Back to Quack Off

 Quack Off               

by Free Market Duck

The Hunger Games

(Mar 05, 2012)

Washington, DC -- The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins.  That's the book you want to read today.

   Actually, The Hunger Games book series is a trilogy:  (1) The Hunger Games, (2) Catching Fire, and (3) Mockingjay.

   Why should you read The Hunger Games?  Because at the current rate of our approaching economic Depression in America, and if president Obama and his fascist cronies win the 2012 Elections, we may all end up as participants in a national fight to the death for what remains of the food supply in North America.

   In Suzanne Collins' 1st book of her trilogy, North America -- which is now called Panem -- has totally collapsed into 12 major Districts, ruled by a Capitol Dictator and an army of Peacekeepers reminiscent of Darth Vader's killer-diller super soldiers who stop at nothing to keep the people in each District towing the line.

   Each District is surrounded by electric barbed-wire fencing and must produce whatever the Capitol tells it to produce: mining, agriculture, etc.  If you stray outside the fence or don't produce for the Capitol, you are dead meat.  Most Districts are barely subsisting.  No food, no medicine, no nothing but bare living essentials.  Residents of the Capitol live like Kings and Queens.

   So what's the plot?  Every year the Capitol holds The Hunger Games.  Each District must send two youths, one boy and one girl, between the ages of 12 and 18, to participate in a nationally-televised fight to the death in a huge landscaped arena with only one winner.  The winner is allowed to live in comfort for the rest of his or her life and the winner's District receives extra food on a monthly basis for a year.  Participants in The Hunger Games are chosen by a lottery, names pulled out of a jar.  Good luck.

   The Gamekeeper who officially runs the Hunger Games is a tricky sucker who has lots of surprises in store for the participants, such as changing the controlled, huge landscape arena from a forest to a desert to an erupting volcano to floods to huge computerized insects and you name it.  People in the Capitol bet on the games and can send in costly silver parachutes of weapons, medicine, food, or whatever to their favorite participants.  It's a blood-thirsty huge game with lots of twists and turns, with RFID chips inserted in each participant's arm so their location can be tracked day and night and broadcast on the Capitol's nationalized TV for the viewers.

   Each night, the recently-killed participant's holographic pictures are shown in the night sky, the national anthem is played, and everybody -- including the remaining participants -- then knows who's left in The Game.  Players do not know where their opponents are at any given moment, unless they are tracking them, but the viewers tuning into their TVs in all the Districts know, if they happen to turn on their dilapidated little scratchy-sounding TVs.

   And so it goes, with our heroine, named Catniss, and Peeta, the unlucky dude from District 12, and all the others from all the other Districts sometimes teaming up, sometimes knocking off their own team mates, all trying to stay alive in The Hunger Games.

   After reading all three books, I guarantee once you start reading, you will not be able to put any of the three books down.  They are all real page turners.

   While the author geared this trilogy for ages over 12 through young adults, it 's turning out that adult-adults and older adults are becoming the main readers due to the current social-political-economic conditions in America today that are beginning to resemble The Hunger Games.

   In fact, the new name of North America in The Hunger Games, Panem, is the Latin word for Bread and that is exactly what is going on in the book and in North America today:  Bread and Circuses, just like in the Roman Empire several thousand years ago, created to keep the people fat, dumb and happy watching chariot races and gladiator fights to the death.  Feed the people "free" bread and create circuses to keep their minds off the real problem:  namely, everybody in Rome, and now the United States, is turning into a slave of a centralized government empire.

   Yesterday, it was Rome.  Today it is Washington DC.  Tomorrow... well tomorrow, it may well be all of us in a new North America called Panem.  Today we already have to deal with continual Bread and Circuses from an out of control Washington DC Capitol, with 50 states that are sending its youth out to face multi-trillion dollar deficits, fighting for jobs, fighting for health care, deployed to undeclared wars in the Middle East.  When will Washington DC turn our bankrupt Welfare State into formal games, perhaps The Hunger Games, fighting to the death just for food?

   Whatever happened to individual rights and the free market?  Gone with the wind.

   Read it.  The Hunger Games.  And then think about how important the 2012 national elections are going to be.  It will be worth your life -- and the life of your children and grandchildren.

   The movie, Hunger Games, will be out on March 23, 2012.  Midnight special viewing.  I hope the movie is true to the book.  Part 2, Catching Fire, is slated to be out in 2013.  Part 3, Mockingjay, who knows?  Maybe that will be on live TV in 2014 featuring your children or grandchildren fighting to the death for what's left of our food supply. – FM Duck

back to top...