最近大家都会注意到台北市最近到处都在挖路，行道的植栽明明长得好好的，却移除重种
。今天下午经过台大新生南路三段，看到行道上的“日本女贞”(Ligustrum
liukiuense, Japanese Privet) 多给拔除，却再重种另一批“日本女贞”。奇怪吧？不
！因为选举到了。
许多掌握政府资源者往往会利用选举前大方拨款，给自己的地方桩脚一些好处，让他们包
些工程。这种政客笼络支持者的政治手腕，中文叫“分赃政治”，英文叫pork barrel，
直译就是“猪肉桶”。底下是 Merriam-Webster 对pork barrel 的解释： government
projects or appropriations yielding rich patronage benefits … used
figuratively to mean "a supply of money" or "one's livelihood" (a farmer,
after all, could readily turn pork into cash). When 20th-century legislators
doled out appropriations that benefited their home districts, someone
apparently made an association between the profit a farmer got from a barrel
of pork and the benefits derived from certain state and federal projects. By
1909, pork barrel was being used as a noun naming such government
appropriations, and today the term is usually used attributively in
constructions such as "pork barrel spending" or "a pork barrel project."
图 1 照片中有两处“日本女贞”已遭铲除，尚未铲除的一处长得很茂密。
图 2 刚铲除的“日本女贞”。
图 3 左为刚铲除的“日本女贞”，右为待种的“日本女贞”。
(Jerome Su, Oct 12, 2018)
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