Custer owes Anheuser-Busch, Inc., is greater than the debt the corporation owes the General, who was a teetotaler. The General’s debt is not reduced by the fact that, when the business connection was first established, the memory of the General was a national asset and the company was still pretty much a local brewery. In the long run, they have done very well by each other. There is some correlation between the profits of this world and its lasting memories. Although the dead are not allowed to take it with them, the dead who continue to live in this world generally go on making money. In a way, they have to earn their keep. Why not? Sometimes business rescues individuals from near oblivion and makes them weekly heroes on TV, as it has done with Wyatt Earp and Bat Masterson. Sometimes it immortalizes a whole class of men by industrializing them. The cowboy, for instance. Apart from Westerns on movie and TV, apart from rodeos and dude ranches and adult consumption altogether, it would take quite an audit to calculate the annual profit in children’s cowboy boots, pants, belts, hats, toy revolvers, etc.
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