Seeing Problematic Relatives this Thanksgiving? Here's How You Can Change the Conversation.
Don't let Thanksgiving stop you from fact-checking them, holding them accountable, etc.
The think-piece economy has evolved around generalized complaints about how much “Thanksgiving sucks,” thus providing endless nourishment for supercilious whining. One year, I had to drive a rental car to travel 400 miles to a shitty suburban hamlet and ate 12 pounds of food with my mom; I assume this is what Oregon Trail was like, but no one ever had to slip into relaxed Thanksgiving pants from getting dysentery. Going home, to many, feels like a retrograde process, an ignoble devolution that inevitably occasions the brief departures from the glittering New York-D.C. axis.
So ripping on the universal Racist Uncle and ranch houses and big TVs and football while eating starchy and inexpensive staple food has long been a reflexive obligation and a submissive deference to family matters. Now the constant complaints about bigoted relatives have been supercharged and exalted within this posting/attention economy, driven by Upworthy-styled headlines about Changing The Conversation and pointing out problematic behaviors. These narratives rely on magical thinking and a fantastical vision of family life that verges on the mortally depressing, where some boomer’s parroting of half-remembered Tucker Carlson zingers is now the direst of provocations.
Angela Davis reminds us that it isn’t enough to not be racist, we have to be anti-racist. Toxic ideologies often start around dinner tables, so if you are not actively a part of the solution, you are part of the problem. It’s not just your senile grandmother explaining that her xenophobia is her way of dishing out some forbidden truth. She will say something like, I don’t have a racist bone in my body—and I believe she genuinely believes this—and then she’ll simultaneously backpedal and double down with a comment like, It’s not racist if it’s true, which is typically what racists say to justify their racism. However, Angela Davis points out that, collectively, all of our grandparents’ geriatric dementia sharts shape how we vote, how judges rule, how teachers guide their students, how companies hire, how police indiscriminately murder people. While there is certainly a lot of validity to this argument, it also assumes we live in a world where a few facts and a pithy one-liner can compete with Fox News blasting in the background of their homes for 10 hours a day, every day. This is Saul of Tarsus as told by Aaron Sorkin.
A few years ago, I posted a video of my Thanksgiving dinner on Instagram and divulged my grandmother’s blatant homophobia, and I was absolutely rolled in the comments. Faceless, anonymous social justice advocates lectured me about how it’s my job to educate her and check her on her remarks. I experienced the engulfing wrath of tossed-off snark like, Hope you weren’t being a complicit little bitch. My grandmother is 89 with severe Alzheimer’s and I can’t even teach her not to give out her Social Security number and mother’s maiden name over the phone, let alone Dylan Mulvaney. I’m still trying to get the concept of interracial marriage through her head—I won’t jump the gun and teach her about powerbottoms. She’s been on bedrest watching Sean Hannity for the past 10 years, and she’ll watch him for another five until she finally croaks. Death is beautiful. The circle of life is nature’s cancel culture.
American politics has been entrenched in the unprecedented soulfucker phase. Maybe we could wage rhetorical battles over something that would engage the rest of the family instead of lobbing Pardon My Zinger burns at someone who maintains their pig-headed beliefs despite every goddamn data point in the universe telling them that they’re an asshole.
So in the spirit of avoiding political debates with our stupid shitty relatives this Thanksgiving, let’s pick a fight over deep-fried turkeys.
Fried turkey is a travesty. It’s only as flavorful as the surface meat and skin and the rest is just wet and nearly illness-inducing. That’s cool if you also enjoy British cuisine, I guess, but dropping a damp meat bomb into a roiling cardiac drowning pool is no way to adequately feed your grandmother who seems a little too eager to separate the white meat from the dark meat.
Only a garbage society would accept this cheap pyrotechnic albatross. Real Patriots should be fighting the War on Fried Turkeys. It’s not as tendentious or upsetting as railing about the Woke Mind Virus or What Trump Just Did. But this may be more rewarding than acting like a Twitter jockey engaging in the factitious exercise of whining about returning to Darkest Pennsylvania via the contrived avatar of some ghastly relative that most likely exists as a goofy caricature.
This war is winnable, and at least it’s worth fighting.
This is so great. Nature's cancel culture makes me happy.
The year I lived in Memphis I saw my first deep-fried turkey. It was also the year I became a vegetarian. Coincidence? Maybe, maybe not.