It is once again time to celebrate Dave Mustaine’s Tweet about the Wisconsin Capitol.
Image: Wisconsin State Capitol dome photo via Phil Roeder on Flickr, image of Dave Mustaine and Megadeth mascot via Wikimedia Commons.
We may never really know what Dave Mustaine was thinking as he gazed out of his hotel-room window in downtown Madison on November 24, 2013. We do know that between arriving there and playing a Megadeth show that night at the Orpheum, he tweeted about what he saw:
Cool building in Madison, #Wisconsin out my hotel window. This is a fun college town! Can't wait for tonight! pic.twitter.com/08fcIpUJCc
— Dave Mustaine (@DaveMustaine) November 24, 2013
This Tweet, in which Mustaine notices Wisconsin’s Capitol building, appears to be suffused with a level of innocence you wouldn’t expect from the spectacularly churlish thrash-metal veteran. Perhaps he knew what it was, and perhaps the whole configuration of domes and columns struck him as particularly novel upon that particular day. In any case, it’s just eternally funny to those of us who experience this stately edifice as a feature of daily life, or really to anyone acquainted with the general concept of capitol buildings. And so it is that eight years later, we still celebrate Cool Building Day.
Perhaps Mustaine admires our Capitol not merely on its architectural merits, but also because it has only self-destructed once. True, this seat of government faces daily indignity at the hands of venal and sometimes just plain evil state legislators, many of whom share Mustaine’s grievances about mask mandates and his taste for truly vile conspiracy theories. But neither the George B. Post-designed Wisconsin Capitol building nor we, the people of Wisconsin, appear in the 2004 documentary Metallica: Some Kind Of Monster.
We can only conclude that like our statehouse, Mustaine embodies a fractious whirl of contradictions. Sometimes he’s prancing around with a miniature horse and sometimes he’s sharing his latest dreadful political awakening. Vice told us in 2016 that Mustaine was “done with drama.” Even if that were true, we’d never want to be done with this annual celebration.
There’s more where this came from.
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