Word: leopardskins
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Mobutu still managed to cut a dashing if reptilian figure on the international stage. Resplendent in his leopardskin toque, symbol of his authority as a traditional tribal chief, the jovial dictator has had little difficulty charming nearly all U.S. Presidents stretching back to John Kennedy. Political friendships with a long line of leaders in China, Romania, France, North Korea, South Africa and Israel (where he trained as a paratrooper) made him a widely traveled statesman. Some were seduced by Mobutu's eagerness to serve as a bulwark against Soviet expansion in the heart of Africa, others by Zaire's natural...
Prince's performing entourage still includes young women attired in flash-happy lingerie. But Prince has dispensed with performing in his leopardskin skivvies, and for the movie camera, dresses up in high-heeled boots, ruffled shirts, brocaded jackets. If anyone notices the similarly suited ghost of Jimi Hendrix floating about, so much the better. Hendrix's classic Purple Haze has left all sorts of echoes around Prince's neighborhood, and not just in the music. Prince has both mastered the Hendrix style and contemporized it; he has become something of a past master at haze in general...
...Thus began a slightly surreal press conference in the artist's home town of Figueras, Spain, that ended his mysterious six months of seclusion. To bring poetry to life, Dali carried an elaborate, eagle-headed sword and distributed tuberoses to reporters. His costume was no less vivid: a leopardskin coat and red barrenita cap. Answering questions in French, Spanish and Catalan, the painter declared, "I am monarchist, Catholic and Roman," but without a political creed "because nobody knows whether the Venus de Milo was a fascist or a Communist." When pressed about a Catalan government investigation into his affairs...
Carefully orchestrated publicity campaigns are nothing new to Mobutu's 23 million subjects. Every night the television station in the capital city of Kinshasa begins its news with a vision of heavenly clouds slowly dividing. As sonorous music swells, a dark, bespectacled face topped with a leopardskin cap emerges to fill the screen. It is the visage of Mobutu, 44, also known as "le Guide," "le Clairvoyant," "le Redempteur." Without undue modesty, he has also chosen another name for himself that roughly translates as "the all-powerful warrior who, because of his endurance and will to win, will...
...advisers insisted that they had no part in the flag painting. But the phenomenon began after President Nguyen Van Thieu announced a stepped-up pacification program following President Nixon's suggestion in October of a standstill ceasefire. In such a cease-fire (known locally as a "leopardskin" arrangement), blotches of Viet Cong-held territory would be interspersed with strongpoints controlled by the Saigon government. Word soon reached Saigon's functionaries that any village that was to be regarded as government-controlled should be marked with flags-which reminded some observers of the origin of Passover, when the ancient...