(Here’s a pretentious Thanksgiving post designed to change our blog personality rating.)

Regardless what you believe about the American Puritans who helped lead the way to making this country the worst narcissistic cesspool of jingoistic bubbas the world has ever known, I think we can all agree that the Puritans of early America were whack-jobs. I quote the truth for you as written by Vernon L. Parrington, A.M., Professor of English in the University of Washington, in The Cambridge History of English and American Literature (which is about a century old now, so read in awe):

No other phase of Anglo-Saxon civilization seems so singularly remote from every-day reality, so little leavened by natural human impulses and promptings. Certain generations of Englishmen, seemingly for no sufficient reason, yielded their intellects to a rigid system of dogmatic theology, and surrendered their freedom to the letter of the Hebrew Scriptures; and in endeavouring to conform their institutions as well as their daily actions to self-imposed authorities, they produced a social order that fills with amazement other generations of Englishmen who have broken with that order. Strange, perverted, scarce intelligible beings those old Puritans seem to us—mere crabbed theologians disputing endlessly over Calvinistic dogma, or chilling the marrow of honest men and women with their tales of hell-fire.

Coincidentally, I read this during a time when I feel a stronger ache of the pain in that leavening of natural impulses, and Parrington appears to know nothing of my struggle.