Fear Is The Trendkiller

One of the critical barriers truly preventing America from blossoming into the greatest country in the world is, well, America itself. It seems if each and every day a new set of aggravating, completely worthless popular trends emerge and start spreading amongst the more braindead citizens of America by storm, nullifying any traces of progress we were previously making. If we as a nation ever plan to assert our dominance over the rest of Earth by claiming we have a superior culture and community, we must first rid ourselves of the terrible trends polluting our society. Naturally, I feel the best way to do this is by bitching about them on a webpage, so let's get started!

These Rap Snacks chips, much like actual rap these days, are hard to beat.

Modern rap music - There used to be a time when rap music was a bunch of street-smart ghetto people belting out rhythmic rhymes and dancing in the street for no real reason while uptight white people in business suits walked by, gave them disapproving glances, and slowly shook their heads in a very frustrated manner. Now rap music has completely erased its two only positive features, the rapping and the streets, and replaced them with this shitty "stream of consciousness" type of rapping where the black guy seems to just randomly say shit to a beat inside his head which arbitrarily speeds up and slows down depending on his bowel movements and the position of the moon. 

Rapping isn't even "rapping" anymore, it's just talking really loudly while a drum loop cycles in the background and a few female vocalists randomly emerge from the shadows to moan "oooh" and "ahhh" while mashing their plastic tits together and swinging their giant asses through the air like a couple of Hefty garbage bags full of grits shot from a cannon. Hell, even the damn streets are gone from rap these days, replaced by Hollywood mansions, fast cars, and a posse of bucktoothed black guys wearing $600 college basketball t-shirts and $400 jeans. You'd think rappers could afford some rhythm lessons with all the cash they make from standing on stage and holding a microphone with one hand while spastically gesticulating towards the audience with the other for two hours, but no, all they do is spend their money on new jewelry for their teeth. Maybe all the precious metals in their gum lines prevent them from actually rapping to any discernable beat.

Anti-Republican protestors - I cringe whenever hearing that the Republicans are planning some upcoming meeting, convention, or fundraiser to earn more money for the "Buy Jesus Christ a New Diamond Beard Foundation," not because I hate Republicans, but because I hate anti-Republican protestors even more. These loudmouthed, braindead raving cliches make me want to start voting Republican just to spite them, but naturally I avoid doing so because that would only ensure four more years of unwashed horse-like creatures parading down busy intersections while waving "BU$H IS EVIL" signs they drew with their parents' Magic Markers. 

The general idea here seems to be that if you are too fucking stupid to intelligently explain your position on a few political issues because you often break down into tears when losing arguments to eight-year olds regarding the quality of Willie Wonkie candy in the Hy-Vee parking lot, you can compensate for your lack of debate skills by being as loud and belligerent as possible. I mean, hell, that tactic works all the time, doesn't it? Do you know how many women have been converted to the ranks of Christianity thanks to the ceaseless efforts of the anti-abortion lobby and their rock-solid tactic of "standing outside abortion clinics in the middle of the rain and shrieking like the Pod People from 'Invasion of the Body Snatchers' whenever they spot a pregnant woman walking within a 20-mile radius of the clinic"? I'm guessing somewhere between nine and ten hundred million billion thousand. Maybe even more if you count fat women as two people each.

Wow! Suddenly I hate George Bush and think America is just like Nazi Germany, all thanks to a fucking posterboard sign held by some fat unemployed shithead! The power of advertising in action!

The insane liberals, despite how much they claim to loathe insane conservatives, seem to have absolutely no qualms with adopting their awesome policy of forming large groups waving crudely misspelled signs, stomping around public places to disrupt the daily routines of normal non-insane folks, and screaming at everybody they see with the ultimate goal of annoying them into submitting to their wills. If people have to choose between George Bush and a crowd of furious bicyclists whose biggest claim to fame is that one of their blogs was mentioned in passing by Al Franken on that one AM radio station nobody turns on because it's about as exciting as listening to NPR at 50% speed, they'll either choose George Bush or they'll choose to look away when the riot police start caving in skulls with their nightclubs.

