oh my

Sometimes performance art appears in a place you least expect.

Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi, the Libyan leader, took the lectern at the United Nations on Wednesday morning for his first address at the General Assembly and delivered a long and rambling diatribe — far exceeding the 15-minute limit on speeches — against the Security Council and a host of other perceived enemies, while urging the world to welcome President Obama, referring to him as “our son.”

In the first third of a speech that lasted more than 90 minutes, Colonel Qaddafi focused on what he called the inherent unfairness of the United Nations, which gives the five permanent members of the Security Council far more authority than the nations only in the General Assembly. This, Mr. Qaddafi said, was dictatorship, not democracy and, as such, “was terrorism itself.”

Ninety freaking minutes?! In a 15-minute slot? (I'm curating a reading on Friday for Oracle Theatre Inc. If a playwright exceeded their time limit by that much, I think there'd be a riot.)

But check out the series of images over at the New York Times. This isn't just the bad behavior of a bully (although he is). Nor is it only the empty posturing of a tyrant (but he is that, too). This is clearly a tour de force performance. With annotated crazy note paper and everything. Makes you wonder if Andy Kaufman didn't die; maybe he just moved to Libya.

This kind of crazy needs to be studied. If someone doesn't post this entire speech in nine parts on YouTube by tomorrow, I don't know what I'll do.

By the way, aren't we glad he renounced nuclear weapons in 2001? Or do we think his "nuclear weapons" program was really just a big ball of tinfoil and rubber bands?