About the Author
MICHAEL MEDVED is the host of one of the most popular talk-radio programs in the country, reaching more than four million loyal listeners. He is the bestselling author of ten other books, including Right Turns, Hollywood vs. America, and What Really Happened to the Class of ’65? A member of USA Today’s board of contributors, he also writes a weekly column for Townhall.com. For more than a decade he served as cohost of Sneak Previews, PBS’s weekly movie-review show. Medved graduated from Yale with departmental honors in American history and attended Yale Law School as well. He lives with his family in the Seattle area.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
A Tainted Legacy
NO CAUSE FOR CELEBRATION
Why do so many Americans find it so difficult to celebrate their nation’s achievements and blessings?
How did cherished occasions of joy and gratitude become the focus of anguish and controversy?
I confronted these uncomfortable questions in my own backyard when Seattle’s notorious “Thanksgiving Letter” became a brief, embarrassing media sensation.
On November 8, 2007, the stern missive went out to all teachers and staff of the city’s public schools insisting that they should “struggle with these complex issues” surrounding the yearly celebration and avoid, at all costs, “teaching about Thanksgiving in traditional ways.” The bureaucrats who signed the letter worried that without their timely intervention, thoughtless educators might arrange precisely the sort of outmoded, one-dimensional observance of Turkey Day that emphasized inappropriate elements such as pride and reverence.
“With so many holidays approaching we want to again remind you that Thanksgiving can be a particularly difficult time for many of our Native students,” warned the officials (led by a school district honcho who identified herself with the intimidating title of “director of equity, race, and learning support”). To achieve a more appropriate perspective, they directed all staff in the Seattle public schools to consult a list of “Eleven Thanksgiving Myths” prepared by the radical “Native” Web site Oyate.org. The letter urged the educators to “take a look?.?.?.?and begin your own deconstruction,” specifically citing Myth #11:
Myth: Thanksgiving is a happy time.
Fact: For many Indian people, “Thanksgiving” is a time of mourning, of remembering how a gift of generosity was rewarded by theft of land and seed corn, extermination of many from disease and gun, and near total destruction of many more from forced assimilation. As currently celebrated in this country, “Thanksgiving” is a bitter reminder of 500 years of betrayal returned for friendship.
As soon as I read this alarming letter, I began to wonder how earnest teachers might take its suggestions to heart and begin to commemorate this festival of destruction and betrayal with, say, their kindergarten charges. My own appallingly innocent 1950s childhood offered shamelessly sentimental Thanksgiving pageants, complete with tacky Pilgrim and Indian costumes and, on one occasion, a live turkey. On my nationally syndicated radio show I speculated on the way such sweet but silly extravaganzas might be updated to accommodate the hip sensibility of contemporary Seattle. Perhaps the nervous kiddies could now parade onto the stage, appropriately costumed as little Pilgrims and Pilgrimettes, and then, after enumerating the countless crimes of their forebears, they could lash themselves (or each other) with miniature leather whips and wail together in regretful agony. The proud parents would no doubt rise and applaud in tearful, self-righteous appreciation.
Much to the humiliation of those of us who choose to raise our children in the Great Northwest, the story of Seattle’s idiotic effort to turn Thanksgiving into a “day of mourning” became a subject for national debate. After I discussed the issue on the air, the Fox News Channel contacted me to provide a local perspective, and they also sent camera crews to interview local Indian tribes. The Tulalips, who occupy a prosperous, well-organized reservation about a half hour north of downtown (complete with high-end shopping center, resort hotel, and, inevitably, casino), emphatically affirmed their pride in the annual November holiday. Tribal spokesman Daryl Williams explained that “most Native Americans celebrate Thanksgiving in the same way that many other Americans do—as a way to be thankful for abundance and a chance to spend time with families.” The Tulalips love to stage festive communal Thanksgiving feasts at which, in a bow to regional traditions, they serve alder-smoked salmon rather than turkey. Williams told the press: “The spirit of Thanksgiving, of people working together to help each other, is the spirit I think that needs to grow in this country, because this country has gotten very divisive.”
