Playing "Chicken"

I came of age in the late 1950s, a time of ducktail haircuts, black leather jackets and cruising (as it was called then, driving up and down a street in town unoficially designated for that purpose--generally from one drive-in restaurant to another and back again), and fast cars.

One of the fast-car games, aside from impromptu quarter-mile racing, was a game called "chicken", where two cars would face each other on a narrow stretch of isolated road and then barrel towards each other at an ever-increasing rate of speed until one drive swerved out of the way, usually at the very last possible second, and then he became the "chicken".

It was totally stupid, totally dangerous, and many young lives were snuffed out across the country playing this pointless "game". A variant of it was seen in the movie Rebel Without a Cause, wherein two cars raced at an ocean cliff, with the first person to bail out of the speeding car before it plummeted over into the sea was the "chicken". Same concept, different execution.

And that's what we've got going on with the looming government shutdown. The newly-fledged teabaggers are flexing their "chicken" muscles with the administration, and from what I've seen this week, it looks like the administration is going to chicken out.

But, if you'll recall the movie, Buzz (the driver of the other car) tries to chicken out, he tries to bail out of the moving car, but his jacket gets caught up on the door handle and he's unable to get out. He goes over the cliff and dies.

That's what I think is going to happen. Obama and the gang are not going to be able to get out of the car in time, and the teabaggers are going to send him -- and themselves -- over the cliff.

But what do they care? They are all card-carrying members of the shrink-government-to-the-size-where-we-can-drown-it-in-the-bathtub Starve the Beast club, and to them, any damage at all that they can do to the government it a good thing.

WASF*.

---

[WASF = We Are So Fucked]