Thanksgiving Dinner: Your Best Preview of the 2012 Elections
The morning after the morning after Thanksgiving, every motorcycle and potted tree in Manhattan had been blown over. The streets were swirling pockets of trash. What a disaster! But the whirlwind that has been Thanksgiving will now die, as we face down the death of this heinous year. There are many varieties of disturbing Thanksgiving conversations; perhaps you had at least one of them. Maybe you've just endured one of my favorites, the Sudden Family Surprise Thanksgiving, in which strange secrets about family biology or ethnicity or religion are revealed. These become amusing over time. Perhaps you've had the awful I Realize I Am Old Thanksgiving, in which you realize that, for today's four-year-olds, Lindsay Lohan will be their Marilyn Monroe. But now more than ever, I think, the Horrifying Political Conversation Thanksgiving is far more stunning than discovering that your brother is adopted or that Grandma Christine was a Jew. (Mazel tov, by the way!) Perhaps you've just spent the week breaking bread with perfectly normal-seeming people who, after a few drinks or at least too much exposure to the coasts, have revealed themselves to be, basically, Orly Taitz.
Often this year I have thought that we play the game of "look at that freak!" on the Internet much too often, and I don't mean just the videos of people dressing up their cats, although perhaps those have gone way too far. All during the summer, outrageous videos from town halls and various (insurance-lobbyist-sponsored) demonstrations cropped up. We were alternately amused and horrified. The capstone on this wacky edifice was Addison "Joe" Graves Wilson, Sr.'s outburst of "You lie!" in Congress in September. It seemed to many of us out here, those of us who were reasonably happy that the Bush terms were finally over, that what we were seeing was some radical, reactionary fringe of craziness, suitable for pointing and laughing.
That these spectacles were backed and supported by long-active right-wing millionaires and rich corporations with a stake in the matter of health care reform made us feel safer. (Or at least smugger, to be fair.) It gave these activities a remove from the kind of authority we thought that an actual grassroots movement would convey. That view is incorrect!
Perhaps you learned at Thanksgiving that there are people to whom you are related by blood or by relationship—funny, kind, normal people—that also believe that Barack Obama is a liar, and a fraud, because he is probably not a citizen. Or at least cannot prove that he is a citizen. And that he also should be killed! Though you may be at first surprised that this is a topic for dinnertime conversation at all, there is a larger, lingering shock to that experience. That shock is that you intimately know people—otherwise amusing, interesting people!—who likely believe that our President is just another test of our nation and our patriotism in these End of Days.
It is beyond many of us how anyone can (already!) look with nostalgia at the record of the Bush administration, which started a war under false pretenses that took the lives of nearly 5000 coalition servicemembers, which rushed through an outrageous bank bailout that codified extreme financial inequity in this country, which signed into law the USA PATRIOT Act, a cluster of laws that created, as an intention or a byproduct, indefinite detention for immigrants and actually forced America's librarians into the extreme absurdity of shredding lending records. Some already miss the idea of an administration that so hated the idea of government that they sought to hollow it out and make it inefficient whenever possible.
It's reasonable for the rich, at least, to fear the Obama administration somewhat—they may actually be forced into obeying the Christian demand of supporting the poor. Why poor people in this country, on the other hand, have any reason to despise Obama—well, who knows? But both among the rich and the poor, the idea that our current President is a liar and a fraud has actually taken serious root in our country.
Craziness: it's not just for wingnuts any more.
There is little doubt in my mind now that Sarah Palin will run for President in 2012, with or without Lou Dobbs or whatever popular entertainer is most popular the year after next. In the days that followed Thanksgiving, I was at least talked down off the cliff of believing that she will win in 2012 as well, at least. But out there in America, there are quiet, non-demonstration-going folks who really do believe that the Obama administration, led by a Kenyan or Indonesian impostor and a menace, is creating a great, overarching, population-controlling government.
This holiday, perhaps you were taken by surprise by the quiet, everyday population of birthers, and were stunned into silence—or, at best, shocked, inarticulate stuttering. That's totally understandable. So, for now, the only thing to do is: prepare yourself for Christmas.
Perhaps it's just our terror about the future that makes us so obsessed with the present and enamored of the past.
Perhaps technology has overtaken and exploited our unquenchable desire for novelty and sensation.
Or maybe the combination of time and tech has finally exposed us for the stupid fucks we always were.
One of the great things about being Jewish is that your family doesn't think Obama is a secret Muslim. It just thinks he's a Muslim.
YOU TOO?!
The absolutely unabashed CERTAINTY with which my Dad proclaimed — even before the election! — that, "He went to a madrassa; of course he's Muslim" stunned me to an extent I find difficult to convey.
