The scariest part of 1984 for me was… well… it was the proles, but the second most scary part of that book was where he gets pwned by the doods, and basically is starved and fed to rats, at which point he is clearly fit to be a member of society. The thing that bugs me is, he knows when he gets put into prison that shit is going to go awry.
On an unrelated note, I pronounce “Awry” like “Cory” without the “C”. In my head “o-ry” and “a-rye” sit as two separate words with identical spellings and meanings. The “o-ry” pronounciation implies that the Rock is somehow involved, and the dude’s got the People’s Eyebrow raised!
Why would someone, who is in prison, and knowing they’re going to meet a fate worse than death (to take crap from a noob, and eventually become a noob) not flip the fuck out? Let me paint this frame by frame. You’ve been captured, your girlfriend has been captured. You’re pretty well fucked. At this point, you can wait and hope someone is going to be nice to you both or some shit, or you can take this opportunity to eat a plate and punch out as many people as possible, whilst singing “Hit me baby one more time”. The worst case, you’ll merely scar some dude and then you’ll die, but that guy will have to live with the scar for the rest of his life, and you won’t have that awkward moment with your girlfriend afterwards.
Seriously, one of the biggest fears in my life is that I’ll be staring down a shitty existance, I had a chance to flip out and I didn’t take it. This is predicated on the fact that you know when to flip out. Like, there will come a moment in your life when everything is crystal clear, and you know that you’ve got to flip out in the next 30 or so seconds or your life is going to be shit from that point forwards. You’ve just got to think of something clever to say when you flip out. I will live a shitty life (or death) topped by the embarrassment of missing my flipping out moment.
It might not be so simple. You might think “Hey I’m going to go get some ice-cream”, then WHAM: your life is now shit. After the fact, you can see what happened, but you wouldn’t know from the other side of time. It could also be one of those obviousness things. Like once someone tells you about calculus you’re thinking “well der”, but until someone tells you, it’s not so obvious.
So the thing that really gets to me about the holocaust is why the entire Jewish population didn’t flip out en masse, transforming into some sort of Jewish Voltron. I reckon they had 30 seconds. I reckon they had a fair while. And I reckon (understandably, with the benefit of hindsight) they knew it was their time. Sure, there were resistance.. s… but no crazy global flip-out. Why didn’t they all decide to meet up at Tiananmen Square for a “coffee” on Sunday morning, ate their cutlery, and ran out stabbing the SS? Maybe they would’ve all died, but they would’ve taken a bunch of German dudes with them, and people in later generations would go “man, those guys were friggin nuts, like viking nuts!”
So, in conclusion, I guess I’m saying I feel sort of embarrassed for the Jews when the holocaust is mentioned. Ordinarily, you’ll see an act of intense volition, maybe people taking their own lives while they’re still strong, maybe going bat-shit crazy, who knows? But man, waiting to die?
TRISaTAN said {{count}} days later:
(You should read about the Siege of Masada for a Jewish flip-out example.)
I think you underestimate the hope that springs eternal – how often that people have a survival instinct to keep going despite the risks. After all, there were some Auschwitz survivors.
I shake my head and smile when youths say things along the lines of “I hope I die before I get old.”; by the time they reach the age they are thinking of, they will almost certainly have a different view. I suspect the same applies to someone entering the concentration camps.
Let’s also not discount the number of individuals who did escape the camps through flipping out and the techniques used by the Nazis to quell uprisings in general.