HAPPY CIVILIZATION DAY :

Charlie Chaplin's Long Nightmare Has Finally Ended: This Labor Day no one is celebrating workers. (DANIEL HENNINGER, August 30, 2002, Wall Street Journal)

What's perhaps most interesting about the American workforce as we welcome a Labor Day weekend is just how little interest there is in the subject. Ever since the Industrial Revolution began to funnel families to big-city jobs, popularizers and theorists have obsessed over the culture of work.

Some weeks ago I saw a restored print of Fritz Lang's "Metropolis," a fantastic 1927 movie in which an all-powerful capitalist runs a magnificent futuristic city with lumpen workers who toil below ground at horrid, perpetual-motion machines. Ten years later in "Modern Times," Charlie Chaplin's Everyman is still enslaved to the metal monsters.

Some 30 Labor Days after that, nothing much had changed. In 1955 the coal miner in Tennessee Ernie Ford's "Sixteen Tons" can't afford to die because "I owe my soul to the company store." It sold two million copies and every kid in America was singing it. But the definitive gloss on work in America appeared the next year with publication of William H. Whyte's "The Organization Man." For the purposes of contemplating the evolution of paid effort on Labor Day in the 21st century, it's still worth reading Whyte's vision:

"The corporation man is the most conspicuous example, but he is only one, for the collectivization so visible in the corporation has affected almost every field of work. Blood brother to the business trainee off to join Du Pont is the seminary student who will end up in the church hierarchy, the doctor headed for the corporate clinic, the physics Ph.D. in a government laboratory, the intellectual on the foundation-sponsored team project, the engineering graduate in the huge drafting room at Lockheed, the young apprentice in a Wall Street law factory. They are all, as they so often put it, in the same boat." In Whyte's world, work had at least evolved from hell to purgatory.

Today we have Dilbert, the first labor theorist in all history with a sense of humor. I say this is progress.

We should scrap Labor Day and instead commemorate the attacks, with church services, concerts, and patriotic observances. This would serve as a permanent reminder that our freedoms have been paid for with blood and that many in the world would like to extract a higher toll. But it should be a day of thanksgiving, a day when we recognize and celebrate the values that were attacked on 9-11 and refresh our vows to defend them. Posted by Orrin Judd at August 30, 2002 1:51 PM