Friday Buzzkills: May Day! Mayday!

Fun fact: The “Mayday “ distress signal is derived from the French phrase m’aider (“help me”), and thus has nothing whatsoever to do with May Day, the midsummer holiday famous for the pagan ritual involving the erecting of a large phallic symbol and dancing around it like a drunken idiot. But while the two share no overt link, there’s something to be said for the coincidental way this year’s kickoff of our annual summer descent into loud, mindless entertainment coincides with our equally loud, equally mindless panic—and lest we forget, many interpreters believe that the most famous of all Maypole-related songs (“Ring A Ring O’ Roses”) was nothing but a fun little ditty about the plague. Anyway, whether you’re just drifting off into your midsummer night’s dream, or broadcasting a call for help, all you’re getting in return is the ashes and staticky bursts of Friday Buzzkills.
– Now that we’re in this airless, confined space together: How’s your own pandemic going? Considering “Swine Flu” is currently the top trend on Twitter, it’s obviously on everyone’s mind, but other than giving us a chance to relive the ’70s and providing even more evidence that Joe Biden should never be allowed to speak for more than 30 seconds on any topic, ever, what have we learned? Specifically, where did this stuff come from? Medical professionals will tell you it was transmitted from animals to humans, but as we learned last week, these are the same monsters who want to inject your kids with autism, so they’re probably not to be trusted. Instead we must always turn to two bellwethers of public opinion: the spoiled celebrity, whose enviable, incredibly shallow worldview will always serve as a loss leader for the common man; and the loudmouth talk show host, whose convoluted theories are a great canary in the coalmine for the moment when all rationale has finally been sucked out of the country and replaced by hot gas.
For the former, what better “proudly ignorant man on the street” could you seek out than Paris Hilton, who this week responded to a TMZ “reporter” asking whether she was concerned about swine flu by sniffing, “I don’t eat that”—a confusion seemingly shared by thousands of people who have similarly sworn off eating pork, which is every bit an effective strategy for avoiding the virus as, say, staving off Lou Gehrig’s disease by refusing to visit the Baseball Hall Of Fame. Oh, if only it were as simple as giving up our daily pound of bacon, but as anyone who listens to right-wing pundits knows, this disease is at best a sinister plot by the Obama administration to fully return our country to the Jimmy Carter era and at worst, just the inevitable result of allowing Mexico to breathe the same air as us, a hypothesis put into especially nasty terms this week by Boston radio host Jay Severin. Making frequent reference to “criminaliens,” Severin let loose on our sickly neighbors to the south this week, saying:
Now, in addition to venereal disease and the other leading exports of Mexico — women with mustaches and VD — now we have swine flu… When we are the magnet for primitives around the world — and it's not the primitives' fault, by the way, I'm not blaming them for being primitives, I'm merely observing they are primitives — and when you scoop up some of the world's lowest of primitives in poor Mexico and drop it down in the middle of the United States — poor, without skills, without language, not share our culture, not share our hygiene, haven't been vaccinated… Millions of leeches from a primitive country come here to leech off you…
In the flood of complaints that followed, the station suspended Severin indefinitely, prompting dozens of his defenders to invade the comments section of the Boston Globe with accusations of liberal censorship and cries of, “The truth hurts!” and “Jay calls it like he sees it!” Which is certainly a valid point: After all, if anyone has the proper vantage point to spot a leech on America’s underbelly, surely it’s a swill-spewing bottom-feeder. (And it’s not Severin’s fault. We’re not blaming him for being a swill-spewing bottom-feeder. We’re merely observing that he is a swill-spewing bottom-feeder.)
– In related news: L.A. lampreys Heidi Montag and Spencer Pratt have graciously agreed to fill the void left by the departing Lauren Conrad with the stifling vacuum that is their own day-to-day on The Hills, so this week everyone’s favorite celebrity couple that no one is sure why they’ve heard of set out to increase their already ludicrously inflated profile with a series of photo-ops that also included an exchange of marriage vows or something. And because every pandemic needs a prom king and queen, the couple bravely ventured into Cabo San Lucas, where they spent the week being photographed walking the beach and even making out while wearing surgical masks, because these are the desperate, attention-grabbing measures you resort to when you’re determined to have a “pre-honeymoon” and yet no one wants to pay exorbitant fees for pictures of your second wedding in a month. See Mexico? You’re not the only nation that can export uncultured, unvaccinated, primitives without skills!
– Even with the Rosencrantz And Guildenstern Are Abhorrent People antics of Heidi and Spencer to keep us entertained, odds are that this is the last sickly hurrah of The Hills, which means it’s high time we find another batch of ungrateful, over-privileged youth to despise and/or emulate. Unfortunately, reality television is such a province for wannabe stars that it’s become far too self-aware. The solution? Exploit that self-awareness by recruiting the most navel-gazing, unjustifiably smug species on Earth: the Williamsburg hipster. Now that the story of The Hipster Grifter has achieved blanket coverage, and the “hipster” archetype itself has become so common that niche porn videos are being shot in the Dim Mak warehouse (poetic, in a way, considering how much jack-off material that label’s already released), it’s about time to kill the “hipster” off once and for all by turning it into a household meme. Check out the open casting call for this “major network TV show pilot,” which, if picked up, should have the majority of New York’s twentysomethings unironically wearing Dockers and enrolling in CPA classes by the second episode:
Did you wake up today around 1:30 EST in your industrial loft, pull on your favorite (and only) pair of cutoff jean shorts, and take a leisurely stroll down Bedford Avenue in search of organic green juice and the new DFA on vinyl? Do you tap the family trust fund every time you need to make rent? (or do you have to fix bikes for a living?) Does your tattoo have a story to tell? Do you jam with a hardcore band on the weekends and DJ on the weeknights? Are you cooking tofu right now for you and your seven roommates? Do you barely make it into Manhattan three days a week for "college"? Is that handlebar mustache merely for comedic effect? Do you consider 25 "old age"? Do you idolize Dan Deacon? Do you fold clothes at American Apparel? Are you SO not worried about getting swine flu 'cause that shit only happens to poor people? Were you recently the victim of the Hipster Grifter? Or even better, are you THE Hipster Grifter? And most importantly, what are you going to do this summer now that the McCarren Pool Parties are over???!!!”
Other questions: Do you enjoy having all of your carefully curated tastes reduced to a series of warmed-over clichés parroted back to you by television producers? Does your desire to be famous for doing nothing supercede any wariness you may have about being famous for being despised? Are you even more desperate for attention than this clearly mocking ad suggests? Have you, in fact, never seen a reality show before? P.S. Yeah Yeah Yeahs: So TOTALLY over, right?