The wingnutty GOP vandals have turned to treating the guvmint shutdown as a form of performance art. I hate performance art. It’s lame, it sucks, and makes one act like Laurie Anderson who is one of the few people as cranky as her husband Lou Reed. I like Lou Reed’s music buthe’s legendary for his dickishness.

Where was I? Oh yeah, Republican stage craft. They’re insulting park rangers for enforcing the guvmint shutdown they voted for. They’re all smiley and hand-clappy on tevee like Michelle Bachmann. They’re holding fake conference committee meetings chaired by that unctuous weasel, Eric Cantor. They’re having a gay old time like the Flintstones, a yabba dabba doo time as well. Did I say gay old time? Just quoting theFlintstones theme.I hope I didn’t offend Louis Gohmert Pyle and Steve King. Actually, I hope I did. I live to offend them. They certainly offend me.

Now that we’ve compared them to performance artists, what kind are they? They’re not Dadaists or Surrealists even though what they’re doing makes no sense whatsoever. I think they may be Futurists, the arty farty Italian group that had links to Benito Mussolini.The Futurist Maniefsto by FT Marinetti gleefully describes a car wreck as follows:

We drove on, crushing beneath our burning wheels, like shirt-collars under
the iron, the watch dogs on the steps of the houses.

Death, tamed, went in front of me at each corner offering me his hand
nicely, and sometimes lay on the ground with a noise of creaking jaws giving me
velvet glances from the bottom of puddles.

“Let us leave good sense behind like a hideous husk and let us hurl
ourselves, like fruit spiced with pride, into the immense mouth and breast of
the world! Let us feed the unknown, not from despair, but simply to enrich the
unfathomable reservoirs of the Absurd!”

As soon as I had said these words, I turned sharply back on my tracks with
the mad intoxication of puppies biting their tails, and suddenly there were
two cyclists disapproving of me and tottering in front of me like two
persuasive but contradictory reasons. Their stupid swaying got in my way.
What a bore! Pouah! I stopped short, and in disgust hurled myself — vlan! —
head over heels in a ditch.

Oh, maternal ditch, half full of muddy water! A factory gutter! I savored
a mouthful of strengthening muck which recalled the black teat of my Sudanese
nurse!

A ditch, maternal or otherwise, is what the teabaggers are driving the country into, so this is an apt analogy. They’re also treating the economy like a slit trench, you know the kind of trench soldiers dug to serve as latrines during the Great War. That’s right House Republicans are shitting on the country and asking us to enjoy it. They’ve even driven me to quote something that is laced with Satan’s punctuation: the exclamation point.

Oh, maternal ditch, my ass.