A Phantasm of Moscow

I came upon this among my Moscow notes. I don't know if it'll inspire a separate blogpost or something more substantial than my temporary jumps upon the soapbox, but sometimes it's fun to self-plagiarize.

I was possessed by the idea that if every generation had its own defining moments: post-war reconstruction; the Civil Rights movement and fighting against the perceived war atrocities of Vietnam; the Challenger explosion and the fall of the Soviet Union; what would be the defining moments of my generation?

I can only assume that they would be anti-moments, all, moments of hope and promise that never came to pass. 1984 and there’s been no major downfall of capitalist society. The fall of the Soviet Union didn’t bring about the end of history, nor the end of postmodernism any sudden break in art and artistic ventures. 1999 and no one’s partying, not really. 2000 and no nerdy man is reunited with his disco love, nor have any bank systems collapsed. 2001 and we still haven’t charted the stars, and there’s been no breakthrough in our nirvana, no children of the stars arisen. Some two-thousand people may have died on September 11, 2001, but there’s been no major policy change in either the US or the Middle East, just new ways to define who can be whose enemies…