Here's a newsflash you guys and gals who believe George Bush is going to physically break into your bathroom and steal the awesome weed you have hidden in that prescription gout medication bottle next to the Drano: most people might actually listen to you if you present your facts clearly and act confident enough in what you believe in to know that these facts will speak for themselves. Most people will NOT listen to you if you're stomping around and blocking traffic while shouting tremendously catchy slogans like "two, four, six, eight, George Bush is a fucking liar and is Hitler and Satan and fuck you George Bush you cocksucking father of whores." Whenever chucklefucks like you begin blocking up traffic and causing me to be delayed, my first two priorities instantly switch to running you down with my car and voting Republican across the boards, not necessarily in that order.

No, really, I DON'T want to be able to use the things I buy! Please require me to use a welder to open them!

"Impenetrable Plastic Pouches of Death" packages - Every single vaguely electronic device these days, from removable memory cards to battery-powered cereal spoons, ships in those handy-dandy impenetrable plastic pouches of death created by Lucifer himself in an attempt to raise the national suicide rate by about 10 percentage points. The corporate business world, serving up more evidence that the hottest consumer trend is "manufacturing products that nobody anywhere wants to actually purchase," has decided the most effective way to prevent people from stealing their 38-cent Korean memory cards is by encasing them in 80 pounds of a titanium-plastic hybrid which can withstand point blank shotgun blasts and most meteorite impacts. I'm sure their research and engineering teams were absolutely tickled pink when they finally discovered a fool-proof way to prevent thieves from stealing boxes of their painfully retro Rainbow Brite flashing wristbands from the local Hot Topic.

ENGINEER: "Dear fucking Christ! I think I just came up with an idea to stop shoplifters from stealing our crap!"
SCIENTIST: "Does it involve the plan we were talking about before? You know, the one where we build armed robots that randomly shoot customers who may or may not look like shoplifters?"
ENGINEER: "No, this is an even better idea! What if we make the packaging for our products so tough and obnoxious to open that nobody wants to even bother stealing them?"
SCIENTIST: "Excellent! I'll start designing a box that screams like a infant in a garbage disposal and sprays out clouds of deadly poison gas when opened!"
ENGINEER: "Why don't we just make it so you can't open the box to begin with? Then we won't have to buy the poison gas and we'll save money!"
SCIENTIST: "That's a wonderful idea! I'll start working on this idea once I get done sodomizing these orphans with a canoe oar."

Look for upcoming 3M anti-theft packages guaranteed to reduce theft by up to 86%, such as the revolutionary "metal box which itself weighs half a ton and is packed full of dirty syringes and rusty shrapnel," and the ever-popular "fragile piece of complicated electronics whose instruction manual is chemically bonded to atoms of the package itself, so there's no way to open the package without destroying the instructions and your sanity."

Hey, great job there you stupid lonely American white sack of shit, that anime drawing of Angela and Tony from "Who's the Boss" will surely get you pussy in Japan, you pathetic tub.

Anime and Japanese culture - I'm firmly convinced that certain depressing Americans love Japanese culture even more than the Japanese. You've got this rancid cross-section of fat American bozos who are obsessed with anime and all other fucked up forms of deviant Japanese culture because they're convinced that while no sane or rational American woman in a non-coma state would even consider accidentally calling their house for a wrong number, 90% of the females in Japan would chain themselves up to their cock just because they're American. You know that saying "the grass is always greener on the other side?" Well these people believe that the other side not only contains a whole shitload of grass, but also an entire warehouse of mobile dick-sucking machines fueled by the oil slick of greasy discharge leaking from their cheese ball-sized facial pores. Japan represents some mythological wonderland where all their dreams can come true, namely the dream of them not being completely unpopular abject failures eternally scorned by members of both sexes just because they're fat, moist, stupid, and have the social skills of a crippled wet ferret.

