I think I'm going to forego the obligatory points to be made about Thanksgiving as a celebration of present-day gluttony and past genocidal exploitation. More than enough has been said about the employment of tryptophan as a soporific agent to muddle the minds of Massachusetts Indians in order to strong-arm them into unfavorable adjustable-rate mortgages and eventually seize all of North America in a brililant four-centuries-long pincer movement of firewater and foreclosure. Who benefits from treading that old track again?
And no, I'm not going to spend any time dwelling on the Black Friday phenomenon and the spinning-up of shopping as bloodsport. Are there some interesting parallels to be made about the simultaneous onset of consumerist mania in the form of Black Friday and blockbuster films in the mid-to-late 1970s and early 1980s? Probably. But the end of the story is always the fall of the Soviet Union, so capitalism wins. Again. Bo-ring.
Mostly I just wanted to assure all of my readership that just because the pope says condoms are sort of sometimes OK, it doesn't mean I'll be rushing back to the arms of the Mother Church any time soon. First of all, it initially only applied to gay male prostitutes, which, come on, considering the structure of the church, is more than a little transparently self-serving.
Plus once you get off the Jesus train completely, it's really hard to get back on. The problem isn't that you can't catch back up, because NOTHING moves more slowly than the Roman Catholic Church, but as you stand beside it and watch it pass, you really begin to appreciate how gaudily overbuilt it is, too lumbering and heavy to efficiently do its stated job, and entirely powered by a combination of extortion and magic. The songs are pretty though.
But I will give them credit for acknowledging that the gays, though still totally an abomination before God, don't actually deserve a slow, painful death by horrifying disease. As an agnostic, I don't really have an opinion as to what the theological ramifications of this are. I just know that given the extra logistics involved, it's going to take a little bit longer now to get a stall in the men's room at the next Knights of Columbus mixer.
Small prices to pay. This is me being thankful.
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PS- As a divorced man, I had the privilege of banging together my first solo Thanksgiving meal. How did I do? Let's just say no one has done this much for turkey since Mustafa Kemal Atatürk.
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4 comments:
A doubter of American exceptionalism and an agnostic.
I'll see you in hell.
You made my heart race when I read, "As a divorced man, I had the privilege of banging..." Imagine my disappointment upon reading it was that kind of bird.
"NOTHING moves more slowly than the Roman Catholic Church" - don't know why but this actually made me laugh kind of hard.
my own personal mother was more-or-less incapacitated with recuperation from major surgery, so I more-or-less slapped together thanksgiving for my family. my dad managed the turkey, under extreme oversight from my mother. but everything else was my handiwork.
it reinforced my dislike of thanksgiving. what a lot of work for such little payoff.
i hope you were thinking of Ataturk while you banged the bird.
LJ: I think it was Jean-Paul Sartre who said "hell is other people." So that means if we make it, there's no way we'll be bunkmates. One of us will get Jerry Fallwell and the other one will probably get someone who knows a lot about Jean-Paul Sartre.
MO: I've cut way back on the poultry erotica since the PTA complained.
KnK: I'll be honest, I think of Ataturk when I bang just about anything.
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