A Liberal Thanksgiving

It’s worth wondering what liberals will celebrate when they sit down to their free-range turkey or yummy tofu loafs. We can be certain that they’ll lift a glass of sulfate-free wine or organic apple cider to family and friends, while the rest of us drink our sulfates and pesticides.

Liberals might, like many of us, root for their favorite pro or college football teams — that is, if they don’t object to the violence of a male-dominated sport.

Otherwise, what will liberals and conservatives have in common this Thanksgiving? Not overeating, as liberals don’t overeat. After all, obesity is a crisis in America, along with a thousand and one other crises that liberals have catalogued.

Liberals won’t be thankful for McDonald’s or Burger King or Nathan’s. Or Little Debbie Snack Cakes or Hostess Ho-Hos or Hershey’s chocolate bars. Those, along with a lot of other enterprises and products, are part of the vast industrial food complex, hell-bent on making a profit from expanding waistlines. It’s about the fat grams, stupid.

Perhaps they’ll celebrate the nation’s economy. Though now sputtering under the benign hand of Barack Obama, the American economy is the greatest on the planet. It has lifted the lives of not only Americans and the nation’s sizable illegal population, but has spread the benefits of capitalism, individual initiative, and creativity across the globe.

But liberals can’t celebrate economic liberty or American economic success. All that economic freedom is a bad thing. Along with their Big Macs and Twinkies, Americans consume too much of the world’s diminishing resources. Take energy, for instance — Americans are energy gluttons. They keep their houses too warm in the winter and too cool in the summer. They drive gas-guzzlers. Some even have powerboats or RVs. Others refuse to put low-flow toilets in their bathrooms and use more than a square of toilet paper at a time.

Go and get more energy? Exploit the natural resources that abound on American soil and off its shores? Use technology to build nuclear power plants? Nonsense. Getting more crude oil or natural gas or coal means raping the environment. And anyone remember Three Mile Island or Chernobyl?

Conventional energy use just spews greater amounts of life-choking carbon into the air. Despite nine consecutive years of global cooling, despite the fraud perpetrated by global warming zealots, liberals know — just know in the marrow of their bones — the world is getting hotter. What are we — twenty years, ten years, or five years from the oceans rising and swamping coastlines? Or are the oceans supposed to boil off? What about all those polar bears dropping from melting icebergs into the briny seas?

Perhaps liberals can celebrate the success of fellow liberal and mountebank Al Gore. The former vice president parlayed his global warming flimflam into a fat bank account and a Nobel Prize. You see, it’s okay for liberals to get rich — or filthy rich, in Gore’s case — selling carbon offsets or hemp clothes or books bashing George W. Bush or Sarah Palin. Or making lots of money on Wall Street, though that’s supposed to be a secret. But Gore has been celebrated so much by liberals that he’s getting to be like the cousin who outstays his welcome.

Here’s an idea. Celebrate President Barack Obama. Yet another Nobel Peace Prize winner, the president can be celebrated for just wanting peace. Better, liberals can celebrate the triumph of lofty rhetoric over action, as personified by Obama. You see, actions can be measured, and liberals don’t fare very well in that department. The economy stinks, public schools in a lot of places stink, the government’s finances stink. Stick with high-blown rhetoric; it never stinks.

Better idea — health care. That’s it. Liberals can toast the president, Harry Reid, and Nancy Pelosi for bullying through, at least to this point, a government-run health care scheme that a growing majority of Americans don’t want and a fair number despise. Yes, if Reid can just move a health care bill through the Senate to conference, then liberals will get what they’ve wanted for decades: Direct direct control over virtually every American’s life. Another dirty little secret is that health care reform is mainly about power and control.

Maybe liberals can just thank God for their blessings. Then again, no. Plenty of liberals either don’t believe in God. God is, after all, a construct of the primitive mind. Ancients needed to imagine God to make sense of events in the natural world, to come to grips with the finality of death. Many liberals appreciate that life is a random chance, a cosmic accident. Here today — poof! — gone tomorrow. Let’s forget about God.

Better to celebrate relativism and its endpoint, nihilism. This is something liberals can jump in with both feet and really celebrate.

The “anything goes, if it feels good, do it” ethos that rose in the mid-sixties is still with us, stronger than ever.

In music and movies and TV, sexuality has no higher value than doing it for pleasure — with anyone and, increasingly, anything. Women are objectified more today than in Marilyn Monroe’s heyday. Violence on the big screen, small screen, and particularly in gangsta rap is gratuitous and rampant. Life, you understand, now imitates (so-called) art. And all of this has spilled over into our communities and turned too many kids into wastes.

With every passing day and week and month and year, the cultural left delivers hammer blow after hammer blow to the mores, religion, conventions, and fundamental decency that has underpinned American society. But given that American society is corrupt, unfair, rapacious, exploitative, gluttonous, boastful, and self-righteous, knocking it down a bunch of pegs is quite a good thing. Creative destruction, liberals might call it.

The rest of us may think it’s about pushing the nation from the pinnacle into the pit. But that’s all relative, isn’t it? You celebrate Thanksgiving your way, and liberals celebrate it their way. A toast to that, anyone?