A Very Thanksgiving 2021 Post
This post contains lethal doses of sarcasm if read irresponsibly.
The turkey is carved, the potatoes are mashed, the wine is poured, and Fox is broadcasting faintly from the living room. Let’s face it. The dining table is one of many battlegrounds for America’s soul.
An underappreciated quality of Facebook is that each cringey eagle-strewn boomer meme offers insight into what your racist uncle is thinking in real-time. We’re careening toward the first post-Trumpenreich Thanksgiving, and it’s our time to deliver L after L to our MAGA chud relatives. It’s only karmic retribution after hemorrhaging dozens of IQ points from watching clips of right-wing talking heads blather on about why every undocumented Mexican immigrant should be hunted for sport and ground up into Taco Bell meat.
One study revealed that Thanksgiving celebrations were about 30–50 minutes shorter for Americans who ventured into enemy territory for the holiday than for those who traveled to ideological safe spaces. That’s 34 million hours of lost cross-partisan discourse in 2016. Some might lament the diminished bonding time with their family, but for me, it’s extra minutes to burrow into my couch and bask in the annual Detroit Lions fail fest while scouring for Black Friday deals on cardigans.
The table spread is a Tetris grid of buttery mashed potatoes, apple-filled stuffing, cornbread pudding, collard greens, and a massive molasses-glazed turkey with enough tryptophan to put the wokest Twitter activist in a 50-year coma. Finishing this entire meal in one sitting is a victory against terrorism.
As the aroma of festive gluttony wafts from our plates, my uncle sits down at the head of the table and says, “Happy Thanksgiving! And soon we’ll be wishing each other ‘Merry Christmas,’ because we don’t say any of that PC ‘Happy Holidays’ nonsense in this house.” I hate political correctness, says the guy who’s irked by certain holiday salutations. Any discussion topic is a landmine: farting cows, critical race theory, Brandon, everything.
I’m no cock-eyed optimist. Most people mistakenly think political discussions are Habermasian dialogues where people reasonably suss out their differences and conclude with an Entourage “let’s hug it out, bitch” moment. Anyone who has woken up from this Sorkinized fantasy understands these discussions almost always devolve into a slapdash idiot festival filled with apocalyptic rhetoric that matches the tenor of our times.
Watching my normie lib and conservative relatives go at it is like watching my two biggest hate follows subtweet each other, a mirror inside of a mirror. It’s a horrifying spectacle that makes me want to cheerily power-drill my own knee caps. If you have any boomer relatives, deep down you know they’re going to their grave believing in the old-timey truisms they’ve been sucking out of a gravy hose since Nixon was elected.
I look into my uncle’s beady little eyes and see a quivering old fool who’s offended over people being offended at things he thinks they shouldn’t be offended at, so he dictates to others what they should or shouldn’t be offended at, all while complaining about people being too sensitive these days. He’s already on the ropes, and he doesn’t even know it. I lean forward and say, “Jesus was Arab.” His face becomes totally immobile.
Thanks to meme culture, political debates are now a contest to see who can bury their sincere beliefs under more layers of irony. (Plus, any politico worth their salt knows that posting about the Ghislaine Maxwell trial is the real #resistance). The average American has the attention span of a Hooked on Phonics dropout trolling for their next hit of Fentanyl, so it’s important to hit your opponent with those high-octane zingers. Market demand creates all the corporate diversity initiatives you hate.
Your uncle has maybe four election cycles left in him, and if McDonald’s brings back the McRib during the wrong time of his cardiovascular cycle, odds are 20:1 that he croaks by 2024. Trying to sway his opinion is more useless than a presidential endorsement from the New York Times.
The galaxy brain strategy is to indoctrinate your younger, more impressionable relatives with Marxist propaganda. Yes, your 17-year-old cousin wearing the flat-brim Infinity Gauntlet hat who spends three hours a day scrolling through thirst trap videos on Tik-Tok. That’s America’s future. Start by hitting them with those unofficial Antifa campaign talking points: Not only will Minecraft be real, but you’ll actually work at a real mine; indica blunts will be covered under Medicare-for-All; AOC will nationalize Whole Foods, socialize Coachella passes, and pardon Tekashi 6ix9ine.
Most liberals roll up to Thanksgiving in a Prius. I roll up with praxis.
After a few glasses of wine and a couple of bourbons, my uncle is knee-deep in his signature kids these days! monologues. It’s like eavesdropping on Tony Soprano’s therapy sessions with Dr. Melfi if they both suffered from traumatic brain injuries. He drones on with the typical boomer drivel: “If we cover people’s basic needs, then it will destroy their incentive to work,” he asserts. “This isn’t what our country was founded on!”
Of course, when people make this argument, they’re inadvertently admitting that capitalism is based on coercion. “Well, voluntary labor doesn’t exist if you need to work to not starve,” I respond. “That’s called ‘wage slavery.’ So you’re right — our country was founded on slavery.”
In typical old-man-screams-at-the-sky fashion, he starts ranting about how my brain has been poisoned by Critical Race Theory and I think everything is racist and I’ve succumbed to a victim narrative or whatever half-remembered unoriginal thought he has passively absorbed from Tucker Carlson. Throughout history, the same old men spout the same old nonsense, and those old men died, and the world kept on spinning.
Today’s currency is attention: likes, clicks, shares, DM requests for nudes, death threats in your comment section. I’ve always maintained that the second Trump becomes boring, he’ll lose his appeal. Why even engage with this pig-headed garbage? Why allow them to think they matter in a changing world that they refuse to adapt to? So I ask my uncle a simple question:
“Can you define Critical Race Theory?”
My uncle’s fist slams on top of the table. He stares at me, his face all puffy and pink and veins bulging out of his temple like speed bumps, eyes widened, like Bambi staring down a fleet of 18-wheelers.
“YOUR GENERATION DISRESPECTS HARD WORK AND PEOPLE WHO MADE THEIR MONEY! YOU BLAME EVERYTHING ON RACISM AND YOU THINK TAXING THE RICH WILL FIX EVERYTHING!”
“You can fix a lot, actually,” I reply. “Amazon paid no federal taxes this year.”
My cousin looks over at me and whips out his iPhone, muttering, “c’mon, yes they did.” His thumbs tap away, the blue light reflecting off his eyes. Seconds pass and, “wait, what is this?”
I smile, lean back in my chair. Welcome to the revolution, comrade.
“Hey,” my cousin says a few minutes later. “What’s the deal with QAnon?”
Ok, maybe the revolution is a work in progress.