One can't help but think of Freud, Jung, Kierkegard and Foxworthy when contemplating the underlying implications of a seemingly innocent game of Whack-A-Mole. What does the mole represent? Is it the eternal struggle of man vs. his own mortality? Is man the mole? Or is his mortality the mole and man is entrenched in a never-ending and futile effort to conquer it? Is there signifigance in the fact that the mole takes a whacking and yet still keeps popping his head back out of the hole? Is this a tribute to man's stubborn tenacity or does it instead imply that we are too ignorant to simply "keep our heads down"?
The phrase, "Whack-A-Mole" finds it's roots in the Latin-American word "Guacamole (Gwok-uh-moe-lee)" which, roughly translated means, "Greasy, grimey gopher guts...mixed with avacado (Ah-vuh-ka-doe)." It is recorded in ancient Aztec texts (try saying that five times fast) that the early American natives practiced a sadistic ritual that involved baiting Gopher holes with scraps of dried fruit then waiting patiently for the timid rodents to poke their heads out of their holes. The Natives would then leap out from their concealment and bash the peaceful creatures over the head with a club fashioned from a large timber crudely weighted with a head-sized stone. They would then gather the "gopher paste" on a flat rock and mix it with mashed vegetables (avacado) and herbs in an earthen-ware bowl crudely fashioned to resemble a sombrero (som-brare-oh) with a crude tortilla (tore-tee-uh) used to scoop the melange for eating.
We still find examples of this dish today in civilized North America in establishments known as Fern Bars (furn-barz), it is called "Chips and dip" (chips-and-dip). Often it will be enjoyed with a cold beer (kold-beer) and is rather delicious.
