First of all, it’s not Mexico’s Independence Day, which is actually celebrated in September sometime. This cool day commemorates the Mexican Army’s victory over Napoleon III’s French forces at the Battle of Puebla in 1862. We were busy doing other things up here at the time, and Confederate forces were occupying the Farm.
As you may recall, the French had quite a spread in North America for a while, from Quebec to Puebla. The Mexican triumph on this day closed that interlude out, and is worth a colorful cocktail to remember. Meanwhile, there is some other stuff going on all over. It is a changing world.
The rains the Lady in Red predicted with precision did not flood the farm, they just blew through, soused everything down and the blue skies and puffy clouds are back. We could talk about that history, with a colorful banner logo with cannons and pageantry, but it has transformed like many of our holidays into an excuse for public daytime incoherence.
Like yesterday, we were forced to go outside the building and down to the loading dock to do our Google searches, and there is so much other stuff going on. Still, we looked up the words again with the first cup of coffee, and we are pretty sure we know what we are talking about, unless we have confused all the new prefixes and suffixes to the words we used to know.
I was chatting with some old comrades this earlier, making sure it was still possible to use some of the old words in the new way. We are captive to a half century of personal history on that. But we were Cold Warriors. We wore the uniform of the nation in the struggle against a single monolithic opponent, the Soviet Union. We bristled with nuclear weapons, both sides, and over more than four decades we went to work with the faint but real possibility that the day could end in something really horrible.
That is why Chairman Socotra opened the meeting noting that confirmation bias could be a real threat to our social order. There was some laughter- the same sort that occasionally bursts out around the conference table when something doesn’t make sense to us, but obviously makes some to whoever thought it up. We had the HR department talk to the custodians about adding new words to the ordinary door markings, checking to see if external birth gender assignments reflected inner personality orientation on the workforce, and what sort of new signage would be required, that sort of thing.
It was no wonder to see this morning that the national birthrate had declined to the lowest in a century. The Chairman apparently believes that re-labeling the door signs may help. A show of hands indicates we are all pretty much on board with that, if we could keep it straight. There was another show of hands, objecting to that characterization, which smacks of paternalism. Or worse.
It could be something Napoleon III would support, so we are opposed. This year’s Cinco falls on Wednesday, which could have a detrimental effect on Thursday’s business meeting. Next year’s will be on a Thursday, which will impact Friday. Cinco de Mayo 2023 is one of the “holy grails” of weekday tequila, since the hangovers will be on Saturday that year. So remember. But today, be merry! We’ll let mañana take care of itself.
Copyright 2021 Vic Socotra
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