There was me, that is Alex, and my three droogs, that is Pete, Georgie, and Dim, and we sat in the Korova Milkbar trying to make up our rassoodocks what to do with the evening.
The adventures of little Alex in Anthony Burgess’ A Clockwork Orange (1962) have become a near archetype in popular culture. The cult of Thug the Aesthete, born in a bolshy great apartment block in some future socialist hell is alive in our revisionist beliefs in the Family, the posse, the license to kill in the modern age. We prefer our worst sociopaths, the ones from our movies, literature, and imaginations, to have a preternatural connection to and appreciation of great beauty, or art. We want to see a refinement in our natural born killers, and even a beauty, perhaps because of the demented fear that the human who is beyond good and evil puts in us, or perhaps because of the stratum of violence our souls is grounded in. Perhaps the Great Victimizer tells us we really do love our deaths, as well as those who kill.
A Clockwork Orange at thefoolsparadise
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