February 27, 2004 - 7:21 p.m.

A Clockwork Orange
is a novel(Burgess) and a movie(Kubrick) about a violent
youth and the government's brainwashing cure that 
removes the choice to do wrong.

"Burgess, both a writer and an established linguist, 
uses A Clockwork Orange as a vessel for some very mature 
exploration of languages and literary play-things. 
Burgess fuses together many different languages in A 
Clockwork Orange to create Nadsat, the language of the 
youth. Nadsat is made up mainly of Russian, child speak, 
and invented and British slang, but it also utilizes 
Malay, German, French, Arabic, and Gypsy. The word 
Nadsat comes from the Russian word nadsat, a suffix for 
the numbers 11 through 19--the teenage numbers (Lund). 

The title A Clockwork Orange is derived from several 
sources. Used in old London slang, one might say someone 
is "as queer as a clockwork orange" (Burgess, "Resucked" 
x). In Nadsat, "orange" means "man" (which is derived 
from the Malay word "orang," meaning "man"), so a 
clockwork orange would be a man moving without pause or 
thought, as a clockwork (Lund). 
Burgess says of the title, "I mean it to stand for the 
application of a mechanistic morality to a living 
organism oozing with juice and sweetness" ("Resucked" 
x). After the state reforms him, the novel's hero and 
narrator Alex becomes a clockwork orange, a man working 
as a machine. "

"What does God want? Does God want goodness or the 
choice of goodness? Is a man who chooses the bad perhaps 
in some way better than a man who has the good imposed 
upon him?" - Burgess

This strikes me as a bit like China's free speach 
problem.  Should they try to force people to be 'good' 
by restricting free speach, or give the people
the right to choose and bring 
chaos.  Burgess would say choice 
at all costs.

Kaiser Kuo disagrees.  he 
unleashes a megasentence:
'As hideously condescending as 
it sounds -- even, I confess,  
to my own ear -- I just don't    
think, given the massive          
spatial inequalities, the low   
level of education in rural     
areas, the delicate and      
dangerous balance of 
population to resources, 
the utter lack of a 
pluralistic tradition, the 
latent fissiparous tendencies 
in the Chinese polity, and 
the horrible scale of human 
suffering that could be 
unleashed should things spin 
too wildly out of control, that 
China is "ready" for full
-fledged mutliparty democracy 
-- or even for things 
Americans take for granted, 
like free speech, free assembly, or total freedom of worship.'

Followed up by The Parentheses of Apocalyptic Worst Case
Scenario TERROR:
'(I have this recurring nightmare where China becomes 
truly democratic, a populist party running on the 
single-plank platform of opposition to the One Child 
Policy sweeps into office, and the floodgates are flung 
suddenly open to rabid nationalists, all manner of 
chiliastic/millennarian cultists, regional splittists, 
and plain-old gangsters).'

A product of state media fear mongering or legitimate 
concerns? i do not know.

 
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