It’s a combination of self-righteousness and smallness, of pomposity and pettiness, that personifies the decadence of this era. In conversation, he toggles unnervingly between grandiose pronouncements about “Western civilization” and partisan cheap shots that seem tailored for cable news. With his immense head and white mop of hair his cold, boyish grin and his high, raspy voice, he has the air of a late-empire Roman senator-a walking bundle of appetites and excesses and hubris and wit. T here’s something about Newt Gingrich that seems to capture the spirit of America circa 2018. “It’s not viciousness,” he corrects me, his voice suddenly stern. Spider monkeys swing wildly from bar to bar on an elaborate jungle gym, while black-and-white lemurs leap and tumble over one another, and a hulking gorilla grunts in the distance.Īt a loss for what to say, I start to mutter something about the viciousness of the animal world-but Gingrich cuts me off.
It is crucial, Gingrich says, that we humans see the animal kingdom from which we evolved for what it really is: “A very competitive, challenging world, at every level.”Īs he pauses to catch his breath, I peer out over the sprawling primate reserve. And for all the famous feel-good photos of Jane Goodall interacting with chimps in the wild, he tells me, her later work showed that she was “horrified” to find her beloved creatures killing one another for sport, and feasting on baby chimps. Disney, he says, has done us a disservice with whitewashed movies like The Lion King, in which friendly jungle cats get along with their zebra neighbors instead of attacking them and devouring their carcasses. De Waal’s thesis is that human politics, in all its brutality and ugliness, is “part of an evolutionary heritage we share with our close relatives”-and Gingrich clearly agrees.įor several minutes, he lectures me about the perils of failing to understand the animal kingdom. Gingrich tells me about one of his favorite books, Chimpanzee Politics, in which the primatologist Frans de Waal documents the complex rivalries and coalitions that govern communities of chimps. It’s the opposite of every American feminist vision of the world-but it’s a fact!”īut the most important lesson comes as we wander through Monkey Junction. The females hunt, and as soon as they find something, the male knocks them over and takes the best portion. Outside the lion pen, Gingrich treats me to a brief discourse on gender theory: “The male lion procreates, protects the pride, and sleeps. In the reptile room, I learn that the evolutionary stability of the crocodile (“Ninety million years, and they haven’t changed much”) illustrates the folly of pursuing change for its own sake: “If you’re doing something right, keep doing it.”
Since then, Gingrich has spent much of the day using zoo animals to teach me about politics and human affairs. “There is,” he explained soon after arriving, “a lot we can learn from the natural world.”
But we aren’t here just for the nostalgia. He used to come here as a kid, and has fond memories of family picnics on warm afternoons, gazing up at the giraffes and rhinos and dreaming of one day becoming a zookeeper. But Gingrich, for whom all of this rather closely approximates a natural habitat, barely seems to notice.Ī well-known animal fanatic, Gingrich was the one who suggested we meet at the Philadelphia Zoo. It’s a weird scene, and after a few minutes, onlookers begin to gather on the other side of the glass-craning their necks and snapping pictures with their phones and asking each other, Is that who I think it is? The attention would be enough to make a lesser man-say, a sweaty magazine writer who followed his subject into the tortoise tank for reasons that are now escaping him-grow self-conscious.
#THE MAN OF THE HOUSE BOOK FULL#
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