Thursday, November 20, 2008

Whale Wars and Megadeth, an Analogy that Makes Sense



I'm bubbling over with analogs lately and yesterday while taking my first taste of the Discovery Channel's latest extreme, reality documentary series, Whale Wars, I came up with one I felt worthy of sharing with ETS:

Sea Shepherd : Greenpeace :: Megadeth : Metallica

It's a well known fact that Megadeth was started when Metallica ousted founding-member Dave Mustaine for being too hard core for Metallica.

Similarly, Sea Shepherd (despite the wussy name) launched when Greenpeace-founder, Captain Paul Watson, was ousted from the organization for being too hard core for Greenpeace.

I was familiar with Mustaine, his diet of intravenous drugs, booze and power chords, his blatant disregard for James Hatfield's feelings. But Captain Paul Watson was still a bit of an unknown 'til I saw his show, his death-metal black ship (The Steve Irwin), his face-slap and grenade fights with Japanese whalers, taking bullets for Minke whales. This sonofabitch is bat shit crazy!

Now, like Mustaine, Paul Watson's got a less well-known, less-successful, but harder core organization that's making some serious 11-level noise of its own. Another eerily similar element drawn from the Metallica/Megadeath diaspora is the brewing blood feud between Greenpeace and Sea Shepherd which laces the Whales Wars episodes with a second or third layer of political intrigue (simmering just below the East vs. West - you're whale eaters, yeah, but you're racists subtext.)

Dave Mustaine and Captain Paul Watson: kindred spirits, soul twins, mavericks, mad geniuses hell-bent on rocking their chosen-fields harder than anyone else ever has!


1 comment:

  1. Now if only the writers of the SAT were that creative . . .

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