These Thanksgiving categories are so genius (but maybe not so comforting). I had a #3. It was the old "What's Wrong With Blackface? I Think It's Funny!"
I had a "Why Would That One Jewish Girl in Texas Object to the Marching Band Singing Psalms?" which is worth bonus points when your whole family is motherfucking Jews.
Deep breaths, deep breaths.
Sounds like a harrowing Thanksgiving. My Thanksgiving was tinged with overt racism by a friend of a friend. I was at a loss as to how to respond to this 'new friend'…Talk about inarticulate stuttering!
"That shock is that you intimately know people—otherwise amusing, interesting people!—who likely believe that our President is just another test of our nation and our patriotism in these End of Days."
When you grow up in the South, it ceases to shock you after the first hundred or so times when otherwise normal seeming folks suddenly open their mouths and reveal themselves to be insane pod people. But, yes, it is always depressing.
And unless the Obama administration can turn the economy around for people outside Wall Street and Goldman Sachs, we might indeed find ourselves nostalgic for the Bush years come the new administration in 2012.
The rich fear Obama? Ha. The rich have never had such staunch defenders as the Obama administration and the current Democratic party.
My family's got issues aplenty, but even my 85-year-old German-immigrant devout Lutheran grandmother and ordained minister aunt/uncle are staunch Obama fans. The only heated political discussions we ever have around the holidays is outrage about the fact that Rumsfeld and Cheney aren't on trial in The Hague. I love my family sometimes.
God I love librarians.
Thanks. We love you too.
Word. I still have a LIBRARIANS AGAINST THE PATRIOT ACT pinback. For the time capsule.
These are the times when I'm glad that most of my extended family has died off or have been estranged for so long I don't even know what state they're living in, because they totally would've bought this birther shit.
It wasn't this year, and it might have been Christmas, but my mother did once drop a "oh yes, that's your father's other child" (person we all knew who lived in our town and went to school with!) as though she was pointing out a house she once lived in. Hmm? That, over there? Oh yes, a half-sibling you knew nothing about. You should ask your father about that, dear.
I don't go home for holidays anymore.
Annual family bbq, looking through a cousin's old bar mitzvah photo album, my dad's with a date who's not my mom. No one would tell me or my sister that it was his first wife. That wasn't when I learned he'd been married before, but it was when I learned that the whole family had been charged with never telling us.
That was creepy.
Correction: it's "The War on Christmas" we should be preparing for. I have my missletoe and ammo right here.
I think I still need to be talked down from the Sarah-Palin-won't-win cliff. (But alcohol must be involved.)
"Sudden Family Surprise Thanksgiving" : watch Festen, by Thomas Vinterberg. Best family reunion EVER !
On the other subject, after watching videos on the Internet for too long, you forget that these are real people, sometimes very close to you, not just caricatures. Because, you know, these trolls posting weird and inflammatory commentaries on news sites and blogs, whom you love to ridicule and dismiss as nutjobs (which they are) ? They are flesh and blood and, more often than not, they really believe what they write. So, when you meet one in person and he's family, it's like a slap in the face and sometimes you ask yourself : I am really in the majority, here ? How many people are really sane of mind out there, because if he/she can have these ideas, a lot of other people could.
Happens a lot with 9/11 truthers. You know what I mean.
Bit gloomy, all this.
All I can say is that I'm thankful that my family is sane. I don't think we've ever had a serious discussion of politics. My sister's in-laws, now that's a different story…
Well, there is a type of old person like my grandmother, who has voted (and proudly) for FDR, Ike, JFK, Johnson, Nixon, Reagan, and Obama and sees no contradiction in this voting pattern.
She votes for winners.
I read the last line as: prepare yourself for Christians. To which I thought, OMG how did you know my Thanksgiving was attended by my Opus Dei aunt who does nothing but rattle off the latest Fox News indoctrination messages? Speaks volumes about how I feel about religion.
I had a houseful of anarchists over for Thanksgiving. There was nothing to talk about, and no one did the dishes.
This thing (east coast) looks like that thing (midwest; south).
Also: That tag is depressing because it is both in the past tense and destined to never be used again. :(
Cousin's wedding in Houston, at a Catholic church with a shrine to the unborn next to the altar, just after 9/11. Listened to vows, which, while not in Latin, included the phrase "obey" ("Dad wrote my vows!" said my cousin, referring to her Opus Dei father/my uncle).
Pulled out of the parking lot, headed for reception, behind a car with "Start the Crusades" poster pasted in the back window. "Isn't Houston hilarious? Hahahaha!" my sibling and I chortled.
It was my other Uncle's car.
Cash bar at reception, too.