Let's talk about Clockwork Orange for a minute - just between friends

I like oranges. I like orange juice, too. Bananas? No. They’re too urban for me. They have this attitude that I don’t care much for. I like oranges. There’s no oranges in this book which is fine with me. Just because someone likes oranges doesn’t mean the topic of oranges would make for an interesting book and it would sell poorly unless it was written by Stephen King or that guy who’s always writing about submarines and espionage.

I remember first reading A Clockwork Orange, first published in 1962 by Anthony Burgess, when I was a kid growing up on the tough streets of the crime-infested industrial town of Kenmore By The Danmore just east of Prince Williams Valley Gorge, BC. Now, I’ve long since lost the book so this whole thing is going down by memory. The protagonist, Alex is a wise-ass psychopathic teenage hooligan (are there any other kind?) He leads a mindless pack of no-goods going from one crime spree to the next, skipping school and everything! There’s some serious debauchery and violence. Alex and his lads beat on bums and commit some pretty
atrocious acts. The language of the book and the Kubric directed movie is Nadstat. Burgess invented it to make the characters seem more psychotic.

According to Burgess, Nadstat is constructed from “old Cockney school boy talk, English, Russian, and bits of Communist subliminal penetration.” Naturally, things get out of hand. Little Alex is sent away for murder. In prison, he is transformed into a model citizen through this controversial Ludivico treatment. He is forcibly restrained and then conditioned to become sick whenever entertaining thoughts or witnessing acts of violence. They make him watch a ‘viddy’ compilation of some ‘nastiness’. But can this state-sponsored psychological rehabilitation program actually work? Can morality and a sense of what is right and wrong be forced down your gullet or guttiwut? Is the ability to choose between good and evil, in fact a human right? Or is it a mere privilege? Oh, and what's up with Mel Gibson? He sound's like a dick.

Here’s how it begins: (this is from memory so I may be off and if I am and you take the effort to notice my mistakes and e-mail them in to Bngus Online,we’ll that’s spooky)

“What’s it going to be then, eh?”
There was me, that is Alex, and my three droogs, that is Pete, Georgie, and Dim, Dim being really Dim, and we sat in the Korova Milkbar making up our rassoodocks what to do with the evening, a flip dark chill winter bastard though dry...

As I have no idea what the hell I did with my copy,I can’t find out word for word how it ends, but suffice it to say, it’s not good. I think it has something to do with recidivism.