Guide to safe topics for politics-free holidays

Have you noticed that Thanksgiving has become the default example of a time when conversation can jump the rails?

Here's Colin Jost last week on “Saturday Night Live's” “Weekend Update”: “A county in Florida became the first all-LGBTQ local government in the state's history. For more on this, bring it up to your grandfather on Thanksgiving.”

Thanksgiving is when we fight? That's weird, given the holiday's peaceable origins. (Person holding dish of green beans: “Are you kidding me? Don't you read Howard Zinn? That's a myth, draped over enslavement and aggression. Sixteen years later, the same ‘pilgrims' attacked a Pequot village and burned everybody in it!”)

Maybe don't bring up the holiday's peaceable origins.

We're a little low on topics about which we can politely disagree. But in the period from now through New Year's we're going to need some. Let's make a list.

PROBLEM: Heroes and villains. Based on a scientific study of email I get, I have concluded many Americans have boiled politics down to a set of bad actors besetting us and some good folks who could ride to the rescue. (Usually, this is a Republican vs. Democrat thing, but bear in mind that Hillary vs. Bernie arguments in 2016 were often worse than Mithras vs. Ahriman arguments in the first century A.D. of the Roman Empire, which often ended in bloodshed.)

SOLUTION: Talk about the death of Stan Lee, the founder of Marvel Entertainment. Lee died last week at 95. Lee's huge revolution — and we're still living in it — was to hand superheroes a full emotional palette, as opposed to the unflinching stoicism of DC heroes such as Superman, Green Lantern and Mitt Romney. Heroes were suddenly capable of grief, selfloathing, wryness, joy, angst, ennui. Lee accomplished this almost simultaneously with his artistic bedfellow, Charles Schulz. Just as Lee insisted that people with super-powers would be just as (indeed, probably more) screwed up and vulnerable as the average person, Schulz, in “Peanuts,” said the same thing about children, who had been previously depicted with unvarying Eisenhower Era sunniness. No, they were sad and scared just like the adults. The ascendance of Schulz and Lee followed close on the heels of

Walt Disney's death. Discuss.

PROBLEM: “Ned Lamont will (or will not) plunge this state into deeper financial ruin!”

SOLUTION: Colorful Connecticut governors of the past. Every Thanksgiving should include a reading aloud of Wilbur Cross's famous “time out of mind” proclamation. (I can even get gubernatorial nominee Bill Curry to come to your house and read it, but he wants $100 plus gas money.)

Even better, discuss Charles Wilbert Snow who was (a) governor for 13 days (b) a former Inuit teacher and “reindeer agent” (no idea what that is; maybe he got them gigs in Christmas movies?) (c) partially responsible for the Herman Melville “revival” (which was more accurately the discovery, 20 years after Melville's death in obscurity, of Melville's significance) (d) a published poet and good buddies with Carl Sandburg ( e) a leftist who stumped for “Fighting Bob LaFollette (f ) the great-grandfather of conservative writer Ross Douthat and (g) the person who smuggled probably the first copy of “Ulysses” to arrive in this country.

BONUS TOPIC: I've been told that Douthat and famous actress Lauren Ambrose appeared in the same New Haven Gilbert and Sullivan production while in high school. Discuss.

PROBLEM: Trump. You cannot talk about Trump.

SOLUTION: A game I made up called “Glover, Sutherland, Duck.” The idea is to talk about other Donalds. (No Dons.) For example, Donald Pleasance was the first Blofeld (the white catstroking Bond villain) to fully appear in a movie. (Before that, they shot one guy from the back and used a different guy's voice.) Future Blofelds included Telly Savalas, Max von Sydow and Christoph Waltz. Donald Fagen was in college bands with Chevy Chase before founding Steely Dan. End by reading Donald Hall's November-y poem “Ox Cart Man” aloud.

Then repair to the living room and listen to soothing music. I recommend Ravel's “Mother Goose Suite.”

Try not to think about how much a goose is like a turkey.