This weekend is the unofficial end of summer, a weekend in which we honor American labor for their hard work by making the first Monday of September a national holiday. Sure, many of the people who actually do hard work are still going to be working that day (think restaurant workers, first responders, nurses in hospitals) while the people who already have so much get the day off. It would make sense to me that we could make Labor Day something like the old British Boxing Day, where the servants are waited upon by their lords and masters for one day. Maybe have the doctors go and clean out bedpans on Monday? Executives of Yum! trying to fry up the chicken or make burritos? Maybe not...our world would likely explode if a lot of the stuffed shirts actually had to sweat a little bit.
Sepaking of restaurants, this past week we saw the Stupidest Story of the Year that didn't involve our Dear Leader, at least directly. Cracker Barrel, that old mainstay of countryfied food and a shop with stuff that people who think 'merica! is loved by voting for an old corrupt billionaire who likes to hump the flag occasionally, decided to change their logo. It...wasn't good. Basically they took the mustard and brown color from before and watered it down to something even less sexy than it had been. Likely this was the result of paying some high-dollar PR people some money hoping that they would get young, hip audiences into the story so they might buy rocking chairs or cornhole games after dining on some fried chicken and catfish. Needless to say, this rebranding made some people who have too little to do in their lives really mad.
Where the story goes from amusing to downright stupid, however, was that the right-wing mediasphere decided that Cracker Barrel did all these things because they are 'woke'. Getting rid of the barrel on the old sign, as well as the old dude (his name is Uncle Herschel, we all learned this week) sitting next to it, showed that they are somehow, someway, betraying all that is good about America. Of course complaints of 'wokeism' have replaced 'politically correct' and charges of liberals of being 'snowflakes' as the great whine of the 38%. Liberal calls to be 'woke', that is, to wake up and recognize that there are systemic problems of racism and inequality in this country', have been twisted to the point where being 'woke' is now code for 'anything that makes we True Americans upset'. That is, of course, pure snowflakeism. Thus a company hiring a black man when a white man applied for the job is now greetied with cries of wokeism. Pointing out that climate change is real and that we are harming the planet, wokeism. Any government policies that recognize the value of diversity, equity, and inclusion are now suspiciously woke. And now a company with a wrong-headed idea about how they should rebrand their company is rooted in a desire to be woke and thereby must be boycotted until obese people wanting to kill themselves with satured fat and bankrupt their savings by buying wooden tic tac toe games get their way, of eating at a restaurant with the right kind of conservative logo.
Maybe it was a good thing that on this Saturday of Labor Day weekend I didn't venture outside the house except to get two pieces of junk mail from the mailbox. Catching up on some shows, watching soccer, taking a nap, and having some smoked salmon and wild rice with my wife tonight, was enough for me.
