The One Pandemic We Need to Eradicate Immediately

The liberal media doesn't want you to know about THIS.

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During COVID, in the absence of any sense of progress or even directed movement, and under the immense pressure of various glaring contradictions and an arthritic status quo defined by relentless grinding failure, American national life first spiderwebbed and then exploded into little episodic shards. The pebbled remains of it don’t really piece back together. No edge really seems to fit with any other, or is even identifiable as having once comprised of a now broken whole. All these new miniature pandemics come from the same shattered thing, but each moment is entirely its own: The McRib, K-Pop, the abuse of the word literally, foodie influencers, shoehorning ASMR into everything, Swifties, Ted Lasso, therapy-speak, the corporate hijacking of Pride Month, conservatives endlessly bitching about the corporate hijacking of Pride Month, streetwear and its attendant hypebeast culture of commodified speculative investment fashion, impending climate doom, and the list goes on. Nothing connects, nothing is really related to anything else beyond the sort of anxious and amorphous desire to go viral on TikTok. Nothing seems to bind yesterday’s events to today’s, or today’s to tomorrow’s.

Every trend shapes the broader cultural moment it emerges from, but the bleakest and most singular and most enduring of these fleeting cultural flashpoints are man-on-the-street interviews. This social media format has hit its limit, it is oversaturated, and it is most certainly played out. They are a creature and creation of a culture that is out of ideas, or at least is running out of topics to meme on. The man-on-the-street interview introduced “hawk tuah” to a nation that didn’t need any more Facebook-adjacent humor.

You can’t walk anywhere in a city without someone popping out of a garbage can or a dark alley to ask you what you do for a living or what song you’re listening to. Turn on Fox News and it’s a sequence of endless fudgy thundering about hidden enemies and crime-infested Democrat-run cities. I am not scared of crime as much as I am terrified of the relentlessly punitive, wholly indemnified, and luridly discriminatory police forces that currently prevail in the United States. I am also frightened by the prospect of sitting on a patio and sipping on a morning coffee and someone jumping out of a bush to interrogate me on my favorite album of all-time and then I’ll say something goofy and plunge into some modernized Patrick Bateman-esque erudite rant about the hidden sophistication behind butt rock:

“It is disheartening to see the nuance of Fred Durst’s lyrics lost on so many people, and many snooty listeners reduce his work to so-called ‘Divorced Republican core.’ What he crafts is ultimately a primal call to Man’s repressed emotions: Anger, fear, loss, and regret. Though on the surface, his music may appeal to, le’s say, more ‘unevolved’ individuals, beneath that testerone-fuelled angsty veneer is a wealth of poignant commentary on the state of primitive masculinity in a rapidly changing superficial world.

Take for example, the song ‘Take A Look Around’ from their magnum opus ‘Chocolate Starfish and the Hot Dog Flavored Water’ and observe a line like: ‘And now you wanna hate me / ‘Cause hate is all the world has even seen lately.’ Have you observed this in yourself and others? The socially magnetic qualities of negativity perpetuate themselves exponentially and, decades after the song was composed, we are seeing this principle reach a climax. The world is no longer just divided into East and West, but countries themselves are internally balkanizing. Hate has grown to fracture human society, and it is our now default state of affairs.

Or another choice cut: ‘Does anybody really know the secret, or the combination for this life and where they keep it?’ Durst ponders. ‘It’s kinda sad when you don't know the meanin’ but everything happens for a reason.’ Here, Fred inspires hope after uttering a bleak prophecy. None of us truly know how to orchestrate our lives to always reach a desired outcome, and our suffering compounds upon itself until we embrace the simple epiphany: Everything happens for a reason.

I trust my brief and glancing perspective on Durst and his band of talented bards will help to expose others to a retrospective evaluation of his works, and lead to A Lesson Learned.”

And once I’m done, I’ll regret it for the rest of the day.

America’s flabby, violent, ineffective police state is the inevitable outcome of the unspoken and unexamined consensus that the job of government is to make sure that the right people are protected and the right people get hurt. If remaking our police force is out of the equation, at the very least, they could stop ticketing people for jumping subway turnstiles and start arresting these so-called “interviewers” who approach complete strangers to ask “For $1 million, would you sleep with your sibling?”

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