They (i.e. that universally and uncritically accepted authority, "They") tell and teach us a lot of unadulterated twaddle about the world, about history, about our society. However we don't readily recognize the conventional wisdom and worldview that they impart to us to be twaddle. For a simple reason of course, the imparting begins for us at a quite early age, when our brains aren't yet fully formed and our minds are innocently impressionable. We grow to mental maturity in our society's version of the matrix, aka our society's culture and power structure, having our perception and conception of reality shaped for us in a very fundamental way indeed.
Now then, in our society's particular thought-molding matrix one of the ideological illusions that's deeply inculcated into our consciousness is the Panglossianly patriotic notion that we're blessed to live in the best of all possible politico-economic setups, that the American governmental, legal, and "free-enterprise" system is as good as it humanly gets. Essentially, we're to believe that humanity's long and grueling trek through history has at last reached its dreamt-of destination, that we're actually living in a manmade New Jerusalem in which justice and equality reins. A true land of freedom and fairness and unbounded opportunity in which we all have plenty to give thanks for.
The Puritans who originated the Thanksgiving holiday quite literally fancied themselves to be laying the foundation for the New Jerusalem, for a "shinning city upon a hill". And today we're all still raised to chauvinistically think that our society enjoys the moral high ground they staked out, that we're in a position to look down on other societies and ways of life. American is the most prosperous & perfect polity on the planet, and we should all realize this, keep our carping to a minimum, and be full to brimming with worshipful thankfulness that we live here and not in Russia or Somalia. (Btw, if anyone doubts that we're catechized by the educational and media establishments to buy into the superlativeness of the American system in almost millenarian/messianic terms, recall the triumphalist and grandiose proclamations, around the time of the fall of the USSR, from commentators such as Francis Fukuyama, to the effect that we had veritably reached the "end of history" and could now rest easy with the fact that American capitalism would sweep the world and rein until the end of life on earth.)
Have you gotten this pseudospiritually, sun-shinily patriotic memo yet, the one that says that you're a citizen of the American New Jerusalem and ought to be grovelingly grateful to the powers that be for such great good fortune? That rather than being disloyally disgruntled with your lot, you should be sending up prayers of praiseful thanks to a supernatural suzerain, and to the earthly stewards, the captains of industry and finance and government that he's appointed to rule over you?
Well, yes you have gotten this memo, you began getting it in the cradle and will continue to be bombarded with it by the media and our culture until you go to your grave. And yes, the Thanksgiving holiday is but another occasion to mass issue this memo to the public. The lulling message of Thanksgiving, which subtly mixes nationalism and religiosity, is, after all, that we really needn't continue to say "God bless America", for God has magnificently blessed America, in the form of political liberty and material abundance. The inescapable ideological implication being that our systems of government and economics are hallowed and ideal, that we should conservatively and steadfastly seek to perpetuate them rather than embrace progressive movements that aim at systemic change.
That is, Thanksgiving helps drill into us, with cranberry sauce and pumpkin pie, the passively appreciative mind-set that we're obliged to uphold a divinely endorsed & favored American mode of life. Thanksgiving is nothing less than a sanctified-by-tradition and quasi-religious opiate of the people. Mm-hmm, Tryptophan isn't the only soporific that you're dosing yourself with on the last Thursday of November each year.
Note, however, that I said that Thanksgiving is "nothing less" than an innocent-seeming opiate of the people, not that it's nothing more than that. Of course it's quite obviously a good deal more than that for most people. It's a day for family to come together, perhaps over some distance, to share a meal and to create fond memories; a day to reaffirm certain "wholesome" values; a day to reflect on the personal boons that one has received from the universe; and a day for football fans to enjoy the social experience of watching a game together on the boob tube. To recognize the ulterior purpose of Thanksgiving is certainly not to deny or diminish the personal and spiritual meaning that the holiday has for the majority of us.
But neither should we allow the heart-warming and Norman-Rockwellian spirit of Thanksgiving to seduce us into naiveté. The tag team of naiveté and nationalism are the great psychosocial stumbling blocks to sociopolitical progress. It's a flag-waving, unsophisticated mentalité that staunchly views our flawed and fraudulent system of representative government as authentic democracy, as something that can be fixed merely by kicking the venal and partisan bums currently in office out on their bums and electing a new pack of political puppets. And it's a loyal and uncritical fetishing of American "free-enterprise" that inclines many to gloss over the ample flaws and evils of capitalism and to embrace that system with hearts & minds that then become averse to the very concept of social and economic justice.
