Now that swine flu's in rapid retreat, and Susan Boyle mania's abated, we seem to be in a mass-hysteria vacuum.  No need for alarm (unfortunately) — this does happen from time to time.  But if we go too long without something insignificant to utterly freak fucking out about, the danger is we might start freaking out about things we should probably really be freaking out about it.  And no one wants that. Trust me. 

Thank goodness the media is tirelessly searching for new "viral content" to safeguard us from this ever happening.  I recognized a valiant attempt last week to turn the sorry exploits of some wretched couple named Jon and Kate with eight children into must-see-TV.  Of course he cheated on her.  She's about as tight as the Sumner Tunnel after pushing out that litter.  Too obvious for a national cause célèbre.  Sorry.

Presidentially-speaking, we've run the gamut from a media-obsession with Michelle Obama's "guns" to fawning over Bo, the Obama's Chinese Water Torture dog.  But neither turned into widespread hysteria, as might have been hoped. 

At the recent White House Correspondents' Association dinner Wanda Sykes went viral all over Rush Limbaugh, speculating that he "was the 20th [9-11] hijacker but he was just so strung out on Oxycontin he missed his flight."  Which seems reasonable enough.  But now the media is actually asking if Sykes's comments "went too far". 

Remember: it's Rush Limbaugh we're talking about here.  The know-nothing bloviator who mocked Michael J. Fox's Parkinson's, called a 13-year-old Chelsea Clinton "the White House Dog," and says he mistook Los Angeles’s Hispanic mayor Antonio Villaraigosa for a "shoeshine boy", et cetera. 

Fox news reports: "After [Sykes's] appearance, conservatives bellowed that Sykes was way over the line. 'Mean-spirited,' 'hateful' and 'disgusting' were just a few of the words used by conservative bloggers and commentators to describe the performance."

It's called karma, bitches.  Get used to it.

But all this idiocy brings to mind the perennial question critics ask of Hollywood: how do they get it so wrong so often?  How hard can it be to create viral content? I mean, it's a fairly simple formula. If a cat can do it by flushing a toilet, why can't the media empires that rule the airwaves? 

I think what we need is a good old-fashioned penis panic — a wave of Genital Retraction Syndrome (GRS) like they had in Senegal, Benin, Ghana, Zimbabwe, Nigeria, Sudan and Congo-Kinshasa at various times in the last decade. There was even a wave of suspected penis-snatchings in the Democratic Republic of Congo just last year. 

Jesus, pop an Enzyte and calm the fuck down!  And that's the problem with America, innit?  Almost anything that could cause a real panic: we've got a pill for it!  Where's the outrage?  I don't know — I popped a Xanax, and *POOF!* it went away!  Why wasn't there panic on Wall Street after the latest economic collapse?  Because everyone's on Lexapro!  Why in the face of media-panic over pig flu didn't people stockpile, sequester themselves, and don surgical masks and latex gloves whenever they had to go out? Zoloft!  The cure for Global Warming?  Effexor!

Sometimes you need a good freak-out to put things in perspective, though, y'know?  I mean, no disrespect to toilet-flushing felines, but when that's entertainment it might be time to adjust your meds.