The new bland architects of doom

Now that we're all in the bail-out business, can't we at least get a little more bang for our buck in the entertainment department? Today’s big corporation suits and sundry CEO's are proving to be a solid letdown. As far as fat-cat millionaires go, they're about as exciting, eccentric, and colourful as robot accountants, so bland and pasty that they can't even work up a decent projection of evil.

If I'm going to be forcibly scooped up by the ankles and shaken down for my tax-payer loot, I demand that these stiffs liven up the act. Would it kill them to live up to our expectations a little bit and start acting like walking cliches? North Americans like their millionaires crazy and larger than life, plain and simple. So where are the lovably bumbling Dudley Moore Arthur-style drunks, the Thurston Howells, and the yee-hawing Texas millionaires from the The Flintstones and The Simpsons? Howard Hughes, William Randolph Hearst—where'd you go? I say the recent parade of yawn-bait in front of the U.S. senate has been a disgrace to the archetype, unless by some stretch of the imagination they're all hiding Kleenex box shoes under the panel tables. If only.

Locally, we fare no better; it’s one mono-toned, starchy, white guy after another, droning on about real estate, the market, the Olympics—whatever—and constantly being wrong about everything they’re supposed to be experts on.

Rampant greed, incompetence, and thievery—all of the turd that helped clog the collective North American toilet—is much easier to accept when the log-layers are a load of laughs. Sucked into their vortex of doom, we don't even get a standard-issue top hat and monocle-sporting Monopoly guy to cheer us up. How can you stay mad at the Monopoly guy? Seriously, at this point I'd even take a roguish Richard Branson or loud-mouthed Ted Turner. Donald Trump they can keep. But I want them to dance.

Bring on the dancing millionaires.