Yes, it's precisely the kind of naïve conventionality, the naïve acceptance of politics as usual and capitalism as usual that's instilled by Thanksgiving that disposes people to stay the course that has been set for our society by its Washington and Wall Street ruling elite. Thanksgiving indeed plays its supporting part in conditioning us to think that being "nice" people means not attacking anything wrapped in the flag or the cloak of our American heritage, which includes our inept at guaranteeing life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness public institutions, and our system of private (i.e. elite) ownership of the means of production. Alas, Thanksgiving feeds right into conservatism, in the literal sense of the word; and, for that matter, in the current political sense as well. And this sappy, red-white-and-blue colored, and increasingly right-wing conservatism plays right into the hands of the plutocracy by discouraging radical "left-wing" action and thereby protecting the status quo.
What we need to offset this insidious conservative effect of Thanksgiving is perhaps an anti-Thanksgiving holiday, a Grievance Day! A day set aside for us to focus on and to voice our righteous feelings and dissent about the lack of genuine political representation that we have under our "democracy"; the lack of political, social, and economic justice for working-class people; the obscene inequality of incomes and inequality of power that the 99% suffer from; the inherent tendency of capitalism, i.e. of big money, to co-opt the political process and create a plutocracy in the guise of a "free country"; and the increasingly grievous conditions of unemployment and outright poverty inflicted upon us by our plutocracy.
Perhaps if we had such a radical holiday, a day to foster conscientization and active opposition to the rule of the rich, perhaps if after sedating our consciences on Thanksgiving with patriotic & ideological Tryptophan we woke them up at least once a year with a Grievance Day, well, perhaps this would in some small but not inconsequential way contribute to generating a mass movement working in the bold and progressive direction of abolishing our current system of capitalist dominance and replacing it with a genuine people's republic – no, not one that is inspired by the bureaucratic and dictatorial ilk of "people's republics" that once existed and flopped in Eastern Europe, but rather the real bleeping deal my friends.
So, what do you think is the chance, realistically speaking, of adding such a holiday to the American calendar to counterbalance Thanksgiving? Not very good? I suppose not. But you might wish to give it some consideration while you're chowing down on Turkey in a couple of days. At any rate, happy Thanksgiving folks!
Now then, in our society's particular thought-molding matrix one of the ideological illusions that's deeply inculcated into our consciousness is the Panglossianly patriotic notion that we're blessed to live in the best of all possible politico-economic setups, that the American governmental, legal, and "free-enterprise" system is as good as it humanly gets. Essentially, we're to believe that humanity's long and grueling trek through history has at last reached its dreamt-of destination, that we're actually living in a manmade New Jerusalem in which justice and equality reins. A true land of freedom and fairness and unbounded opportunity in which we all have plenty to give thanks for.
The Puritans who originated the Thanksgiving holiday quite literally fancied themselves to be laying the foundation for the New Jerusalem, for a "shinning city upon a hill". And today we're all still raised to chauvinistically think that our society enjoys the moral high ground they staked out, that we're in a position to look down on other societies and ways of life. American is the most prosperous & perfect polity on the planet, and we should all realize this, keep our carping to a minimum, and be full to brimming with worshipful thankfulness that we live here and not in Russia or Somalia. (Btw, if anyone doubts that we're catechized by the educational and media establishments to buy into the superlativeness of the American system in almost millenarian/messianic terms, recall the triumphalist and grandiose proclamations, around the time of the fall of the USSR, from commentators such as Francis Fukuyama, to the effect that we had veritably reached the "end of history" and could now rest easy with the fact that American capitalism would sweep the world and rein until the end of life on earth.)
Have you gotten this pseudospiritually, sun-shinily patriotic memo yet, the one that says that you're a citizen of the American New Jerusalem and ought to be grovelingly grateful to the powers that be for such great good fortune? That rather than being disloyally disgruntled with your lot, you should be sending up prayers of praiseful thanks to a supernatural suzerain, and to the earthly stewards, the captains of industry and finance and government that he's appointed to rule over you?
