Surviving the day with conservative relatives

Thanksgiving at Chez Brilliant usually amounts to a day off from work with a preposterously expensive dinner out, followed by a nap. This year, it'll probably be punctuated by slapping some Benjamin Moore paint samples on walls and catching up on backlog of movie reviews that need to be written. It's actually a pretty nice way to spend a day.



And yet, every year, co-workers ask what I'm doing on Thanksgiving, and when I tell them about my planned Day of Quiet Reflection and Overeating, a look of abject pity crosses their faces. Are people really feeling sorry for me that I don't have to spend the day cooking and cleaning up and avoiding confrontations with contentious relatives, or is it more akin to the Wanda Sykes bit about people with children...that they always say that having kids is "a lot of work", and then cast their eyes away and say "...but it's worth it"?



Does misery simply love company?



This year, the annual Festival of Industrial Mutant Dry Bird and Carbohydrates is seasoned with an extra tablespoon of irony: today we celebrate a gathering which brought together a bunch of people who fled their native country because of religious persecution and the people that over the next generations they and their descendants would do their best to annihilate. And this celebration is taking place against a backdrop of our leaders doing their damnedest to turn this country into a particularly odious brand of fundamentalist Christian theocracy, and against the current offensive in Mosul, Iraq, where we are attempting to annihilate another indigenous population.



I realize that most people are just too busy driving or cleaning or cooking to deal with such ironies, and so I'll simply send you over to the pragmatic Joe Conason, who has some useful tips for dealing with your wingnut relatives who, after a few too many Coors Lights, will start waxing rhapsodic about the Golden Era of the American Middle Class that another four years of George W. Bush portends.



Happy fucking Thanksgiving, everyone.