Performance Art

Last Thursday's reading of the Constitution of the United States on the floor of the House of Representatives gave me pause to think of a number of other significant buy monumentally ridiculous wastes of time. Maybe at the next MacWorld conference, Steve Jobs and his henchmen could stand around and read the privacy agreement for iTunes. Maybe this could stir up all kinds of angry rhetoric about which version they should read: the one before the iPhone, or the one that was issued after the iPad? So many little swirls and eddies of interpretation and legality.
Historic though it may be, the rules that bind our corner of the galaxy together isn't much of a page-turner, and everybody already knows the ending. Even so, the Republicans didn't feel the need to include all that stuff about slaves being three-fifths of a person. That kind of thing just brings the room down. Instead, they chose to focus on the high points: the bill of rights, the seperation of powers, and the location of all the alien autopsy laboratories. Just a little test to see if you had nodded off yet.
The show was an attempt to prove that Congress really is all about "we the people" after all, and now maybe all those tea partiers will settle down and go back to writing crank letters to their local newspapers when the city changes the trash collection days. Or stirring cauldrons. Now the serious work of the one hundred and twelfth Congress can begin: campaigning for 2012. Tune in next month when the Senate begins their reading of the newly expurgated "Huckleberry Finn."