(AOL is hosed up this morning, gentle readers, so imagine that attachment 1 goes here for important foreshadowing.)

It was so delightful a day yesterday that it was hard to believe that the market had lurched into near panic again. I wasn’t panicked; I was preoccupied with sending frantic e-mails about some rare new business with the government customer, and traveling across the District to Joint Base Bolling-Anacostia to attend a meeting detailing the technical specifics about it.

There was construction on I-295 both ways, nasty delays, so once the meeting was done and the notes in hand, I put the top down and took the Hubrismobile over to the old Navy side of the base to use that exit to hook up with South Capitol Street and avoid the freeway.

The gate was torn up, coned-off, and drove around the athletic fields to try to find whatever temporary gate might be available. I was listening to NPR on the radio, and the news from the market was bad, but not as plain flat-out weird as the news from Britain.
America has been focused intensely inward these last few weeks, between the lunacy of the debt ceiling and the Treasury downgrade and the collapse of the market. That would be enough to get anyone’s attention, but we are an intensely navel-gazing culture anyway. It takes a lot to get our attention.

The Brits have succeeded this week only to a mild degree. The riots across the North that spread into London were stunning, almost as stunning as the reaction to them.

NPR took the usual muddled position that the shooting of young Mark Duggan had untapped a deep well of racial animosity at first, and the commentators seemed relieved that many of the subsequent rioters in the rapidly tweeting violence were white, so they would not have to address the racial aspect of the trouble and move it over into the “class” bin where the rioters could be termed “protestors.”

Duggan was armed at the time of his death, and someone got off a shot at the Bobbies. The mainstream press is rife with explanations and analysis, from both sides of the political spectrum. You have probably had some of it lobbed into your in-basket. I sat on the fine leather seat of my German car and wondered how to get off the base as I listened to Prime Minister Cameron condemn the criminals, and the NPR manage to include the alternate view that the smash-and-grab looting was actually provoked by the marginalization of oppressed minorities.

We pioneered victim-originated rioting here in America, and I am proud to be a Detroiter, where the modern smash-and-grab movement started in 1967.

Back here in the future, I finally found a gap in the fence with two bored guards and got off base and onto South Capitol, headed the wrong way, which I do not claim to be a metaphor for anything. I did find myself wandering back in memory to that summer when my hometown burned, and the literature of the times. The British connection made it inescapable, and I was surprised that none of the commentary had connected the dots.

Anthony Burgess pretty much nailed this whole thing in his prescient 1962 book “Clockwork Orange.”

I mean, it is all there. The protagonist, Alex, leads his three Groogs (buddies, in Russian-English patois) on nightly rampages of “the old ultra-violence,” hopped up on “milk plus.”

I mean, Burgess nailed it. In the first of the three parts of the book, Alex and his Droogs beat the crap out of pedestrian, stomp a homeless man, loot a newsstand, beating the owners bloody, and steal a car. They interrupt a joy-ride with a home invasion of a country cottage of a writer and his wife, and knock him around and rape the wife.

Remember when we had to coin the term for the assault on personal homes?

There are consequences, of course, since this is a Burgesses’ parable on society. Alex gets busted after another orgy of rape and murder, and is reformed in prison by a novel mind-control program called the Ludovico Technique, which essentially de-fangs the sociopath, leaving him vulnerable to the violence of the streets when he is released. He is even savaged by those who he victimized.

It is too delicious that he is befriended by the socially active writer whose wife was raped (and later died) by the home invasion of the Droogs.

Poor Baby. Anyway, the state restores his original savage personality, and all is right for Alex. Burgess had intended the book to have three segments of seven chapters each, and published it that way in Britain. The last chapter features a metamorphosis in which Alex realizes what a fuck-up he is, and gets his life in order.

It is an odd foreshadowing of recent brain research, which suggests that the male brain does not complete development until the early 20s, which is something any parent of teenage boys already knew.

We did not get Clockwork Orange that way in America. The US publishers thought the upbeat ending did not ring true, and insisted would be ‘more realistic’ and appealing to U.S. audiences. That darker ending gave us Alex the sociopath at the end, and that is what actor Malcolm McDowell gave us in Stanley Kubrick’s masterful film.

The problem with parables is the variability of the future. But as it turned out, both Burgess and Kubrick were right on. In the West we have been living in Wonderland so long that we have come to take the impossible as gospel.

Like, uncontrolled immigration has no consequences. All cultures are equal, and all values and beliefs, however loony, must be respected. Entitlements are a human right. Budgets don’t have to have any relation to revenue.

I don’t know when we turned the keys to the asylum over to the inmates, at least not precisely, but it is easy enough to recognize the consequences of the folly. I don’t know what we do about it at this late date. I don’t have any bright ideas.

I got a joke in the mail from my pal Mac, who has lived enough summers to remember the world before this one, which was no paradise, but made a certain sense.  He remembers the Great Panic of ’29, and the closing of the local bank, and a summer without money and a barter economy in Iowa. The joke goes like this:

“A guy calls his stockbroker and asks him what he should be buying in this chaotic market. Apple? Google? What will hold value? The broker thinks for a moment, and responds:

“Canned goods and ammunition are your best bet.””

I laughed, and then I didn’t. Crap. I am off to Virginia Beach later today, and will not be at the computer tomorrow, so have a great weekend. God willing, and the creek don’t rise.

(Imagine a dance off with a photo of Malcolm McDowell as Alex. Photo courtesy Warner Bros and Hawk Films.)

Copyright 2011 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com