79-08-A7
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Political Bestiary[edit]
Transcript[edit]Conservative columnist James J. ("Jack") Kilpatrick and one-time liberal Presidential candidate Eugene McCarthy may seem like unlikely collaborators, but it turns out they are good friends. One night a few months ago, sitting by the fire in Jack's home in the Blue Ridge mountains of Virginia, they got to talking and were inspired to write what may be the season's funniest book, A Political Bestiary. As they say in the foreward, "During the course of a pleasant evening, as the flames leaped up and the bourbon went down, the two naturalists spoke of the strange creatures they had seen in the thickets of politics and in the seas of language." Late in the evening they telephoned Jeff MacNelly, the Pulitzer Prize-winning editorial cartoonist and got his agreement to illustrate their book about these strange creatures. A Political Bestiary begins with The Mandate and ends with the Vanishing Milieu and, along the way, you will encounter such beasts as The Viable Alternative, The Mounting Crisis, the Running Gamut, the Leaping Quantum, The Gathering Momentum and many others. Here is a sampling of their description of The Mandate: "Mandates come in as many varieties as finches, warblers, sparrows and Southern politicians. They are generally divided into Greater Mandates and Lesser Mandates. Among the Greater Mandates are the Impressive Mandate and the Overwhelming Mandate. Greater Mandates usually are discovered almost immediately after elections, gamboling about the White House lawn. They appear like tree frogs in early March or old friends after a victory at the polls." Once you have seen MacNelly's drawings of two Mandates you'll be able to spot one coming forever after. Here are the two political zoologists on a strange fish called The Bloated Bureaucracy: "The species is almost always accompanied by its adjective ... Bloat is no laughing matter; a bloated government has serious digestive problems. The more it eats, the more it wants; the more it wants, the more it eats. The Bloated Bureaucracy has a life span that ranges somewhere between the infinite and the eternal." Next comes The Untouchable Incumbent, shown clinging to the trunk of a tall tree. About him, the authors say, "Today incumbents feed on the juiciest leaves high on the tree, their diet consisting principally of choice prerogatives, traditional perquisites, special privileges and fringe benefits. On such a rich diet, with their tree-parking places carefully reserved, incumbents tend to build up heavy layers of fat just below their quill-protected skin. This comfortable blubber is called a pension." That's just a sampling. You'll have to get a copy of A Political Bestiary to enjoy the rest. I have a hunch you'll have as much fun reading it as Messrs. Kilpatrick, McCarthy and MacNelly had putting it together. This is Ronald Reagan. Thanks for listening. |
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