Naturally, this professor’s hypothesis was embraced by the radical leftists at Salon.

Rick Moran of the PJ Tatler has the story.

And the Winner of the Most Idiotic Leftist Rant Against Thanksgiving Is…

Robert Jensen, a journalism professor at the University of Texas at Austin, has made a career out of writing anti-Thanksgiving diatribes. And today, in Salon, he continues his own holiday tradition by bashing Americans for being “hypocrites” and authors of an Indian “holocaust.”

“Thanksgiving is for sociopaths,” he writes. In this case, I would offer the opinion that it takes one to know one.

In other words: Don’t many of us feel just a bit uncomfortable with a holiday that is defined by obligatory family gatherings that often cover up unresolved strife and/or apathy; thoughtless overeating simply because so much food is available; spectacle sports that have become painfully close to Roman gladiator contests; and relentless consumption that often involves buying stuff that many people don’t really want and no one really needs? Of course not everyone in the United States has access to all these markers of affluence, but these Thanksgiving Day routines are more the norm than aberration.

These reflections are not confined to one day; we live in this corrosive culture 365 days a year. For me, much of what is considered “normal” in the United States isn’t very appealing. I think we eat too much cheap food, are spectators to too much cheap entertainment, and buy too much stuff (some of it cheap and some expensive, but all costly to the larger living world). And many people struggle with family dynamics that are stuck in unresolved pathologies which quietly coerce people into ignoring problems for the sake of family “harmony.”

I have long felt that at the heart of Thanksgiving is a denial of reality and an exercise in numbing ourselves, individually and as a culture. I am not claiming that everyone’s celebration of Thanksgiving is defined by these negatives; individual experiences vary widely, of course. But the alienation I’m describing is not hard to understand, and not limited to a few surly people on the margins.