Here are your pre-Thanksgiving instructions…
…for talking to your progressive friends and relatives who might want to stir things up with you at the Thanksgiving table.
How to give offense without offense being taken. Easier said than done.
At Thanksgiving, I just try to keep my mouth shut when politics comes up. It does no good to argue under those conditions, and everyone at the table with me already knows my opinion anyway. Luckily—very luckily, and I hope my luck continues—politics has been a topic my greater family and I have steered clear of for the last decade or so.
Actually, my generation of the family (a small group, I might add) never really discussed politics very much anyway. It may be because we grew up witnessing recurrent and bitter verbal battles at the dinner/holiday table between the two wings of the family’s older generation—and by “two wings” I mean the Communist pro-Soviet wing versus the liberal Democrat wing. My parents were the latter.
“There are three classes of people: those who see, those who see once they are shown & those who will not see.” Leonardo da Vinci
I simply no longer attend.
May everyone have a happy Thanksgiving celebration. The only political divide in my extended family is the donald divide. A few of my otherwise wise family members, to my disappointment, actually believe the donald is the one.
Well, I hope everyone has a safe and enjoyable Thanksgiving. Rush Limbaugh told his listeners some interesting things about the original Thanksgiving, which he found out when he and his team were doing the research for his children’s American history books (the Rush Revere series, which see).
The Pilgrims, he said, were helped initially by the friendly Indians, but their main problem was that they tried living as a commune: we know this from William Bradford’s writings, inter alia. And the socialistic model didn’t work, so they had to switch to, in effect, free market capitalism, and soon grew so much extra food that they were able to feed the Indians!
And so the first Thanksgiving was a thanks to God for their prosperity (as indeed it was founded to be later by George Washington), not as a thanks to the first settlers (i.e., the Indians). Though they were grateful the natives were friendly.
He also told a very funny fact — the Dutch didn’t “steal Manhattan from the Indians for $24 in trinkets” — actually, the natives conned the Dutch! Because the Dutch settlers gave the trinkets to the wrong tribe, which lived on Long Island, and had no stake in “Manahatta!”
So the Dutch were taken by the Indians. And they later had to pay the Manhattan Indians a good deal more.
Which just goes to show you — Human Nature is Universal.
Happy Thanksgiving, all!
The Rush Revere American history books are a big hit with the elementary school crowd. Limbaugh and his team are trying to counter the lies the Left tells about America by putting out accurate history, in the form of time travel adventures by the title character and a talking horse: If you have kids or grandkids, nieces or nephews, etc., and you deplore the stuff and nonsense they’re being taught in school, check them out.
http://www.rushrevere.com/AdventureSeriesBooks/index.html
They’ve gotten kudos, even from the book publishing establishment types, for being good history.
Through the years, though aging and the distance of moving for work and primary relationships, my “family” has gotten smaller and smaller.
I recreate it with friends and “orphans” without local family, though. (And Colorado is full of people moved here from other states.)
And whether with or without local relatives, polite diversions into politics is mandatory – if only to gently “feel out” where others stand. The parrying can continue another time or place.
I learned this at home, of course, but it was reinforced by a Leftist icon at my university. He wrote a long textbook history on Political ideas and Ideologies (which stayed in print for maybe three decades, and still in India, last I looked), often evincing his Christian pacifist roots.
A learned Marxist-Pacifist (because Quaker – the Society of Friends), he was also a learned scholar whose lectures were annotated bibliographies of the literature. His equanimity also gained the Poli Sci department similar historians of political thought who, after his death, migrated to other universities like Northwestern and Arizona State University, and authored influential textbooks of their own.
Professor Sibley was fond of quoting Emily Post’s étiquette maxim – never to discuss religion or politics – only to rebuke her wisdom: what else is there to talk about? Despite his mid-20th century Marxism, at base, he championed Athens and the Greek polis as his social and intellectual ideal.
Perhaps the end of the Cold War – the Holiday from History Clinton years – diminished the appetite for political philosophy. Or else the virus of PoMo become a cancer killer, dessicating political discussion and over the last decade, political debate. (SEE Hicks, “Explaining Postmodernism,” to the side bar, here.)
Whatever the cause, the decline and now poverty of political discourse is endemic in the US. And I only find the company of my elders, the retired, and the rare younger folks, satisfying to discuss politics at any great depth.
Sometimes I have been rewarded, and even astounded. For example, when my regular opponents can give me concise, even scintillating accounts of my ideas, such as when I’ve had to miss a scheduled book meeting and could only share my thoughts on the reading by email.
That experience is very gratifying.
Ideas used to lead political debate. But now we are all Breitbart, all the time: all politics is downstream from culture.
And therefore we can’t do genuine political debate, as the utter incomprehension by the lame-stream media at the Pubbie debates shows. Unless it follows the NYTimes and Obama by the righteous dispatching of strawmen.
This isn’t worthy of great nation, but is fits well a once great nation, now in decline.