It wasn't guts or guns or glory or even the highly overrated Gadsden
Purchase that made America great. It was a marvelous proletarian legacy
that marked our ascension into the Industrial Age and celebrated
our nation's proud tradition of hasty consumption of any high-sodium,
high-fat, high-starch morsel our families toss into a paper bag or a metal
box. It was the Brown Bag Lunch, and it symbolized our fleeting noon-time
freedom from the ravenous corporate machine. Take that, Mr. Man;
I'm eatin' my headcheese sandwich! Vive le' Brown Bag!
But we have lost our way. The 50-pound metal lunch pail has given way
to the sissified teal insulated mini-cooler (try to look macho swaggering
across a steel girder toting THAT), and the childish wonder of the
school lunchbox died with our innocence (try to picture the Beverly
Hills 90210 Lunch Loader festooned with images of safe sex and
mall-surfing). The plastic grocery bag has supplanted the paper model,
leaving the office diner with a limp lunch sling instead of the tightly
packed, grease-spotted meal in a sack. Thanks to McD's, the
mall food court, and the (erggh) office microwave, the portable
feast that was the Brown Bag Lunch is nearly a thing of the past.
Let us not lose this vital heritage. Repeat with me the
Brown Bagger's Oath for the New Millennium:

That is my lunch - do not touch it, please;
As I consume it, do not ask me work-related questions,
just because I was not wise enough to leave my cubicle for lunch.
I may appear to you a geek, but I am serene in the knowledge:
That I am saving much money as you squander it on
hot, rich restaurant food.
That this Weight Watchers meal has my prescribed two starches.
That my immediate supervisor can witness me hastily shoving
chips into my jowls as I continue to type, as you slackers
cut out for an illegal 67-minute lunch.
That my odds of contracting salmonella from the turkey sandwich
with mayo I forgot to refrigerate in the breakroom are fairly
infinitesimal.
All right. Unwrap your cookie and look in the bag:

Download brbag.zip, and trade me that pudding cup for my pear, okay?
Fine, then. No, I don't have change for the damned Coke machine.