I saw the movie In The Company of Men again over the weekend and it touches on a number of themes that have been explored over at Bobvis and here. The basic plot of the movie is that the very examplar of the “alpha male” breed teams up with a passive middle-manager type on a business trip for some extracurricular activity. Both emasculated and angry at women, they decide to find some vulnerable woman, both pursue her, and both disappear into the night when they go back to corporate HQ. The find a secretary that is beautiful, but very self-conscious about the fact that she is deaf.

This post does contain spoilers, so if you’re planning to see the movie soon, skip it.

As the end of the movie approaches, it’s apparent that the passive Howard has truly fallen for the film’s heroine, Christine. Christine, meanwhile, has chosen the charming but nefarious alpha-dude Chad who hides his seething contempt for Christine underneath a charm and social grace Howard is incapable of demonstrating even when he is sincere.

“Can’t you see?” Howard emphatically explains, “I’m the good guy!”

His sweet talk falls on deaf ears in more ways than one. But the fact that Howard still sees himself as the good guy is instructive. In his mind, he was merely the copilot. It’s Chad that was the enemy. And sure enough, Chad is by far the more evil of the two. Chad revels in the mischief while Howard mostly goes along with it until he suddenly sees a self-interested reason not to. Chad may be evil, but Howard is weak enough to serve the same ends.

I was reminded of the Nietzsche. Howard thought he was good because he was powerless. He was powerless in the face of Chad’s charisma and then was too weak to follow through with it, falling in love with Christine because she was pretty, pleasant, and just vulnerable enough to want him back.

“You! You are [expletive] handicapped. Do you think you get to just choose?!”

Don’t you get it, he may as well have said, you’re a damn cripple and I’m the one that’s okay with that!

You’re in pretty dangerous territory when the biggest thing you have in your favor is your willingness to tolerate some aspect of who they are. A rich guy who thinks that a girl from the other side of the tracks should jump at the opportunity to marry into money cause most guys with money wouldn’t look at her twice is likely in for disappointment. Spungen points out that older guys often think they should have a leg up cause they’re older and they’re willing to overlook age.

I’ve personally come close to falling into this trap. I consider myself a reasonably intelligent person and for the longest time I wouldn’t discriminate based on intelligence. Not that I wanted someone dumb, but that I was willing to tolerate a less stunning intellect and I figured that I was smart would be helpful. Boy was I stupid. the couple dim girls I did date were bored to death talking about anything more complicated than the Ross-Rachel-Joey love triangle on Friends.

Most things that we are “willing to tolerate” are things that others appreciate. Some guys would prefer to talk to any of my erstwhile dates about Friends than about anything that I’d like to discuss and they’re probably a more appropriate match. In the case of the movie, another deaf person obviously wouldn’t have a problem with Christine’s deaf person, nor would a lot of people. But even if Howard were the only person on the planet willing to deal with her deafness, that’s still not the basis for a relationship.

Were it not for Chad, it’s quite possible that Christine would have fallen for Howard. He does have a steady job, is congenial for the most part, and isn’t a bad looking guy. But, in the fury of the moment, all that occured to him was that he wasn’t as evil as Chad and was okay with the fact that she was deaf.

The film is several layers of sad and more than a little maddening. This post contains spoilers, but there is relatively little that happens in this movie that you don’t see coming a significant time ahead. That’s not a knock on the movie at all* because it’s a process movie rather than a plot movie. It’s not about what happens but rather how it happens. And how it unfolds, one dreadful and tragic scene at a time.

* – But here’s a knock on the movie: it is the most poorly directed movie I have ever seen, bar none. Heavy dialogue scenes are filmed from afar. Worse yet, the dialogue’s volume is drowned out by whatever else is going on in the scene. A truck passing out back makes more noise than the characters do talking.

Something that I don’t understand:

Sometimes I like to make myself half a sandwich. I take a single slice of bred, put some ham and cheese in there (along with some BBQ sauce or spicy mustard), roll the bread, and eat it. But one is rarely enough. I usually want two.

But if I make myself a traditional sandwich with two slices of ham and cheese in between two slices of bread… I get tired of eating halfway through and don’t want any more.

