The Annual Dogfight: Avoiding Political Slaughter at Thanksgiving

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The worst part of Thanksgiving is the dogs. Everyone has that one relative with a German shepherd, two Corgis and a Schnoodle/Pug mix. Some of us have more than one of these relatives, and some of us have many, many more than one. Some of these relatives have named their dogs Bill O’Reilly. All of these relatives arrive at every holiday party.

But you can’t just tell someone that you don’t like their dogs. There is no greater insult around the Thanksgiving table; you may as well have stuffed, dressed and roasted nephew Kenny.

Political beliefs work the same way, and in some ways are more annoying, because there’s no practical limit to how many you can stuff into the same party, and they’re usually invisible, unless Uncle Joe’s got some kind of witty hat (“Republicans Screw The Country, Democrats Usually Raise Taxes”).

And so you’ve got Grandma’s staunch Grand Old Politics jumping on your new dress and cousin Laura’s furious socialist anarchism taking up all the space on the couch and Teddy and Ralph are barking and howling about the liberal media and you can’t just shoot them.

So you’ve got to find a non-violent, pleasant solution to the problem. Just how do you deal with divergently political relatives?

The simple Thanksgiving solution is to compliment their cooking. This isn’t always easy, because people will put anything in a pie these days, and it might be compliment enough to even swallow Aunt Maura’s green bean and rhubarb casserole. But a quick white lie can be an effective deterrent to all-out family feuding (“All I’m saying is that they should learn to speak English — ” “Oh, Maura, I just love the way you’ve pickled the rhubarb!”).

Dropping the ‘willful ignorance’ bomb might sting, especially when this is the year for politically passionate young people, but it’s an acceptable Big Red Button when the situation gets too dire. Refuse to know anything about anyone, anywhere: just for today, you don’t talk about foreign politics, which includes anything outside the circumference of the pumpkin pie.

Alternately, you can simply pretend you’ve got wildly inconsistent political beliefs and simply agree with everything. Play it off as a product of your age: all that multi-tasking us young folk do has taught us to radically re-align our world view every five minutes, and maybe Grandpa will be impressed and give you ten dollars or something.

If you think you’ve got the wit, you can try taking both sides at once. Try playing devil’s advocate, but do it with such dripping sarcasm that your allies think you’re hilarious and your enemies just agree with you. After all, if people disagree with your political beliefs, it’s because they’re stupid, right? They’ll never catch on (“O’Reilly? He’s a genius! He’s got the sexiest pout on TV!”)

Finally, you can try to appeal to the elementary spirit of the day: we should cast aside our grievances and unite in the common spirit of thanks.

But who’s going to buy that?

Sometimes it seems like the only thing keeping the family together is the dogs.