We love to personalize. We have our initials embroidered on towels that will fade and thin in a year. The idea of clothing custom-tailored to our bodies—unaffordably, by a human, or now, with computerized manufacturing—thrills us. So why not make our lives our own?
Giving thanks, as Melanie Kirkpatrick reminds us, is an American preoccupation, a powerful religious and civic expression of our nation. Kirkpatrick’s fear is that the left’s attempt to banish gratitude unravels our country by denying it any dimension of humanity except its quest for power.
It makes sense that here, in the land of self-improvement, we should grant gratitude its own (albeit politically confused, deceptive, and tainted) holiday. But I suspect we also need Thanksgiving because we are so bad at it.
Casinos used to buy direct mail lists that identified people with “unquenchable appetites for all forms of gambling.” Now, some manage to buy data for the ATMs on site, and all have computerized loyalty cards that show just when and for how long each customer plays, how much they bet, what times of day they visit, how often they hit that Spin or Deal button.
Growing up, I felt wretchedly sorry for you. Widowed young, with an eight-month-old baby and no work you loved. Years as a secretary, flattering bosses and cleaning up their messes for chump change. But you left at five on the dot and never looked back, never brought work home except to tell funny stories, and then we played and talked.
I appreciate that marriage does not have to be an empty receptacle for property exchange and reproduction. I also appreciate that Gloria Naylor and Toni Morrison believed in love. I have seen marriages in their literature that I recognize: troubled marriages, shallow marriages, commitments based more on double incomes than courtship, relationships aging into dry and empty nests. Marriage is not salvation, or a goal.
What keeps us together, and what tears us apart.
Some might be inclined to think that F. H. Buckley, a Trump supporter and conservative, must be a bit tongue-in-cheek with this. But he is not. He makes a plausible case that the country can separate, despite the Civil War which seemed to cement the states for good, and that it really ought to.
If the role of marriage in the presidency and the public attention it receives has changed, it is more a matter of degree and of detail than any sort of revolution. Marriage has always been an inextricable feature of the presidency.
In the most elevated terms, Milton urges an understanding of marriage altogether spiritual and intellectual, a union nearly without bodies, for in the divorce tracts he repeatedly figures marriage as the joining of rational souls, as the mind’s solace and satisfaction, its source of “comfort and peace,” an apt and cheerful conversation that hedges a man against the solitary life.