Tony Woodlief has some really poignant thoughts on the death of Anna Nicole Smith. I honestly don’t know enough about Smith to feel one way or another, but I found it touching:

You wonder how a life can end up like this. What does it take, for a girl born in a little Texas town, whose mother named her Vickie Lynn Hogan (in hope, which is always how we name our children), who had birthday parties and drew pictures for her teachers and whispered little-girl secrets to her friends on the school bus? What causes a girl to become what Vickie Lynn was? Some of the answer is obvious, I suppose — a father who left her, an incapable mother, drugs, alcohol, the usual.

The usual. I have this feeling of complicity that I can’t shake. I wonder if anyone ever offered this girl a glass of water on her long, ugly path from abandoned child to helpless mother, from whore to star, from office joke to a corpse that will be picked over. Did anyone hold out the hand that each of us secretly longs for at some point in his life, often more for the offering than for the help it promises? We long for it because in our hearts we are tired and lonely and wish that someone could just see that this is so, and more, tell us that he sees it. Did anyone ever tell Vickie Lynn?

In addition to eulogy, it’s part sermon — but I don’t think exclusively so.

We’re going to leave the land of Delosa and Deseret and Estacado for a moment and return to the world of Georgia and Missouri and West Virginia. Specifically, we’re going to look at the state of Georgia, its flag, and it’s relationship to the flags of the Confederacy.

Outside the South (and commonly inside it) people have some mistaken impressions about the flags of the Confederacy. The most commonly attributed flag was never actually the flag of the would-be nation:

The above is the Navy Battle Flag, the Southern Cross, the Battle Flag (or an elongated version of it), the Rebel Flag, or the Confederate (Navy) Jack. The recognizable emblem would be used on later flags, but what we consider “The Confederate Flag” has mostly persisted not because it was the official flag of the Confederacy, but rather because it is the most instantly recognizable. The official flag of the Confederacy was considerably more forgettable:

That would be the Stars & Bars, which was the official flag of the Confederacy until people began confusing it with the American flag on the battle field. So they replaced it with a white flag that was subsequently confused with a surrender flag and then, about the time they were actually surrendering, they put a red bar on it.

But enough about the Confederacy for a moment, let’s talk about Georgia. In 1956, Georgia replaced three horizontal bars on their flag with the Confederate emblem. It doesn’t take a whole lot to figure out why, in 1956, Georgia might be so motivated. Flash forward forty years and Georgians are stunned and outraged to discover that their black population doesn’t so much like their state flag including an emblem from an era that, to say the least, was not one they were particularly nostalgic for.

Eventually something was going to have to give, so at the turn of the century they designed what is considered by flag experts to be the most poorly designed flag in history. It allowed the Confederacy-boosters to keep the emblem somewhere on the flag, but kept it as small as possible and part of the old Georgia among a collection of mini-flags below the state emblem. Pro-Dixie whites were angry cause the Confederate emblem was so small. Blacks weren’t satisfied cause it was still there.

So they went back to the drawing board. It was seeming as though it was going to be impossible for the flag designers to come up with something that could please everybody. Then somebody got a clever idea.

Blacks don’t mind it because it doesn’t have the emblem. Pro-Dixie types like it cause it’s their little inside joke. The design of one and the number of stars from the other. Utterly brilliant.

Last week, there was a certain celebrity who died.

Why this person was a celebrity, except for being a train wreck and taking off her clothes for all to see, I don’t know.

I had a few people ask me “how I felt” and whether it was “sad.”

My honest return question, because it was the best way to sum up that I had heard: “If a crack whore dies of overdose, why is it news?”

“Should I take a class to lose my southern accent?” -Ben Folds

Apparently, it would be entirely unnecessary:

The King of Santomas is Elliot Bergman, who founded a high-tech firm that you are all familiar with and many of you have used today. He is a bazillionaire and the quintessential Santomas millionnaire: a liberal eccentric workoholic. Those that live in the silicollege town of Santomas that have not eschewed capitalism altogether want to be Bergman one day. Not only does his company keep the city employed, but his example is the bunny-on-a-stick that keeps people on the treadmill.

The latest hip thing in Santomas is to eat kosher, whether you’re jewish or not. It’s what the cool kids do. Money gives you the opportunity to buy kosher. Buying kosher gives you something to talk to Sally Bergman about when you’re invited to her parties. The other huge thing here is organic food, which is getting bigger everywhere.

