Robert Townshend, "Moso Bamboo" (The blog is about the growth of an Aussie bamboo grove...and other things.)
On the subject of commercial achievement, one wonders why great corporations, and Hollywood studios amongst them, seem to have such scorn for the extraordinary entrepreneurs who made their corporations and studios possible. If you asked the typical Harvard MBA, CEO or Hollywood boss whom he most admired, it would probably be the charismatic figurehead of a quasi one-party state in Africa or South America, Bono, or a fashionable theocratic figure like the Dalai Lama. Or Al Gore.
Plutocrats who would rage if their limo broke down on the way to a Darfur benefit would look at you in bewilderment if you suggested that Soichiro Honda was a benefactor of mankind. For the modern corporate man, a titan like Honda is the guy who was dumb enough do all the work and take all the risks. Wouldn't know an executive bonus if it bit him on the bum.
What studio boss would be willing to make All the Vice President's Men, story of cover-ups by a major British climate authority to aid in the dispersal of the West's wealth and dismantling of its industries? Couldn't happen in real life. Besides, Redford has moved on to corruption in 1950s quiz shows, Hoffman is maybe practising his Venezuelan accent for the definitive Hugo Chavez biopic....
After the show is over, nobody heads for Havana or Pyongyang. People continue living lavishly in a world fashioned by the likes of Rockefeller, Woolworth, Ford, Carnegie and Bill Gates...but reserve their praise for dictators in impoverished backwaters. Or Al Gore. (h/t Charles G. Hill @ dustbury.com)
Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.
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