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November
27, 2002, 10:40 a.m.
Blame
Giving
Some America
critics never take a holiday.
By Jim Boulet
Jr.
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hanksgiving
brings out the worst in some people.
During the Clinton years, the Department of Education even paid for a
study, "Teaching
Young Children about Native Americans," which urged teachers
to "[c]ritique a Thanksgiving poster depicting the traditional, stereotyped
Pilgrim and Indian figure."
The hostility of
some folks to Thanksgiving is based upon their conviction that Indian
culture, as they idealize it, was a socialist
utopia, lacking only national health insurance:
There were two language
groups of Indians in New England at this time. . . . Among the Iroquois,
however, women held the deciding vote in the final selection of who would
represent the group. . . .
These Indians
of the Eastern Woodlands called the turtle, the deer and the fish their
brothers. They respected the forest and everything in it as equals.
. . . Any visitor to a Wampanoag home was provided with a share of whatever
food the family had, even if the supply was low. This same courtesy
was extended to the Pilgrims when they met.
Given their beliefs,
these liberals want to scream at Squanto
(the Indian who helped the Pilgrims) the way most of us do at a clueless
horror-movie character: "No, don't do it. You'll be sorry."
While they idealize the Indians in a way simply not justified by the historical
record, these ever-so-tolerant folks aren't above hinting that the brave
Pilgrims were little more than England's trailer trash. A suggested Thanksgiving
lesson plan urges that students be reminded that "settlers on
a frontier are most often outcasts and fugitives who, in some way or other,
do not fit into the mainstream of their society."
James Carroll's recent
diatribe
against Thanksgiving even degenerates into an attack on Israel and a defense
of a bloody
riot by Nigeria's Muslims over a beauty contest:
[T]he main moral
obligation settlers have upon arrival is to see their arrival from the
point of view of the indigenous.
This is true on
the local scale: Such a shift in seeing explains why a majority of Israelis
oppose in principle most Israeli ''settlements'' in the disputed territories.
And it is true on the global scale as well, since ''settlements'' today
can involve the airways as much as land. Thus, an American-style beauty
pageant, with its celebration of the female as sex object, can be yet
another dumb leper wandering the world without a bell, meaning no harm.
Media and entertainment entrepreneurs have an absolute obligation to
anticipate — and mitigate — the culture-smashing effects of
their interventions.
Funny — when
it comes to the "culture-smashing effects" of homosexual marriage
or mandatory multilingualism, liberals of Carroll's ilk seldom urge proponents
to tread gently. This is because they do believe in good and evil and
some people, including both our Pilgrim forefathers and conservatives
today, are just plain evil.
Because these apostles
of political correctness see the Thanksgiving holiday as a celebration
of unmitigated evil triumphant, they prefer to grind their teeth while
the rest of us concentrate on cooking turkey.
One would hope that
the Blame America First crowd would take a moment to be thankful that
here in America, unlike places like Nigeria, anyone is free to think and
speak freely — even those who prefer to mourn
on Thanksgiving Day.
—
Jim Boulet Jr. is executive director of English
First.
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