privatizationbeastFor those of you who haven’t checked under your desks this morning, you might want to consider slowly backing your chair away and peeking under the desk. If you see nothing, check your drawers. You never know where the privatization beast might be hiding. Be thorough; it can hide anywhere.

Then again, while you’ve backed away from the desk, you might want to look around and make sure your workspace is clear of the “beasts” that prowl in the public and private sector workplaces in California. 

Take, for instance, the Wasteful Spending Beast.

wasteful_beastThe Wasteful Spending Beast can most easily be recognized by the remnants of billion dollar bills left between its teeth, like overcooked broccoli. This devilish fiend can be found just about everywhere, and I think that the Legislative Analyst Office is preparing to declare it an invasive pest and licensing hunters to track and slaughter them, even if it means aerial hunting.

Who can neglect the Bureaucratic Beast?

The monotonous cry of the Bureaucratic Beast can lull even the most ambitious Type-A into a state of numb-minded groupthink. Often times, the Bureaucratic Beast can be bureaucratic_beast_copyidentified because of its clothing made out of red tape and its stacks of forms, and forms to explain the forms. It’s often littered with paper cuts and covered in stamps reading “received” or “sent” or “returned for review.”

Frankly, I felt nearly as ridiculous writing and designing these beasts and I did when I read that someone really did dress up as the Privatization Beast and help rally librarians for AB 438, a bill introduced by Assemblyman Das Williams that would greatly undercut the authority of California’s local governments.

Certainly the discourse in our political system isn’t always high-brow, it isn’t always eloquent, and it can sometimes degrade into a school-yard insult match where the refrain can often be “I’m rubber, you’re glue…”

But the privatization beast is a new one for me. Debate merits, discuss issues, create solutions, but leave the ridiculous costumes at home. If you don’t think your case is good without a bright yellow ghoul, then maybe you shouldn’t be making it at all.