[quote=“Victory_Oracle, post:42, topic:90165, full:true”]
So, your plan is to just wait it out for four years doing nothing of significance? Throwing a ball against a wall for four years?[/quote]
No. To appreciate what the gif is about, you have to have watched or know about the film it’s taken from. Since it seems a lot of people haven’t had the pleasure of watching “The Great Escape,” I’ll try to explain.
In the gif we have Hilts, an American prisoner of war played by Steve McQueen. He’s an American flyer who’s been captured by the Nazis. Far from sitting on his hands as the Germans would prefer all POWs do, he constantly attempts to escape and otherwise undermine camp rules and routines. He’s done this at several camps, and for his trouble he’s now been sent to one of the most secure camps in the Reich, one that holds an international group of anti-authoritarian malcontents.
Whenever Hilts is caught, the Germans toss him in what’s called “the cooler”, basically solitary confinement, for a stretch (they can’t leave him in there permanently or beat or torture him because the Geneva Convention, a form of rule of law, is in effect); that’s the room you see there in the gif. Each time he’s bunged in, one of his pals throws him a glove and ball to pass the time (and to annoy the guards with the constant, monotonous thumping they can’t do anything about). He’s not happy to be there, but even in the cooler he does what he can. The moment he gets out “The Cooler King” is back to disobeying the rules and plotting another escape (probably resulting in yet another stint in solitary).
Now Hilts is very effective at vexing the fascists, but it is only when he gives up some of his American rugged individualism to contribute his skills to a larger escape effort that he sees truly serious effects that extend beyond the camp. He is joined by other skilled individuals (e.g. an entrepreneur/scrounger, an artist/forger, a miner/tunneler, an academic/linguist, a shopkeeper/tailor, etc.) under the direction of an organisation to help pull off one of the most successful mass POW escapes in history – one that diverts German troops from the war effort, creates chaos inside the Reich, boosts the morale of prisoners, and generally embarrasses the fascists.
Does that sound like spending four years doing nothing of significance? American studios in the 1960s didn’t make epic movies with all-star casts about people doing nothing, any more than liberals and progressives in the U.S. are going to let the current pack of right-wing populists we’re stuck with now have an easy time of it.