He’s right, of course. The divisiveness, shame, and self-hatred have spread far beyond the damp and moody precincts of Seattle. In fact, the year before our “Emerald City” launched its controversial assault on Thanksgiving, the Associated Press featured an account of an innovative educator at an elementary school in San Francisco, yet another city known for brain-dead trendiness:
Teacher Bill Morgan walks into his third-grade class wearing a black Pilgrim hat made of construction paper and begins snatching up pencils, backpacks and glue sticks from his pupils. He tells them the items now belong to him because he “discovered” them. The reaction is exactly what Morgan expects. The kids get angry and want their things back.
Morgan is among elementary school teachers who have ditched the traditional Thanksgiving lesson.?.?.?. He has replaced it with a more realistic look at the complex relationship between Indians and white settlers.
Stealing backpacks and glue sticks provides a “realistic look” at a “complex relationship”?
Across the country, too many Americans have developed a complex, even tortured relationship with their own past. And like all deeply dysfunctional bonds, this frayed connection rests on a series of destructive lies—sweeping distortions that poison our sense of who we are and what our country means.
Consider, for example, the oddly apologetic May 2007 commemoration of the four hundredth anniversary of the first permanent British settlement in the New World. With both the queen of England and the president of the United States journeying to Virginia to mark the occasion, federal officials took grim pains to tamp down any sense of merriment in the festivities. The National Park Service invested taxpayer money in new exhibits at its “Historic Jamestowne” visitor center, and these displays explicitly shunned the congratulatory messages of prior tributes. “Past Jamestown anniversaries were referred to as ‘celebrations,’?” warned a prominently posted introduction to the Park Service exhibition. “Because many facets of Jamestown’s history are not cause for celebration, like human bondage and the displacement of Virginia Indians, the Jamestown 400th Anniversary is referred to as the Jamestown 2007 Commemoration.”
Another display in the same facility struck Edward Rothstein of the New York Times with its remarkably unbalanced approach: “The Indians, we read, were ‘in harmony with the land that sustained them’ and formed ‘an advanced, complex society of families and tribes.’ English society—the society that gave us the King James Bible and Shakespeare along with the stirrings of democratic argument—is described as offering ‘limited opportunity’ in which a ‘small elite’ were landowners; in London, we are told, ‘life was difficult,’ with social dislocation, low wages, unemployment, etc.”
While official observances scrupulously avoided any overtly festive messages, small crowds of protestors denounced even the subdued themes of the “commemoration.” Demonstrators from groups such as Black Lawyers for Justice and the New Black Panther Party announced their intention to “crash this illegitimate party and pursue the overdue case for Reparations and Justice for the victims of slavery, mass murder and genocide.” The protest leader, Malik Zulu Shabazz, cited “crimes committed at Jamestown which resulted in America being originated on the corrupt foundation of racism, population removal, mass murder, slavery and a litany of crimes against divine law and humanity.”
Mr. Shabazz not only rejects the long-cherished view that American society arose in fulfillment of some powerful, providential purpose but proudly advances the opposite perspective: that the nation’s origins involved a “litany of crimes against divine law and humanity.”
“It’s not just Jamestown,” he told the Associated Press. “It’s what started in Jamestown.”
And what started in Jamestown? Our distinctive civilization. Malik Shabazz and other America haters view the nation itself as a vicious, criminal enterprise that requires radical transformation if not outright termination. In June 2006, Jake Irwin, a student at Evergreen State College in Olympia, Washington, and an outspoken supporter of Venezuelan demagogue Hugo Chávez, told the Wall Street Journal: “My political belief is that the U.S. is a horrendous empire that needs to end.”
POISONING THE PRESENT
Though few of our fellow citizens share this overt hostility to our national project, the big lies about America still circulate so widely that they feed an insecure and angry public mood. Grotesque distortions about the nation’s origins and institutions poison our present and threaten our future. But any attempt to challenge the prevalent slanders will draw scorn as a sign of simple-minded jingoism, while those who teach or preach the worst about America earn fulsome praise for their “sophistication” or “courage.” As a result, our universities and public schools eagerly endorse the cynical assumptions about the country, and alarmist mass media recycle hysterical accounts of imminent doom and corruption.
We worry over anti-Americanism abroad but parrot its primary charges here at home. While objective indications identify residents of the United States as among the most fortunate people in human history, much of the public refuses to acknowledge our blessings be...