Well, yes you have gotten this memo, you began getting it in the cradle and will continue to be bombarded with it by the media and our culture until you go to your grave. And yes, the Thanksgiving holiday is but another occasion to mass issue this memo to the public. The lulling message of Thanksgiving, which subtly mixes nationalism and religiosity, is, after all, that we really needn't continue to say "God bless America", for God has magnificently blessed America, in the form of political liberty and material abundance. The inescapable ideological implication being that our systems of government and economics are hallowed and ideal, that we should conservatively and steadfastly seek to perpetuate them rather than embrace progressive movements that aim at systemic change.
That is, Thanksgiving helps drill into us, with cranberry sauce and pumpkin pie, the passively appreciative mind-set that we're obliged to uphold a divinely endorsed & favored American mode of life. Thanksgiving is nothing less than a sanctified-by-tradition and quasi-religious opiate of the people. Mm-hmm, Tryptophan isn't the only soporific that you're dosing yourself with on the last Thursday of November each year.
Note, however, that I said that Thanksgiving is "nothing less" than an innocent-seeming opiate of the people, not that it's nothing more than that. Of course it's quite obviously a good deal more than that for most people. It's a day for family to come together, perhaps over some distance, to share a meal and to create fond memories; a day to reaffirm certain "wholesome" values; a day to reflect on the personal boons that one has received from the universe; and a day for football fans to enjoy the social experience of watching a game together on the boob tube. To recognize the ulterior purpose of Thanksgiving is certainly not to deny or diminish the personal and spiritual meaning that the holiday has for the majority of us.
But neither should we allow the heart-warming and Norman-Rockwellian spirit of Thanksgiving to seduce us into naiveté. The tag team of naiveté and nationalism are the great psychosocial stumbling blocks to sociopolitical progress. It's a flag-waving, unsophisticated mentalité that staunchly views our flawed and fraudulent system of representative government as authentic democracy, as something that can be fixed merely by kicking the venal and partisan bums currently in office out on their bums and electing a new pack of political puppets. And it's a loyal and uncritical fetishing of American "free-enterprise" that inclines many to gloss over the ample flaws and evils of capitalism and to embrace that system with hearts & minds that then become averse to the very concept of social and economic justice.
Yes, it's precisely the kind of naïve conventionality, the naïve acceptance of politics as usual and capitalism as usual that's instilled by Thanksgiving that disposes people to stay the course that has been set for our society by its Washington and Wall Street ruling elite. Thanksgiving indeed plays its supporting part in conditioning us to think that being "nice" people means not attacking anything wrapped in the flag or the cloak of our American heritage, which includes our inept at guaranteeing life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness public institutions, and our system of private (i.e. elite) ownership of the means of production. Alas, Thanksgiving feeds right into conservatism, in the literal sense of the word; and, for that matter, in the current political sense as well. And this sappy, red-white-and-blue colored, and increasingly right-wing conservatism plays right into the hands of the plutocracy by discouraging radical "left-wing" action and thereby protecting the status quo.
What we need to offset this insidious conservative effect of Thanksgiving is perhaps an anti-Thanksgiving holiday, a Grievance Day! A day set aside for us to focus on and to voice our righteous feelings and dissent about the lack of genuine political representation that we have under our "democracy"; the lack of political, social, and economic justice for working-class people; the obscene inequality of incomes and inequality of power that the 99% suffer from; the inherent tendency of capitalism, i.e. of big money, to co-opt the political process and create a plutocracy in the guise of a "free country"; and the increasingly grievous conditions of unemployment and outright poverty inflicted upon us by our plutocracy.
Perhaps if we had such a radical holiday, a day to foster conscientization and active opposition to the rule of the rich, perhaps if after sedating our consciences on Thanksgiving with patriotic & ideological Tryptophan we woke them up at least once a year with a Grievance Day, well, perhaps this would in some small but not inconsequential way contribute to generating a mass movement working in the bold and progressive direction of abolishing our current system of capitalist dominance and replacing it with a genuine people's republic – no, not one that is inspired by the bureaucratic and dictatorial ilk of "people's republics" that once existed and flopped in Eastern Europe, but rather the real bleeping deal my friends.
So, what do you think is the chance, realistically speaking, of adding such a holiday to the American calendar to counterbalance Thanksgiving? Not very good? I suppose not. But you might wish to give it some consideration while you're chowing down on Turkey in a couple of days. At any rate, happy Thanksgiving folks!
