Never asks why an orphan-crushing machine exists

I had a pleasant Thanksgiving Day. Sister and Niece came for a few hours. Most of the time we talked, first while Niece created her potato dish, then while we ate. The day was definitely better than the solitary meal of a year ago. Over the last few days I’ve learned more about the original Thanksgiving, one of our national founding myths. This year marks the 400th anniversary of that first one. The actual day may have happened as our myth says – the Wampanoag tribe of natives were a friendly bunch. But after that ... April Siese of Daily Kos delved into some of history. The Thanksgiving celebration in 1637 was to honor colonial soldiers who massacred 700 Pequot tribe members. William Bradford, the colony governor was highly racist, declaring in a journal that God delighted in seeing the natives succumb to the diseases the colonists brought. So modern native tribes use the day as a National Day of Mourning. They march through historic Plymouth and put a white sheet over the statue of Bradford. Another event is held at Alcatraz Island. An Unthanksgiving Day ceremony is held the third Thursday of November. Audie Cornish of NPR spoke with Anita Peters, a leader of the Mashpee Wampanoag tribe of southeastern Massachusetts, and Paula Peters, a historian and cousin to Anita. Some of the things Paula mentioned were the missionaries forcing Christianity on the natives and sending their children to residential schools where they were mistreated and murdered. Their land was taken. Their problems are ignored – missing native women don’t make the news like missing white women do. Yes, we can celebrate Thanksgiving – and acknowledge the real story. Matthew Korfhage of USA Today discussed the history of pumpkin pie in America, which is unknown elsewhere in the world. The story begins with New England abolitionists writing stories that contrasted pumpkin farms with the immoral plantations of the South. So eating pumpkin pie was identity politics. Pumpkin wasn’t all that well liked by the early colonists. It grew fast and offered sustenance, but wasn’t tasty. It served well as feed for farm animals. City dwellers only saw pumpkins in trips to get back to nature – so it gained a noble air of nostalgic connection to the land. With a shift of Thanksgiving as a celebration of autumn abundance pumpkin pie joined cranberry and turkey on the table. The abolitionists elevated the meal to be more godly than whatever Southerners ate. When Lincoln declared the first Thanksgiving in 1863 those in the South declared it a political ploy of Northerners telling them how to live. Pumpkin pie was seen as too Yankee and Southerners refused to eat it. Only after Reconstruction did Southern states embrace Thanksgiving as a way to show they were really American. But they didn’t embrace pumpkin pie until mass marketed pumpkin pie filling came along after 1940. Even then pumpkin pie had to compete with sweet potato pie. Because slaves from Africa and their descendants did most of the cooking they used the yam they knew from Africa, soon substituting the similar colored sweet potato. The dessert I shared with Sister and Niece was chocolate non dairy cheezecake. No pie. Mark Sumner of Kos discussed inflation and the misinformation about it from the New York Times and CNN. First, yes, there is inflation. Prices for consumer goods are higher. However ... Sumner shows several examples of reporters from CNN or NYT listening to everyday citizens complaining about rising prices. It is understandable that citizens might get current and historical prices wrong, such as saying a gallon of milk used to be $1.99 and is now $2.79 – the last time milk was $1.99 a gallon was in 1994. But it is bad reporting to pass on those numbers as truthful representations of current inflation and not offering corrections. In addition, both CNN and NYT discuss the price rises, but don’t mention families are still much better off because of the child tax credit payments they get. Another example is comparing the price of gas now to the prices last year, which were the lowest prices since 2008. Along with that CNN claims gas in some areas of the country has climbed to $7.59 a gallon. Which any website with a nationwide look at gas prices easily shows as false. Sumner repeated his Big Two points, and concluded:

* It treats the exceptional as if it’s average. * It passes along gross exaggerations without correction. In both cases, CNN and the Times avoid directly making false claims themselves. They just let the people they’re interviewing make those claims, and let them go uncorrected. Which makes you wonder how many interviews they went through until they came up with someone who gave them the kind of scare quotes they wanted.

SemDem of the Kos community is annoyed with CNN for a different reason. The network has a regular segment of “The Good Stuff” in which a person performs a heartwarming deed. These include: Home Depot employees building a walker for a two-year-old boy. Fellow teachers donating sick days to a colleague with a daughter with cancer. A 13-year-old granted a Make-A-Wish to feed the homeless of his town for a year. Heartwarming, right? SemDem wrote:

None of these are heartwarming stories. They are sick. Please tell me how the wealthiest nation in the world allows children to starve or tells a mother of a sick child it can’t be bothered to pay for a f**king $100 walker? So I’m supposed to be happy that a teacher had to choose between making a living and his dying child? F**k you! Billionaires got 54% richer during the pandemic—getting an excess of 4 trillion dollars. Why the hell is anyone begging for food or the minimum baseline of health care? Are we that morally bankrupt? Is our plan to feed homeless vets really going to depend on sick children giving up their charity wishes because our government can’t be bothered? I might have to live in this dystopia, CNN, but don’t f**king tell me I should “feel good” about it.

SemDem then quoted a tweet from Anosognosiogenesis that captures the situation well:

Every heartwarming human interest story in America is like “he raised $20,000 to keep 200 orphans from being crushed in the orphan-crushing machine” and then never asks why an orphan-crushing machine exists or why you’d need to pay to prevent it from being used.

As for NYT, Leah McElrath quoted a tweet from their feed that said:

Kyle Rittenhouse’s acquittal has reinvigorated support on the right for armed responses to racial justice protests. To paramilitary groups, Rittenhouse verdict means vindication.

McElrath responded:

Inexcusable framing by @nytimes. I’d say it’s f---ing unbelievable, except they’ve been headed down the road to this moment for a while.