These Days Are Just Packed #7

I don’t think it’s overly simplistic to say that much of human history can be reduced to a disagreement on what the coolest moment of all time is, so this morning I spent a bit of my morning walk on the beach shoring up my answer in the event that I’m abducted by aliens and have to speak on behalf of our planet in some ornate, governmental setting. You’ll be happy to know that I found the correct answer, and that after a few run throughs I feel good about my presentation and main points. There’s some polish left to apply but I imagine I’ll have a commute of some kind and can use that to get the finer points down.

To summarize, my research, and truly perhaps all research across all of our recorded millennia, suggests that the pinnacle of the human experience occurred at Tushino Air Force Base outside Moscow, Russia on September 28th, 1991 a minute or so into Metallica’s opening salvo of “Enter Sandman” to 1.6 million recently un-communized youth. The vibrant je ne sais quoi of Socialism’s jeans and t-shirt startup years had faded rapidly post-IPO into the type of corny and malignant corporate malaise the movement had suggested it could avoid. By the mid to late 80’s, the enthusiasm of Marxism’s particular flavor of “I know not what” had festered into a defiant “I know not this” that’s palpable and electric in the concert footage I’ve included below, and the entire post-Berlin wall place feels joyfully ready to explode.

Whether humanity succeeds or fails at scale will probably tie directly into our collective ability to stop getting hung up on the vocabulary and start chipping away at the same machine that powers so many of our supposedly opposing worldviews. Privatizing gains and socializing losses is a bad cycle, I don’t care what name we’ve made up for it in our neck of the woods, and while I hope there is always a Metallica to help clear out the emotional wreckage that pattern leaves in its wake in the West and East alike, the only thing I can say for sure is that I feel comfortable using a laser pointer to direct our new alien overlords through my presentation’s salient points. And since I promised product recommendations all week and we’re now at the templated inflection point where either your emotions or beliefs or both have been piqued, I’ll let you know that recently I’ve been enjoying looking at vintage Metallica t-shirts on eBay and you can use your fingie to click here and find one for yourself. Happy Friday and don’t be good!