Clan Gatherings 
Inigo Thomas
- The Bush Tragedy: The Unmaking of a President by Jacob Weisberg Buy this book
An obscure utopian novel published in Dallas in 1960, Alpaca is notable less for its depiction of an ideal polity than for the fact that it was written by the oil tycoon H.L. Hunt. ‘Except that I am slow, I am the best writer I know,’ Hunt once said. Alpaca is a South American country threatened with dictatorship, though Hunt’s fictional would-be dictator is a Communist, not a general. Juan Achala, a citizen of Alpaca, travels to Europe to meet its political brains, hoping to learn the secrets of Communist-dictator-proof government. He returns to Alpaca to implement what he’s been told. There will be no discussion of politics on the radio or TV: the papers will have to do. The government will have the authority to say who is fit for a job and who is not. Those who make fortunes, men whose profits the state depends on, will have more than one vote: tycoons will have as many as nine.
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Inigo Thomas’s profile of Barack Obama appears in this month’s Esquire.
Other articles by this contributor:
President Gore · Gore Vidal
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