Please Read David Dark and Think About Thanksgiving.
It's very relevant and welcome back.
Welcome back! I hope you readers enjoyed your holidays. After an extended break, we are back on the trail. The following was written during Thanksgiving time but remains relevant because we tend to frame our unfolding American dramas through a lens that Thanksgiving affirms. This week is less about what I have to say, and more about someone who is still very much alive and is very curious about the lenses we choose to see ourselves through.
This week, I would much rather you spend time with the words below, all by David Dark.
Specifically:
David Dark’s book, Life’s Too Short To Pretend You Are Not Religious.
You could also start with his Substack blog, Dark Matter, where he wrote this essay titled Remembrance Belongs To The People.
Another of his relevant essays is about hysteria, fear, love, and Critical Race Theory: Fear No Theory.
And finally, this one: Concerning Beloved.
Read the above and if you have time, come back for me. When I grow up, I hope to articulate things half as well as him. While we are pointing out people who are still alive who are helpful to how we see things, please see the artist Sarah Masen Dark (his wife), who is also a person I find deeply cool.
This week in the USA we celebrated Thanksgiving. As a holiday, Thanksgiving feels timeless and undying. I assumed - for years- it was some kind of holy American holiday that had been dutifully celebrated ever since the very first Thanksgiving, the one with Squanto and the Pilgrims.
Nearly every aspect of the holiday’s history from the feast, to the date it was observed nationally, the questionable winter clothing choices, and even the beloved turkey, contains a complicated mix of fact and fiction. The holiday functions on several levels, delivering many different things to us. It provides an American origin story, a collective day set aside for rest, family, and gratitude, and, over the centuries, has been employed to promote national cohesion in times of war and unrest.
On social media, we can observe the contradictions of how the holiday is celebrated now, how it has been wielded in the past, and what it all might mean today. There is talk of both genocide and gratitude. This can be uncomfortable for the casual scroller because remembering the ways genocide, theft, and colonization are inextricably woven into the history of the USA is always uncomfortable. For citizens of this country who are still deeply, brutally affected by this history, the day is one for mourning. Both the myth and truth of Thanksgiving hold immense social and national power. How we observe it, the traditions we share within it, and what the narrative allows us to feel about ourselves as citizens fall under what some people would call religious. I just had a passionate, friendly fire fight about this with a friend and realize this is a loaded charge against the holiday. Please stay with me, as Ira Glass says.
Howard Zinn’s book was primarily about the ideas that shaped our country. Loewen’s book was about how we frame and teach those ideas. David Dark writes about everything from Radiohead to the resurrection of Christ. He is in the business of examining our ideas and the many ways we hate (or love) ourselves, our neighbors, and our gods. He often asks readers to consider the stories we tell ourselves, the very stories we use to orient ourselves in time and history.
I think you should read all of the above because when we try to talk about the ideas, priorities, tendencies, and beliefs that shape our lives and our nation, something terrible tends to happen. We find ourselves tripping on the same wires, the whole conversation blowing out and going dark before we can get to the good stuff.
Words like Politics and Religion, and Policy make people squirm at Thanksgiving, and if we are honest, all year long. The essays above and the book Life’s Too Short To Pretend You Are Not Religious offer up some good definitions of these words. What might we find when we examine the altars on which we place our precious time and attention?
Dark is interested in why we react to these words the way we do and how we can put ourselves back on the hook as people who first believe things and then do things. If we can understand the stories we tell ourselves, we can better understand the worlds we make. If we can hold up and turn over in our hands our tv shows, playlists, habits, national budgets, legislation, fears, and hopes, we have a shot at fleshing out what Dark calls the Controlling Story. This is the narrative that makes sense of our world, or as Dark notes, reconciles us to the human chaos all around us.
Thanksgiving is a part of the American Controlling Story. Depending on which characters you empathize or side with, how you name the land involved, and what governmental powers you respect, you end up with different holidays. This plays out as an unadulterated celebration, somber mourning, or even a reappropriated holiday entirely, one that leans heavily into family time and pie, pilgrims be damned. The power of the players in the origin story The Thanksgiving Feast to have any effect on your actions lies in the framing of the narrative. Everyone celebrating or memorializing or gathering in any way is a participant of some kind.
