My dad passed about a year-and-a-half ago.
I miss him terribly, especially around the holidays. Since I moved out of the house for college, the times of the year I used to see him the most were Thanksgiving and Christmas.
I am the cook in my family and I would always do a huge spread. My dad was never a turkey fan so I always made him a duck for Thanksgiving.
My dad was an attorney and did a lot of work in state and federal regulatory law, so he was big into politics as well. He raised me with the thought that I would become an attorney like him so we used to argue politics for sport.
We’re doing Thanksgiving at my house again. My father-in-law is visiting us. I like my father-in-law and he is always welcome. My son loves playing with grandpa, but it still is difficult knowing that he’s not going to grow up with memories of my father.
So when I check my morning news feed and I come across this article from GQ magazine, I got so mad I thought I was going to have a stroke.
It’s Your Civic Duty to Ruin Thanksgiving by Bringing Up Trump.
The very first sentence in the article is “This Turkey Day, consider making life HELL for a few of your relatives.”
The author, Joe Berkowitz, decided to prove in roughly 1,100 words that he is one of the worst sons and worst people currently working in America.
He opens talking about Thanksgiving 2016.
I was lucky, kind of. Both my family and my wife’s family were Hillary supporters. But we spent Thanksgiving 2016 at my parents’ house in Asheville, North Carolina—a city which, despite its Portlandia-esque sensibilities, was nestled in deep red territory. Walking around downtown, I saw more sentient MAGA hats in a few hours than I had in three long post-election weeks in New York. Right away, my dad informed me that some Trump supporter friends would be joining our Thanksgiving dinner. He assured me he’d politely asked them not to talk politics, and encouraged me to follow suit. I spent Thanksgiving dinner trying to guess which guests were the ones who voted for Trump, like the most embarrassing Agatha Christie mystery of all time.
Ah, yes, his family is made up of righteous true believers and it was his duty to ferret out the heretics amongst them.
He then runs through a histrionic litany of why Trump is immanentizing the eschaton.
He then concludes:
Any parents still riding the Trump Train at this point have thereby signaled that nothing is sacred. It is time to follow their example. They can’t stand idly by while President Deals tramples every other American tradition and yet somehow expect that Thanksgiving will be normal too. If every other moment of this year is going to be drastically out of whack, nobody should get to pretend that everything is normal for one meal just because that’s what the pilgrims would have done.
If he can’t be happy about the 2016 election, nobody will be happy every again.
Here are a few suggestions for how to ruin Thanksgiving, arranged by ascending order of righteous fury:
Don’t show up. For some parents, your absence will speak louder than any sodden arguments over the density of pumpkin pie. If you can’t even look them in the eye, they’ll know you mean business. Besides, Friendsgiving rules.
Show up and be kind of an asshole. No hugs; only stiff, formal handshakes. During the football game, talk about police brutality nonstop. Take any opportunity to emphasize just how much Bruce Springsteen and the entire E Street band loathes Trump. Come out as an aspiring professional DJ.
Scorched Earth. Not even a handshake; just stare, disgustedly, at their outstretched arms. Build a wall out of mashed potatoes. During the football game, order 10 Papa John’s pizzas—the official foodstuff of the alt right—and use them as pie charts to demonstrate who benefits most from the GOP tax plan. Refuse to be alone in a room with your mom, citing the Mike Pence rule. Call your parents by a Donald Trump nickname of your choosing—perhaps Little Rocket Mom or Liddle’ Dad. Insist on setting a place for Robert Mueller, the way Jews do for Elijah on Passover. Wear a coal miner hat for solidarity. Punch a cornucopia right in the mouth.
He seems to earnestly believe that being a total holiday ruining asshole will convince his family to see the errors of Trump’s ways.
Of course, this is about more than just spite—as satisfying as spite can be in these trying times. This is about potentially chipping away at the ~35 percent of un-budging Trump supporters. Sure, some of them are fully on board with every inexplicable decision, but others may be swayable. They are Fox News devotees who have simply internalized the message that all negative news about Trump is fake news. They know the president is unpopular, but they think his unpopularity is the strict province of haters and losers. It might be different when it’s their own child—who probably isn’t an Antifa supersoldier and who definitely doesn’t have loser genes—weighing in with cold hard facts. Having a son or daughter loathe everything you’ve become is easier long distance; it’s another thing when that kid is staring turkey-carving daggers at you from across the table.
Personally I doubt that will work. Granted my son is only three, but generally temper-tantrums don’t result in him getting what he wants. I don’t mind carrying a crying child out of the toy aisle of Wal-Mart. I’m not rewarding bad behavior.
As a rational person, if everyone else at Thanksgiving was having a good time and the one person there throwing a temper-tantrum was doing so to motivate me to vote for his candidate next election, that’s not very convincing.
He ends with this thought.
If your family is unmoved after a ruined Thanksgiving, though, that’s fine too. After all, next year’s Thanksgiving falls just after the 2018 midterms, and if your true believer parents still feel the way they do now, you might ruin their holiday in another way.
Ah yes, his parents are true believers. They aren’t the ones putting politics above family, making everyone else miserable.
I’m not Trump fan. I prefer him to Hillary, but that’s only because I prefer syphilis to cancer. The Clintons had metastasized through the Federal government and the election of Hilary Clinton would have meant we have reached end stage cronyism. Trump will run his course in four to eight years and go away.
Despite the hysterics of the Left, Trump as of yet hasn’t started building concentration camps for the gays and Jews. He hasn’t set the police to the task of exterminating black people. He hasn’t even managed to make a dent in Obamacare. He not going to cause the apocalypse.
Joe Berkowitz is going to ruin his relationship with his family, destroy life long relationships because of four to eight years of a presidency that will have marginal-at-best Republican efficacy.
This makes me sick and angry at the same time.
There is little I wouldn’t be willing to give up to do another family meal with my dad again.
This fucking piece of shit is willing to throw his mom and dad away over an election?
A fucking election.
And he is recommending that other children do the same.
This is un-fucking-believeable.
Somebody needs to take Joe Berkowitz aside and make sure the only thing his eats for Thanksgiving is his own teeth.
Maybe that will teach him the value of family.
Like this:
Like Loading...
