew America and let their pre-selected crew of time-traveling Klansmen make this even weirder.
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