A Kristol Clear Thanksgiving
 
We had a very nice Thanksgiving, as I trust all of you did. Every year, I’m reminded what a fine American holiday it is, and I must say it’s reassuring that Thanksgiving remains as popular as it does. After all, its theme is gratitude, not a prominent feature of today’s American popular culture. And yet we still have the sense that there is a time to express gratitude, to give thanks, interrupting (if only briefly!) our usual getting and spending and accusing and complaining.

 
As I’ve said before, I’ve always thought that the two great American holidays, July 4th and Thanksgiving, form an appropriate pair of bookends, The first celebrates an assertion of human freedom and independence; the second acknowledges the limits of what we can choose or control. Accordingly, Thanksgiving is our preeminent family holiday, while July 4th is our outstanding civic holiday. Together, they form a rounded view of political life, indeed of human life.
 
On a more prosaic note, we had a very good time seeing family, catching up on things, not doing too much work, eating well, and watching football (sorry, University of Michigan fans–what a heartbreaker! You still have the best fight song, though). We stayed at a Dolce hotel near the relatives we were visiting the one night we were away–have any of you ever frequented that chain? It was a perfectly nice hotel, but decades ago some enterprising salesman sold them the weirdest shower soap dispensers I’ve ever seen. This is always good fodder for discussion at the Thanksgiving dinner table when one’s trying to avoid politics. Which we didn’t avoid–since, really, what’s a lively conversation that doesn’t include politics? Illustrating the dictum that all politics is local, however, we did spend more time discussing how much worse the Trump presidency would make New York’s traffic than its effects on America as a whole.
 
Speaking (as we were for a minute there) of the Michigan-Ohio State game, I do want to note that it’s nice that some of these minor “rivalries” are played soon after Harvard-Yale, to try to keep some interest in college football alive after The Game has come and gone. And of course it’s always mildly interesting to see who’ll get to lose to Alabama in the playoffs. Or whether Alabama will go down unexpectedly, à la Hillary Clinton, to an Ohio State… Clemson or Washington team determined to make college football (as opposed to ‘Bama’s de facto pro team) great again? Anything’s possible in this year of Trump….