TARGET: THANKSGIVING!

By Michael J.W. Stickings

You can see the headline at Fox News, can't you? Martial theme music, elaborate graphic, perhaps a mushroom cloud emerging from an about-to-be-carved turkey, an all-American family looking on in horror, white to the core, manifest destiny come undone, exposed at last, the pioneers of American imperialism obliterated by the revisionist blamers.

Wait... what?

Yes, there is war here, there, and everywhere on the American cultural landscape -- and it ain't just Iraq and Afghanistan. No, it's Christmas and Easter and, yes, Thanksgiving.

So says Michelle Malkin. Which means it must be true.

Right?

Mademoiselle Malkin, crackpot extraordinaire, claims to be "all for truthful, historically accurate lessons about Thanksgiving" -- and that's really something, because she isn't for "truthful, historically accurate lessons" about anything else.

She just can't stand the "'diversity'-peddlers" -- you know, all that "guilt-mongering and institutional racism indoctrination," all that "Blame America" bullshit.

Oh. I see.

I don't much care for political correctness either, nor for historical revisionism, but one extreme is often as bad as the other, and the "Blame America" extreme -- and it is an extreme that does not represent most of those who are in some way critical of America's imperialism (for the critics of Thanksgiving are actually a tiny minority) -- is mirrored here by Malkin's extreme.

No, her extreme is much worse -- for her revisionism, the rewriting of history to whitewash America's bloody past, requires the willful avoidance of historical fact, actually, the denial of historical fact.

In this case, Malkin lambasts the Seattle school system for making the rather obvious point that Thanksgiving may not be such a joyous occasion, let alone a celebration, for Native Americans, that, you know, the treatment (genocide) of Native Americans by America's imperial colonialists, may be something of a sore spot.

"With so many holidays approaching," say Malkin's allegedly anti-American foes to their staff, "we want to again remind you that Thanksgiving can be a particularly difficult time for many of our Native students." Is that not true?

Perhaps Malkin should ask Native Americans what they think. She quotes one, but is that one representative of Native opinion on this matter?

For Malkin, that hardly matters. Her point here is to try to score points against her "Blame America" strawmen -- not to achieve "the right balance," and certainly not to tell the truth about what actually happened, the bloody conquering of the continent at the expense of those who were here long before the European settlers got down to business.

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There is no War on Thanksgiving. The "war" is a myth made up by conservatives, just like the "wars" on Christmas and Easter and the flag and whatever other sacred cows they trot out at their convenience. They need these fake wars, these battles in the culture wars that they alone are fighting. Without them -- without their little wars, without their myths, without their designated enemies -- what are they, and what is left?

It's Malkin, it's O'Reilly, it's Limbaugh, it's Hannity, it's Gibson, it's all the rest of that ilk -- pitting us against them, them against us, driving wedges into the soft underbelly of American politics.

Their followers may be ignorant fools, but they themselves feed off the wreckage.

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Meanwhile, most Americans will be getting together with their families, eating turkey, and watching football. Oblivious to America's blood-stained history, oblivious to the cultural warmongering of the right.