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"One"

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"One" by Metallica

 

The joy -- if you could call it that -- from TV tunes was rare.  Hospitalization was a terror, an incarceration.  This song by Metallica tells everything.  Based on the stream-of-conscious novel  'Johnny Got His Gun' by Dalton Trumbo, the clip is, quite literally, the book's film set to metal.  Trumbo's classic was written as an anti-war manifesto, in which a soldier, after losing his limbs, sight, hearing, everything, is left rotting as a stump in a hospital bed.  But the anti-war theme is lessened as the song/video applies perfectly to those of us whose minds were the only thing that mattered when our bodies and brains were destroyed.  Kept in actual restraints, in intolerable pain, and never conscious of the real or unreal, I too was presumed to be benumbed, nothing but a motionless stump in the prison that was my bed.

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