In Santomas, money buys status by way of authenticity. Organic and kosher aren’t about the health or spiritual benefits, but rather of being more in touch with… something. It means spending $50 at a vintage store what you could have bought at a second-hand store for $4. It’s about putting your zip code on your bumper sticker so that you can tell everyone that you live in that one zip code that hasn’t been run over by bulldozers and brought up to building codes.

This is in stark contrast to my home city of Colosse, where I suppose a more traditional view of wealth takes hold. Being wealthy means being able to wear not the coolest stuff, but the nicest stuff. You get to eat not at the restaurants that are expensive becuase they’re hip but the ones that are expensive because they flew a chef over from France. Wealth in Colosse means being able to buy a nice house, not an old house in an authentic neighborhood.

I don’t know that either form of wealth is right for me, which is good because it’s unlikely that I will ever be wealthy. Nonetheless, I find the contrast interesting.

News Item: Democratic Presidential candidate Barack Obama is attempting to kick his smoking habit.

My Reaction: Is having a jittery and moody candidate really better than having one that smokes?

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News Item: Not long ago, San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom was caught having had an affair with the wife of a female aid.

My Reaction: Wait, are you saying the mayor of San Francisco is a straight white guy?!

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News Item: Female astronaut was charged with attempted first degree murder when it was revealed that she planned to kill an acquaintance of another astronaut whom she fancied.

My Reaction: If I recall there are something over 10,000 applicants for every open position as an astronaut. You’d think that they would be able to filter out the donkeysong crazies. I’m sure that somebody somewhere is reading this and saying to themselves “Another woman denying an omega male a shot cause she’s hung up on an alpha male.” If you don’t know what that means, power to you.

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News Item: Evangelist Ted Haggard announces that he is completely heterosexual again after a three-week treatment for sex addiction.

My Reaction: I used to have a really close friend who lost her virginity to the son of a Pentacostal preacher. He had a problem with fidelity. Over and over again, he swore up and down that it was just an aberration and that he was straight. Over and over again, he found himself in compromising situations with other men. Even if Haggard isn’t naturally a homosexual, whatever pushed him in that direction is going to take a lot longer than three weeks to fix.

Once upon a time there was a TV show called Two Guys, a Girl, and a Pizza Place. The show never did that well ratings-wise, which lead them to develop the ongoing romantic interest between two of the three leads faster than a show otherwise might. They also determined that the title may be too complicated for modern audiences, so they dropped the pizza joint, leaving the show as Two Guys and a Girl. It wasn’t the greatest show, but it did leave me curious how things would turn out.

Meanwhile, at about that same time in the land of Napster, it was really difficult to download anything by the band “Live” because, well, any live song recorded by anyone would show up on the search results. You had to pretty much go song by song until Audio Galaxy came along.

Today, on BitTorrent, I discovered that trying to retrieve episodes of the old TV show Two Guys and a Girl makes for a naughty query indeed.

I was waiting in line at the drivethrough of the local Happy Burger and it was taking longer than usual. Much, much longer. So long that I considered just getting out of line. It wasn’t that the food was taking a really long time because I saw the woman place the sacks by the window right when the car pulled up. It didn’t matter if the person was paying with cash or a credit card, it was taking forever. I asked myself “What the heck could be taking so long?”

I ordered a Grilled Chicken Sandwich with cheese and no tomatoes. No combo, no drink.

When I drove up, the woman behind the counter asked me what kind of drink I had asked for. I told her that I didn’t want a drink, I just wanted the sandwich. She said “okay” and then read me off the cost of the combo, which was $2 higher than the figure she had given me before I pulled up to the window. I told her that I didn’t want the combo and that I didn’t want to pay for the combo. She then cancelled my order and then retyped it all in.

“Here’s your credit card, sir.”

“I didn’t pay with a credit card,” I informed her. “I gave you a $20.” I watched as the car that was in front of me pulled on to the freeway and I was sure that they were leaving their credit card behind.

Then she said, “Oh, wait! This is my credit card!” and she put it back in her pocket.

“Okay, so what did you pay with?”

“A $20 bill.”

She gave me a twenty dollar bill. “What did you want to drink?”

“A Coke”

She handed me the Coke and I drove off with my combo meal.