"A VULCAN ODYSSEY"

by

Lawrence Montaigne

             A VULCAN ODYSSEY is a true story.  It is set in the background of forty years in the entertainment field, both in the U.S. and abroad.  New York born and raised in the Jewish ghetto of Rome, Lawrence and his family returned to America just one step ahead of the fascist movement in Europe.

            Upon the completion of his schooling and military service, he began his pursuit of an acting career, first in summer stock, then as a dancer on Broadway, and then on to Hollywood to work as a stuntman in a series of swashbuckling films where he excelled as a fencer.

            His pursuit of an acting career took him back to Rome, then on to Israel, Yugoslavia, Spain and Germany.  Between acting jobs, he learned to cope with three months of seasickness as a member of the crew of a fishing boat on the Mediterranean Sea, spent eleven months as a cowboy with terminal saddle sores as he pushed two hundred head of cattle along the Jordanian border of Israel, worked as a “shomer” (guard) carrying a rifle for a surveying team in the Negev Desert, survived five weeks in a coma after being shot while taking photos of Arab installations on the Golan Heights, and worked as a photo-journalist for Globe International out of Rome.  His adventures as a gold smuggler took him to far off places such as Teheran, Cairo, Karachi, Kabul, Bangkok, Singapore and Hong Kong.

            Hired by the director, John Sturges, as a featured player in his film, The Great Escape, Lawrence eventually returned to the States where he cashed in on the success of that film.  Over the next few years he was featured or starred in over 200 television episodes and twenty-five films.  He claims that he is best remembered for the two roles he created in the original Star Trek series: DECIUS in Balance of Terror and STONN in Amok Time.

             While appearing as an actor in the Disney adventure, Escape to Witch Mountain, he sold that company his original story about the adventures of a group of Northern children and their attempt to escape from the South during the Civil War. He was hired to write the screenplay and served as assistant to the producer for his film, The Million Dollar Dixie Deliverance

            Throughout his career his curiosity for books and learning rewarded his academic pursuits with a master’s degree and he eventually gained employment as an associate professor at North Texas State University.

            Throughout his travels he manages to experience the bliss of five marriages (and four divorces) and a plethora of romantic interludes.

            A VULCAN ODYSSEY is an irreverent and accurate account of a man who lived his life as if he was pursued by fire-brandishing demons, but took time out along the way to smell the flowers and appreciate the wonders of animals.

            THE POLITICAL SCENE

Here's one from a smarter person than I.

Question: What do America’s premier investor, Warren Buffett, and Iran’s toxic president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, have in common? Answer: They’ve both made a bet about Israel’s future.

Ahmadinejad declared on Monday that Israel “has reached its final phase and will soon be wiped out from the geographic scene.”

By coincidence, I heard the Iranian leader’s statement on Israel Radio just as I was leaving the headquarters of Iscar, Israel’s famous precision tool company, headquartered in the Western Galilee, near the Lebanon border. Iscar is known for many things, most of all for being the first enterprise that Buffett bought overseas for his holding company, Berkshire Hathaway.

Buffett paid $4 billion for 80 percent of Iscar and the deal just happened to close a few days before Hezbollah, a key part of Iran’s holding company, attacked Israel in July 2006, triggering a monthlong war. I asked Iscar’s chairman, Eitan Wertheimer, what was Buffett’s reaction when he found out that he had just paid $4 billion for an Israeli company and a few days later Hezbollah rockets were landing outside its parking lot.

Buffett just brushed it off with a wave, recalled Wertheimer: “He said, ‘I’m not interested in the next quarter. I’m interested in the next 20 years.’ ” Wertheimer repaid that confidence by telling half his employees to stay home during the war and using the other half to keep the factory from not missing a day of work and setting a production record for the month. It helps when many of your “employees” are robots that move around the buildings, beeping humans out of the way.

So who would you put your money on? Buffett or Ahmadinejad? I’d short Ahmadinejad and go long Warren Buffett.

Why? From outside, Israel looks as if it’s in turmoil, largely because the entire political leadership seems to be under investigation. But Israel is a weak state with a strong civil society. The economy is exploding from the bottom up. Israel’s currency, the shekel, has appreciated nearly 30 percent against the dollar since the start of 2007.

The reason? Israel is a country that is hard-wired to compete in a flat world. It has a population drawn from 100 different countries, speaking 100 different languages, with a business culture that strongly encourages individual imagination and adaptation and where being a nonconformist is the norm. While you were sleeping, Israel has gone from oranges to software, or as they say around here, from Jaffa to Java.

The day I visited the Iscar campus, one of its theaters was filled with industrialists from the Czech Republic, who were getting a lecture — in Czech — from Iscar experts. The Czechs came all the way to the Israel-Lebanon border region to learn about the latest innovations in precision tool-making. Wertheimer is famous for staying close to his customers and the latest technologies. “If you sleep on the floor,” he likes to say, “you never have to worry about falling out of bed.”

That kind of hunger explains why, in the first quarter of 2008, the top four economies after America in attracting venture capital for start-ups were: Europe $1.53 billion, China $719 million, Israel $572 million and India $99 million, according to Dow Jones VentureSource. Israel, with 7 million people, attracted almost as much as China, with 1.3 billion.

Boaz Golany, who heads engineering at the Technion, Israel’s M.I.T., told me: “In the last eight months, we have had delegations from I.B.M., General Motors, Procter & Gamble and Wal-Mart visiting our campus. They are all looking to develop R & D centers in Israel.”

Ahmadinejad professes not to care about such things. He was — to put it in American baseball terms — born on third base and thinks he hit a triple. Because oil prices have gone up to nearly $140 a barrel, he feels relaxed predicting that Israel will disappear, while Iran maintains a welfare state — with more than 10 percent unemployment.

Iran has invented nothing of importance since the Islamic Revolution, which is a shame. Historically, Iranians have been a dynamic and inventive people — one only need look at the richness of Persian civilization to see that. But the Islamic regime there today does not trust its people and will not empower them as individuals.

Of course, oil wealth can buy all the software and nuclear technology you want, or can’t develop yourself. This is not an argument that we shouldn’t worry about Iran. Ahmadinejad should, though.

Iran’s economic and military clout today is largely dependent on extracting oil from the ground. Israel’s economic and military power today is entirely dependent on extracting intelligence from its people. Israel’s economic power is endlessly renewable. Iran’s is a dwindling resource based on fossil fuels made from dead dinosaurs.

So who will be here in 20 years? I’m with Buffett: I’ll bet on the people who bet on their people — not the people who bet on dead dinosaurs.

 

To be continued: