Think it's a joke like the war on poverty? That's what you thought about the War on Christmas. Now it's “Season's Greetings” and “Happy Holidays” and your kids don't know Santa's an anagram for Satan anymore. Wake up! The War on Thanksgiving is the next battleground in the culture wars, and it's terrifyingly real. I should know. I was a culture warrior: I was one of Them.
If I vanish after divulging their plot, tell my story to the world.
The clandestine cartel of Native Americans, vegans, elementary-school teachers and other Pilgrim-haters will not stop at stuffing their anti-Thanksgiving agenda down America's gullet. No, they won't rest until we're all running around in pleather loincloths, giving spirit names to cranberries and refusing to be thankful for anything!
First they took Christmas and now they're coming for Thanksgiving. If you don't stand up for your traditions, mark my words: The next thing you know, they'll take away your Casual Friday and your Laundry Day.
It started in the '80s. After the whole free love/Soviet world-domination thing didn't work out the way we'd planned it, Fake America launched its project to rain all over Real America's holiday parade. Our well-organized multiculturalist militias infiltrated the public-school system and fabricated a smear campaign against America's legendary founding grandfather, Chris “Kringle” Columbus. Using nothing but our “mellow vibe” and “the historical record,” we managed to turn “Discovery of America” into “Encounter with Naked Wood Nymphs” and, ultimately, “The Birth of the National Rifle Association.” In no time, America's children were making paper plates and the traced outlines of their fingers into severed Indian hands instead of turkey plumage. All we had to say was, “Look, it's already a hand.” Phase 1 was complete.
Meanwhile, we launched the massive attack on Christmas that would bring Christians to their knees. This was Phase 2: Operation Nog, our conspiracy to commercialize every aspect of Christmas by drugging Americans with our secret nihilist eggnog and seducing them with psychedelic trees, lead-painted plastic toys manufactured by our Chinese comrades and brown paper packages tied up with strings that contained the first issue of dad's Playboy gift subscription. The disenfranchised majority could do nothing but bend to our will, submitting to the dreidel song, drunken mistletoe tongue kisses and, eventually, total tinselification of their sacred rites.
Once “The celebration of the birth of the baby Jesus” had been transformed into “Never mind Jesus, here's the Sex Pistols and long live Stalin day,” it was time to enter Phase 3 of our communist party-pooping: Thanksgivisceration.
But then, in 2007, thanks to Real America's BFF, Michelle Malkin, I was finally able to throw off the Fake American vale of lies and jump on the gravy boat to salvation.
It was at this time last year on her blog that Malkin announced the beginning of “the annual war on Thanksgiving.”
Through the valiant right-wing underground, she learned that staff members of the Seattle public schools had distributed a memo that used “the holiday to indulge in oppression studies 101.” The malicious memo identified a website (Oyate.org) where teachers could learn about Thanksgiving from a Native American perspective!
Malkin saw through “the complexities” of “promoting respect and honoring the diversity of our students, staff and families”—as the sinister staff members put it—and got right to the heart of the ugly truth: debunking the “myths” of Thanksgiving includes guilt-tripping Real America's precious children into submission:Myth No. 11: Thanksgiving is a happy time.
Fact: For many Indian people, “Thanksgiving” is a time of mourning, of remembering how a gift of generosity was rewarded by theft of land and seed corn, extermination of many from disease and gun, and near total destruction of many more from forced assimilation. As currently celebrated in this country, “Thanksgiving” is a bitter reminder of 500 years of betrayal returned for friendship.Thank God (by which I mean Jesus and not the Pagan idols of the Natives and their Fake American co-conspirators, of course) for Malkin's blaring alarmism. The slippery slope from “Near total destruction” to “Native perspective” to “Informative website” to “educators having access to facts” to “children being taught that they're not allowed to be happy anymore” couldn't be slippier!
She's onto the Master Plan: “It's about guilt-mongering and institutional racism indoctrination… the Blame America narrative.” Michelle knows Fake America wants to force children to “prepare for an Unhappy Un-Thanksgiving.” The plan isn't just to consider the Native perspective; it is to literally make each and every American child cry a salty teardrop river, like the Indian guy in that '70s commercial about littering.
Now that I've been deprogrammed by Malkin and spent a year free from the clutches of the bummer-mongers, my patriotic adoration of Thanksgiving as a happy time has been restored. I understand once more that there is no greater joy in life than slipping into a room-temperature yam-and-marshmallow-casserole-fueled coma and watching hours and hours of football with my cousins.
I am so thankful that I can hardly wait until it's my turn to be forced to say out loud in front of everybody just how thankful I am for something that's hopefully original and not the same thing that everybody else already said they're thankful for.
Wait. Did you hear that? A noise outside the window. They've come for me! And you're next! Better give thanks to Jesus quick before it's too late; he's practically powerless against the Fake Americans!
Write to dak@sdcitybeat.com and editor@sdcitybeat.com.