MISCELLANY

May 1 1989 by Chief Executive

DEFINED

Agriculture, n. The cultivation of legislators to raise subsidies; pillage in the name of tillage. Broadcast Journalism, n. Slanted news.

Canada, n. An expurgated paper-back edition of the United States. Conservative, n. One who favors limited government and total war. One who supports law and order within the American Empire, but not the Soviet. One who is against exercise because Jane Fonda is for it. As Franklin Roosevelt said, “A conservative is a man with two perfectly good legs who, however, has never learned to walk.” Of course, Roosevelt forgot to add that a Liberal is a cripple who wants to force somebody else to pay for his wheelchair.

Doubt, n. The philosophical device Descartes so cleverly used to prove everything he previously believed.

Foreign Aid, n. Handouts across the sea. Liberal, n. One whose heart bleeds when the Federal budget is cut. In recent years, there has been a vast improvement in our liberals-knee-jerk liberals have become neo-jerk liberals.

Locke, John, n. A closing or fastening device used to prevent unauthorized entry into private property.

-Lucifer’s Lexicon, L.A. Rollins

MORE COOKIES, MR. DRUCKER?

I am going to shock you. I don’t know a single business that is nearly as well run as some of the well-run nonprofits. Not as tough, nor as disciplined, nor as ruthless.

You want examples? I don’t know a single executive who, in terms of competence and performance, can equal what Frances Hesselbein has done with the Girl Scouts, an almost totally volunteer organization with 6,000 paid staff and about 750,000 unpaid nationwide.

-Peter Drucker, Across The Board

WEAKLY ALLOWANCE

“There’s a misperception of what a son of a president is,” complains the second oldest offspring, 35-year-old John Ellis Bush, a Miami real-estate executive known as Jeb. “There’s a surprise, a shock, that I’m working here, that I want to work here. I think there’s a perception that if your father’s the president you get a check or something.”

-Michel McQueen, The Wall Street Journal

ARMED CASHIERS WANTED

” `…Yet, bad as Iran is, we complain about people leaving the Middle East to run our 7-11′s. Think about it, what guy’s better equipped to run a 7-11 than a guy who used to live in a war zone? A crook walks in with a gun, the clerk just laughs. “What, no rocket, no jet? Get out. When I was a kid, I got shot in the head every day!’ ”

-Kevin Rooney, Laugh Track

MORE KAFKA THAN CAPRA

Conservatives have a lot of rhetorical fun with the working-class consciousness that is so prevalent among $300,000-a-year scriptwriters and millionaire producers. During the writers’ strike, writers at one guild meeting actually sang “Solidarity Forever.” There was some speculation about whether they would dash off in mid-chorus to answer the car phones in their Porsches. After he made his first million, Steve McQueen bought a wardrobe of identical blue work shirts and identical jeans from a theatrical warehouse company so he could appear to be wearing the same clothes every day, and thereby demonstrate that he was nothing more than a working stiff. He drank champagne out of beer mugs lest anybody think he had sold out.

-David Brooks, National Review

WHY TV DISHES DAGWOOD

A colleague who writes about advertising and the media says advertisers are afraid to fool around with women’s roles. They know, as she puts it, they’ll “set off the feminist emergency broadcast system” if they do. So, she concludes, men are fair game.

In 1987, Fred Hayward, who is one of the pioneers of the men’s rights movement (yes, there is a men’s rights movement), studied thousands of TV and print ads and concluded: “If there’s a sleazy character in an ad, 100 percent of the ones that we found were male. If there’s an incompetent character, 100 percent of them in the ads are male.”

-The New York Times