While every unhappy family may be unhappy in its own way, Dr Garrett FitzGerald discovered some common genetic traits at Christmas
Thanksgiving in the United States is not always a happy time for families who gather together to thank the relevant deity for the good things in their lives.
One hundred and twenty million of them are very excessively into the fourth-world directorate as an explanation for life. According to Richard Dawkins in his new bestseller The Greatest Show on Earth, over 40 per cent of Americans (and 44 per cent of Britons!) believe that the world is less than 10,000 years old and that man walked the earth with dinosaurs. Evolution is a dirty word, an attack on ‘holy’ books written in the last couple of millennia. The majority of the 40 per cent believe – literally – that the world was made in six days by a celestial being who also planted the fossils in rocks, which he cleverly made to seem to be millions of years old, just to divert the godless scientists of geology, archaeology, history, biology, embryology and genetics into the arms of the lad with the horns, cloven hooves and tail.
The hundreds of thousands of books written by these people cannot be of any account at all because they do not comply with the ‘facts’ in the favourite book. This view is shared by a significant percentage of members of the religions which are based on ‘holy’ books.
Religious groups who accept evolution (and the billions of years the earth has been there) just move the insertion of creation back to the beginning. But why oh why were men designed with nipples?
Family reunions
Thanksgiving naturally comes soon after Hallowe’en. Families across the US get together. But… why? It would appear that it is to take up where they left off before they left home. For many, it is a nightmare. Tara Parker Pope (religion not given, but suspicious last name) of The New York Times has reviewed what goes down at these reunions. It’s not pretty.
One can understand Mark Twain’s views on the subject of the family. He stated that it was very important to have a large extended family — ideally in a town 100 miles away. And that was before cars or airplanes. Read 2,000 miles plus to bring it up to date.
The main event appears to be the Thanksgiving dinner – its preparation and its eating. Often, Granny does the cooking. Typical exchanges might go like this: hyper-reactive grandchild is bitched at because he won’t eat her special ugly-as-sin-looking homemade cookies: “What’s wrong with my cookies, brat?” Red-faced grandchild eats the damn thing and surprisingly likes it, so reaches for another. Gran says, “Do you really think you need to eat another one, Chubby?”
Obviously, Gran’s daughter-in-law now needs to make Gran feel guilty for calling young Adolf ‘Chubby’, who feels guilty for being chubby. Gran now feels guilty. Son – chubby hubby — tells daughter-in-law she’s upset Gran. Adolf feels more guilt for causing Mom and Dad to have a fight. Gran switches off heat for turkey, cries to make everyone feel guilty and retires to her room. Daughter-in-law calls snowmobile taxi to take her to airport with Chubby, but without asshole husband.
Gran feels extra-guilty for ending the marriage, as do daughter-in-law and chubby.
Granddad turns in his grave. Son is left, guilt-ridden, sitting in kitchen and renouncing Oedipus, and clears the festive Coor’s Light. Grabs one of Granddad’s four hundred and twelve guns (for personal protection) and goes out into the snow to shoot antelope and cougar in the sierras. Gets whacked and half eaten by a grizzly, whose evolutionary DNA thrives on the extra nutrition and rearranges one internal molecule to become a man, God willing, down the line. Son/hubby instantly loses doubts about evolution.
It appears from Pope’s investigations that the modern Thanksgiving family’s rows have to do with food and body image. If the turkey gets cooked, the discussion is mainly about weight reduction, diets, calories and anything else that might be guaranteed to spoil the meal and start a fight. The slim look down on the chubby.
Primeval evolutionary stuff to do with pushing the weaker baby bird out of the nest takes hold and all the suppressed and repressed sibling hatreds emerge in technicolour.
Still-living Granddads call for a little hush at the table to invoke the deity. The real unspoken prayer is that half of the assembled won’t live to see the next Thanksgiving and put us all through this again a year from now.
Unfortunately, everybody makes up in the summer and they all get to come for Gran’s lovely cookies next time. Family-related DNA appears to have discarded its process of natural selection.
We have the same thing here – Christmas, it’s called. No doubt the same tensions and carry-on apply, probably more so because of the bountiful use of the substance that halted the evolution of Irish DNA – booze. Like the Americans, we have moved to a culture of body-image fixation, and have now become the fatties of Europe.
There was a time when a drink-accelerated clarity of mind allowed for discussion of Who Shot Michael Collins in a civilised way at the Christmas dinner. Admittedly, it usually ended in a fight. Sometimes, a few shots were fired, but what harm was there in that? Now, we’re reduced to fighting over too much butter on the spuds, size 56 waist in a trousers, and the latest fad diet.
It’s definitely a mutation to have moved from Michael Collins to this.
About Greg Baxter
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