I think Thanksgiving - as a national Rorschach test of our American loyalties/blind spots- can be used as an example to remind us we’re all participating in some religion or politics, all the time. There’s this horrible, infectious assumption floating around that some people are religious and some people are not. That some things are political and other things are not. That SOME people have Controlling Stories, and while others are free and unbiased.
Now granted, in a conversation with a friend this week, I had to concede that the terms “nonreligious” and “apolitical” are used to denote one’s lack of affiliation with an established creed or party. We should have words to denote that kind of independence. But these words particularly allow us to harbor the bad idea that some people have more or less faith or more or less political lives than others. That some people are impacted by ideas and beliefs, and others are less so.
Dark’s writing asks us many questions, often at the same time, but one big one is What’s the controlling narrative in my life? We all choose stories to stake our lives on, stories, as the late theologian Rachel Held Evans said, are worth being wrong about. I particularly find sense in the Gospel and the Spongebob The Musical Album. Both contain narratives that tell me my actions matter, that my neighbors matter, and that there’s always a chance for resurrection. I believe. They don’t have to have the same cultural weight and influence to both make a difference in my Controlling Story.
One of the problems we run into when we look at our American history is this desire to pretend that the legislation that passed didn’t really match anyone’s beliefs. Or that our historic actions don’t line up with any belief. This sounds ridiculous until you start picking out the Controlling Stories offered up by history textbooks. We find ourselves with white supremacist laws without white supremacists. We see misogynist laws and traditions with nary a misogynist in sight. We find gut-wrenching legislation that decimated and crippled Native peoples and no haters of the Natives. We have entire wars over racism and slaves and money and land, and yet almost no one in the textbook is responsible for those ideas and systems. This is suspicious, not to mention unhelpful. It is often so difficult to have a good conversation about what people in the past did and what we should do now. We have a very hard time looking at our own beliefs or even naming them as such. We struggle to recognize that our belief system and our religions are what we do and do not do, not so much what we say or think we believe.
Everyone in some way is religious all the time. Everyone is political all the time. Maybe not partisan or of one established religion. But what do you do and say and think and believe and act on? Dark would say that is your religion, your politics. To leave brunch to join a protest is just as political and religious as staying seated at your table. Not a single piece of American legislation is free of some belief about what we owe each other. The holidays we observe this time of year are obvious ways in which we turn our stories and mixtures of truth and myth into Controlling Stories. It’s a good time to start reflecting on just how accurate those stories are or if they are missing wider, richer context. It’s a good time to ask why and how we do this all the time. This season reminds us that if we can turn our ordinary pilgrims into Fathers with a capital F and moralize a complex past along racial lines, that perhaps we should slow our roll and reconsider the other stories we trot out to justify and explain our present. Maybe we can accept that we are all taking part in shaping and framing and telling this American Story.
David Dark’s writing can help you also joyfully realize that it all matters. He is not about demeaning our human habits. Even the habit to tidy up our story can be used to complicate our story and inject empathy, imagination, and compassion right back into it. All our human lives are full of stories and rituals and traditions, and all of them have the capacity to shift when we find ourselves with new information or a different perspective. We are not fated to end the story how it began. We are not destined to repeat bad or incomplete stories forever. Remembrance, Dark says, is the work of the people. It does not simply belong to politicians who squeeze votes out of it or frightened parents at the PTA. The possibility of something new entirely is always right in front of us.
“[...Our] failures aren’t compressed in an instant. They’re consecutive and slow and well-intentioned, and tracing them well, the comedy and tragedy of it all, will require some careful storytelling, a clear eye, and some redemptively meandering confabulation. Above all, tracing our world out truthfully will involve the abandonment of domineering knowing-ness for the more biblical justness that only lives by faith. Cultural revolutions are always housed in stories. Revolution is story. It will be told.” Remembrance Belongs To The People- David Dark