Blog #7

In the Flobots song "Handlears", it has the theme of corruption of power. In the song, the person is first talking about how they can do whatever they want, starting with small things, like riding their bike with no handlebars, or making a comic book. Then they starting getting a little bigger with the ideas, like opening a thrift shop, to selling a product, to running a corporation. Eventually they start talking about running the country/world/whatever. They basically become a tyrant, saying "I can make anybody go to prison, just because I don't like them." It gets more and more violent, eventually climaxing at "I can end the planet in a holocaust". The idea that I get from this is that the person is getting more and more power, and with that power, they get more and more mad and do anything they can to keep that power. They get fanatical and think more "I can do whatever I want" in a more violent, aggressive way.

There are many, many different examples of this kind of theme. Probably the most famous being Lord of the Flies. Recently, a television show has come out that is kind of a modern/future take on it. The CW sci-fi show The 100 is about 100 teenagers that were sent to Earth (which 100 years earlier had been destroyed by a nuclear war) to test out if it was safe. While there, they are disconnected from the rest of society (who live in space) and are left to fend for themselves. Their first decision was that since there were no more adults, there was no one to tell them what to do, so they go crazy and end up doing "whatever the hell they want", which had become their motto. However, they begin to look to the guy who started this motto, Bellamy, as a leader of sorts. They trusted him to make most of the decisions, and eventually he became really power crazy. He began making lots of rules and even kept people from eating if they didn't do exactly what he wanted. He had henchmen even, who would sometimes beat up anyone who defied him/them.