Captain Capitalism and Me

This will be the first of many installments where I run a counter, parallel, perpendicular or skewed argument to my esteemed colleague Captain Capitalism. It should be stated beforehand that the Captain is Irish and therefore is always at least a little right. Besides, he's got real nice pretty graphs.

So here would be my addition to his statements accusing the Baby Boomer generation for making him into a sissy until he met a cool guy like me. Naturally, life has become dramatically better for him ever since. But I digress... My main point would be that the Captain has several good points that need a bit more fleshing out and some of his background information could use some color.

#1, Bad Boy Syndrome

First of all, he bemoans the fact that he had to act like a "bad guy" to keep girls interested in him. Now on some levels he is no doubt correct. Everyone falls for the bad one at least a few times. Reminds me of Vaughn,

"I don't want you to be the cute boy in the PG movie, the one that everyone's hoping things will work out for. No, I want you to be the guy in the PG-13 movie, the one you haven't quite decided whether you like or not."

There is no doubt that a propensity of attraction to exotic, dangerous or even immoral people is a fact. Especially at the ages that my colleague is referencing. However, it should be plainly stated that the age range of which he is so infuriated fall between 16-23 years old. Now once I hit my 20's I was pretty sure of what I was doing but come on... 16? You used every tactic, every scheme, swindle, and artifice to get a girl to go out with you.

And then, once you actually got them to go out with you it turned out that they were an uber-wench from Hades. What a surprise!!! You pursued a good-looking girl in high school or college! What in Samhain did you think you were going to get? They're surrounded by hormone intoxicated men/boys (present company included) at all hours of the day and night. It's there first real brush with absolute power. It's like a toddler in a sandbox. Lets step on this, we'll throw this one... Mayhem! Those girls were responsible for more devastation than a rampaging horde of New Kids On The Block fans. Unfortunately, the vast majority of us sucked it up and got back in line.

There was no whining and bitching about the nice girl that you just couldn't find... you weren't even looking for her! Remember all those people who got married right after college and we just could not believe it? Yeah... they figured it out a bit earlier than us. They found the good ones and watched as we flopped around like lake trout on a summer highway trying to get our hands on the "Mean Girls" of the year.

No Captain, I'm not going to buy that. You ran into problems for the same reason every other guy did back then:

We were all after the same damn women.

And they knew it.

#2 Addressing the "Swing Renaissance"

Unfortunately, I must differ again from my colleague on this analysis. Having experienced the swing dance scene, during its decline, I can agree with some of his statements. There was no doubt that a unique social scene was created by this movement. It was quite plucky. Instead of having to grind your way over to some girl and squeeze between three other guys so you could rub your pheremones on her... you got to ask her to dance.

What a concept.

Now how in the blue blazes of Odin's tit did that whole tradition get kicked? I mean, that was one hell of a coup. For the past 3000 years, man has been forced to risk humiliation and possible thrown drinks by prostrating themselves before women asking permission to dance. (Yes, 3000 years... look it up. No, I don't know where. What the frack do you think Google is for?) So at some point in the mid-60's, some dopehead was sitting around and simply lacked all motivation to make himself presentable and muster up the courage to ask that nice nude girl over there if she'd like to dance. Nope, that wasn't gonna happen. So instead he crawled himself to his feet and stumbled over to her. At this point, the nude girl was happily oblivious to the approach of said man. In fact, she would have been oblivious if he had been a clown car with a cow catcher. This dropping of her natural defenses, not a big deal since she had already dropped her clothes, allowed the man to get right up next to her. Now once he had achieved his position, it was readily apparent that he had no clue how to go about asking her out. Well aware of the eyes of his friends burning into his back, the guy quickly covered for it and began to dance next to her. Well, she was delighted to be dancing with a purple flamingo and the ensuing dance-off was a success. Unfortunately, that man had friends and those friends had friends and word soon got out... "Just dance next to them until they HAVE to notice you".

Blim, blam--end of civilization.

Now you're thinking this isn't so bad. I mean, who wants to risk being turned down by formally asking a woman to dance? Next time you're in the club and you find a young woman worthy of some quality time, pay attention to the fact that those four guys surrounding her are not exactly going to let you walk in and start busting a move. Not only that, but have you ever noticed that the music in that club never frigging stops? So the only chance you're going to get to talk to her is if you follow her off the floor at which point she's going to the bathroom to wash off the damn pheremones.

But when you ask a girl to dance, guess what? She dances with YOU. Only you. Not the three other guys, not the bartender, not the skinny little economist from Minneapolis who likes capitalist blogs... for the entirety of that song, she's dancing with you. A side-benefit to that is due to the one-on-one situation, you can generally tell if you want to continue pursuing them! Try to figure that out on a techno dance floor, playing C-Bers with three other guys.

Another bonus to this whole formal dancing etiquette scallywag was that there were individual songs and asking a girl to dance was far less intimidating than you would have expected. The end result being that, if you found a nice girl (or a Mean Girl, if you were still in that phase) but she was already dancing with someone all you had to do was wait for the song to end. Sure enough, they'll come off the dance floor and you have a prime opportunity. There was a definite lack of intimidation also. Lets face it, we're not born with groove. We needed to learn it. Swing-Dancing allowed even the most inept dancer the chance to enjoy whirling around the floor with cute girls. In addition, it wasn't exactly a chore to ask the girls out. You gotta remember those girls were THERE to dance.

That's a win-win situation, savvy?
So, the swing scene brought back several things. One of the more important things, in concurrence with my colleague, was the reestablishment of etiquette. What the hell? Where does a guy get off not opening doors? Harassing women?

That just ain't right. Someone oughta put a cat in your ass. (Yes, I said c-a-t)

Now I must diverge from my colleague. So please stay tuned for the next epsiode where I point out the ridiculous notion of calling it a "renaissance, the dumb ass clothes, the idiots with the black hair and the why it in fact died out.

Then we'll move onto the far heavier topic of my colleague's distaste for bars.

I will refrain from shooting him until I state my case.