Matt Taibbi on enjoying Thanksgiving like a grownup:
How can I eat turkey and stuffing with a smile, when Columbus massacred the Arawaks?... 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?
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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....
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.
... On Thanksgiving one year, I told [a Swedish friend] I was going to the consulate for dinner. “Thanksgiving,” he said. “That’s the one where you killed all the Indians, right?”
“Not me personally, but yes.”
“Bring back leftovers,” he answered.
I guess I am unusual in being descended exclusively (as far as I know) from people who were here before the Founding. I think all my ancestors were here by around the 1740s. Most of them were frontier people, though, neither rich nor powerful.
ReplyDeleteMy ancestors on my mother's side, were also here in the 1700's, possibly even before then. My father's side, however, came over just prior to the turn of the 20th century.
ReplyDeleteSome of my ancestors were brought over in the mid-1600s (indentured servants), some were chased over in the early 1700s (Scots-Irish cattle thieves, um, that is, livestock liquidators), most arrived in the 1830s-1870s (to make money, or fleeing anti-Semitism or the draft, or both.)
ReplyDeleteLittleRed1