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Meet the new boss, same as the old boss

Last spring, as Whistler was winding down, golf was being played, corn snow was being smooshed around and lily-white skin was being exposed, the National Review – a highly conservative magazine published south of the border – ran a truly bi

Last spring, as Whistler was winding down, golf was being played, corn snow was being smooshed around and lily-white skin was being exposed, the National Review – a highly conservative magazine published south of the border – ran a truly bizarre, even for them, article on the top 50 most conservative rock ’n’ roll songs of all time.

Most people don’t tend to associate conservatism and rock ’n’ roll. Rock was, certainly in its early days, loathed by conservatives, who gleefully tried to stamp it out and keep their children safely living in the same straightjacket they themselves wore. Of course, they lost the war against rock ’n’ roll. Rock became the anticonservative cultural glue for their kids who, in protest to their parents’ stultifying lifestyle, grew their hair long, messed around with drugs, screwed like bunnies during the sexual revolution, protested whatever came to mind, graduated from college, got jobs, and became the Generation of Swine, growing increasingly conservative. You can now find them bopping to insipid oldies FM stations while they bitch about how much it costs every time they fill up their SUV.

Written by one of the magazine’s political reporters, John J. Miller, the piece is an amusing, Rovian contortion of reality… or reality as seen through the lenses of someone who sees a conservative aura floating around the corporeal existence of, well, everything. It drifts pretty far into the spin cycle but the notion that rock has a hidden, conservative bias – if one simply looks hard enough – must both comfort and distract dyed-in-the-wool conservatives who would otherwise be spending their time wondering how actually executing their world view in the Middle East and economic agenda at home has proven so diabolically difficult and disastrously wrongheaded, respectively.

In Mr. Miller’s opinion, Who’s Won’t Get Fooled Again is the #1 all-time most conservative rock song ever penned. It is, in his opinion, an ode to the very conservative idea that revolutionary change is inherently flawed and all revolutions crash and burn in a deep pool of cynicism. It is, he writes, "An oath that swears off naïve idealism once and for all."

Except for having been licensed and co-opted as the opening bars of one or another of the CSI franchise shows, the song is largely unknown to a generation of attention-challenged Sesame Streeters who can’t be bothered to listen to its eight-and-a-half minutes of, mostly, duelling guitar and organ riffs. But once past the noodling organ and opening guitar chords, the first verse is, on sober reflection, an obvious icon of conservative thought.

"We’ll be fighting in the streets

with our children at our feet

and the morals that they worship will be gone."

Or maybe not. You decide.

It is the final two lines, "Meet the new boss/same as the old boss," upon which Mr. Miller’s counterrevolutionary, conservative conclusion rests. The more things change, the more they stay the same, huffs the newly-empowered conservatives-to-be. What the hell? That’s the way it worked after the French Revolution.

Ironically, that sentiment is, right now in Tiny Town, about the best we can hope for. But I’m not holding my breath.

We’ve been sold, in case you haven’t heard.

One set of sharks has forced the sale of Intrawest to another set of sharks. Quite possibly the blood in the water is ours. We’ll only know for certain when the thrashing stops.

Intrawest arrived on the scene 20 years ago when Hugh Smythe needed to find someone to buy out Aspen Ski Corp’s 50 per cent of Blackcomb. He met Joe Houssian at a Young Presidents’ Organization dinner. Joe was a developer at the time and a new skier with a place at Blackcomb. Hugh and Gary Raymond showed Joe the numbers, their development plans and Hugh said, "Joe, don’t buy this unless you’re prepared to take it to the next step."

Joe took a lot of steps. Including buying Whistler Mountain, several other ski resorts, golf resorts, CMH’s heliski operations and morphed Intrawest into… well, that’s the problem. While locals may think of Intrawest as the Borg, financial analysts didn’t know what to think of it. It wasn’t a real estate developer, wasn’t a ski operator, wasn’t a golf operator, wasn’t an adventure travel and lifestyle company. Their inability to fit the company into any of their well-recognized slots, accompanied by Intrawest’s breathtaking, acquisition-related debt, meant its shares were doomed to languish below what most people thought of as its intrinsic value.

Enter the aptly-named Pirate Capital. The traders at Pirate give vultures a bad name. They embody Oscar Wilde’s definition of a cynic: men who know the price of everything and the value of nothing. They saw unrealized value in Intrawest, bought 18 per cent of the company and turned the screws.

In late February last year, Joe announced Intrawest had hired Goldman Sachs to "explore strategic alternatives…" for the company. Everybody who knows a lie from the truth knew what Joe was really saying was, "We’re for sale." In the biz world, one hires the likes of McKinsey and Co to explore strategic alternatives; one hires Goldman to sell one’s ass.

Enter Fortress Investment Group. They’ll be, at least temporarily, our new owners. From what I can tell, Fortress has a deep background in the ski industry. Maybe a couple of the partners ski. Maybe they know skiing takes place on snow… on mountains… and that’s about it.

No one knows what’s going to happen but one thing is a pretty good bet: Fortress isn’t going to be interested in buying and operating Intrawest’s assets. They’ll attempt to make good on their investment by parsing out the assets to (a) other investors, or (b) someone interested in the actual operations.

And that, my brothers and sisters, is about the best we can look forward to. Being bought by yet other money whores or being bought by…? Joe might walk away with enough in his jeans to buy Whistler-Blackcomb. Dave Perry, having recently opined on where Intrawest and WB management have missed the boat, might persuade Aspen to make an offer. The venerable Disney rumours are likely to surface again.

Or maybe a core group of influential people might look to the Green Bay Packers for inspiration. The Packers are an anomaly in pro football, in all of sport for that matter. Their home is a tiny little nowhere on the shores of Lake Michigan, north of Milwaukee. By all rights, they ought to be housed in a big city. They aren’t because the team is owned by its fans… literally. If you want to find out more about this weird, and very empowering idea, click over to http://www.packers.com/history/fast_facts/stock_history/ and begin dreaming about what’s possible.

In the meantime, be worried. The new boss definitely ain’t the same as the old boss.