LABOR DAY 2007

I don’t understand why we call it Labor Day when everybody takes the day off. We might better refer to this first Monday after the first Friday in September as “Men Cook Food Day.” Thanksgiving and Christmas, Easter and Passover and Eid-al-Fitr, the feast that culminates Ramadan, all embrace the image of hearth and home and Mother-in-the-kitchen. But in the United States, Labor Day is the one holiday when men traditionally apply heat to food for their families, which makes it the oddest holiday of all.
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Inside a kitchen the average male considers himself a chief if he can microwave popcorn without starting a fire. But on Labor Day those same men are mystically transformed into alchemists, capable of using a $600 barbecue to transform $75 worth of dead cow into something worth about six bucks at any McDonalds’. If women coked like this on Thanksgiving we wouldn’t have turkey until Easter. And then it would be chicken.
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The barbecue was originally invented to allow cooking on a wooden sailing ship without setting it afire. But the practice didn’t become popularized until the Pirates of the Caribbean invented the first rudimentary barbecue sauce – made up of at least 30% rum - to disguise the usually rancid beef. But why did the modern barbecue become so closely associated with Labor Day?
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Perhaps Sigmund Freud said it best when he wrote, “Sometimes potato salad is not just made out of potatoes”. In short, burning meat is merely the context of Labor Day, but the subtext must surely be the so called male “Y” chromosome, actually a standard issue “X” chromosome with one leg missing. Scientists are still not certain what genes are in that amputated leg, but this hobbling has left the human male abandoned high and dry by the incoming tide of civilization.
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Cave men once gathered in hunting parties to track and kill wooly mammoths. In the process they bonded, sharing not only the bounty of protein but also the danger of becoming wooly mammoth toe jam. That bonding created the identity for men in their maleness, and allowed them to rank each other by accomplishments and toe jamminess. But a cubicle is not a cave and a production line is not a hunting party. And no males have ever bonded over a spreadsheet. Thus Labor Day was born of biological necessity.
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Each September the male of the species ( in North America) answers the call of the wild, and slathers the modern day equivalent of mammoths with the sacred sauce - usually consisting of 10% catsup, 40% beer, 5% mustard, 10% more beer or bourbon, 2% vinegar, sugar and steak sauce, and 60% of any commercially available barbecue sauce. It’s a social analogy in sticky goo.
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The Labor Day barbecue is as much a part of the modern male’s maleness, as a bar pick up line and urinating while standing alone before at a porcelain portal. Both processes tend to be messy and both define being a modern male. Women, in contrast, are much more individualistic, yet they go to the restroom in herds. Why this discrepancy? I have no idea. I am the owner of a “Y” chromosome, and this prevents me from understanding women. But whatever it is I don’t understand I know that it also discourages women from cooking on Labor Day.
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I suspect that if evolution has any say in the matter, it’s only a matter of time before our limping “Y” chromosome trips over something important and human males join the forearms of Tyrannosaurus Rex and Britney Spears’ musical career on the path to extinction.
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So let the kids play with those recalled lawn darts. Invite the neighbors over, even though you think they are annoying. Count on the dog getting diarrhea on your patio. And singe that poor dead cow so that even its own mother wouldn’t recognize it. And know that tens of millions of males all across North America are doing exactly the same thing as you. Revel in your unity while you can, men. It’s Labor Day!
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