Wake up America: anime fucking sucks. I don't give a shit about the spirit of Mother Earth and why she's personally pissed off at me just because I throw rusty car batteries into freshwater lakes and piss on baby birds nests. I don't want to watch poorly translated analogies about the struggle between technology and man's eternal soul; I want to see the soul get incinerated by Metal Storm. I don't care about the romantic lives of two 12-year old girls that look like eight-year old girls imitating six-year old girls who have had their DNA genetically combined with the DNA of an insect and a creature composed solely of tits. If you're really desperate to see inside the dramatic love life of a grade school kid, go abduct a few from a nearby public school and force them to recreate the time you were turned down by Susie Johnson in fifth grade just because you had a patch of braided hair growing from your left ear canal. If you get arrested, let the authorities know you're a big anime fan; they'll probably have a special section of the prison just for your people, complete with titanium reinforced cots and a fire hose that sprays out Clearasil. The best thing to ever come out of Japan was dickgirl porn, and that's just because their penises make it too difficult for them to fit in those fucking stupid ass robot suits.

Perpetual online victims - Oh gosh, I'm sorry I and the rest of the world can't comprehend exactly how intelligent and emotionally complex you are because you wear Switchblade Symphony t-shirts and fishnet stockings regardless of your gender. I feel so lousy that I could never ever ever, in a million years, understand how important your "Juggalo Family" is to you and how they're more of a family to you than the pockmarked fat wretch who shoveled you out of her urethra and now oozes around on the couch, smoldering in her own expired juices. 

Yes, I am absolutely wracked with guilt because I made fun of your neon pink Livejournal site detailing your furry persona, a 40-foot tall gender rotating horse that shoots cum from his nipples. You're not going to get any sympathy from me by comparing the plight of the transgendered skunk cock lover to that of Rosa Parks, Martin Luther King, or even Martin Lawrence. Juggalos, goths, furries, and all you other groups of middle class white males who dress differently and jack off to different kinds of porn don't deserve special protection or rights from the government to ensure scrawny webmasters across the globe don't point out how laughably retarded you are. If you're going to continually go out of your way to announce how different you are, be prepared for people to point out how different you are. Oh, and how you want to fuck mules too, you goddamn weirdos.

That horrible female vocal pitch sliding effect heard in every song on the radio - Every female pop song these days uses the same goddamn vocal effect that really grew to popularity on Madonna's"Ray of Light" song. You know that grating, obnoxious thing I'm referring to, it's the effect where it sounds like the female's voice was recorded in a robot's anus and the metal machine is tightly clenching his buttocks to shift the voice up and down half an octave via sphincter vibrato. Hell, they might as well just completely synthesize all female performers' voices these days since they're so fucking overproduced and brightly computerized that there is undoubtedly more work put into the effects chain than there is the actual singing. I can't really give any other examples of female pop singers who employ the robot anus vocalist techniques, as all their voices are processed so heavily that they sound completely homogenized and identical, like a chorus of tall brunette clones wearing evening gowns and puking up dinner in the bathroom of the MTV Music Video Awards.

No wait, this is truly worth paying $50 and $10 a month for, in addition to four hours a day! Now please excuse me, I must get back to waiting for an sand witch to spawn so I can kill her and steal her magic socks.

Online RPGs - The entire concept of "games" came from the idea that people don't like to work all day, instead requiring some time off to relax and do something amusing such as "not work." Games were invented to entertain people so they could escape from their boring, dreary lives and engage in something exponentially much more amusing like rolling dice and flipping over brightly colored orange cards which helpfully inform them they are going to jail. Online RPGs, or MMORPGs, or "colossal wastes of both time and money," buck this trend by not only requiring the participants to engage in a neverending series of menial, repetitive work tasks, but additionally charging people to do it. So not only are the people are required to spend their free time working, but they are now paying money to do so. It's really probably the greatest business model to ever exist, much like McDonalds charging people $15 an hour to sweep the rotting french fries and runny man gravy from their floors. Let's take a look at the mechanics of any online RPG:

1) You pay a company money for a pass that lets you buy their game and play on their server for a month.
2) During this month, you spend countless hours every day killing the same creatures over and over and over again so you can go up a level and kill slightly different creatures over and over and over again in a slightly different area.
3) You spend hours of your time obtaining large amounts of fake money so you can buy fake clothes and fake swords to impress fake people online.
4) You get killed, lose a bunch of equipment, money, and time, which causes you to get very angry and write 500-page rants about how dissatisfied you are by the game company and their horrible product.
5) You repeat steps 2-4 until you grow so fat and pathetic that third party assistance is required to lift you from your chair, not that you will ever go anywhere.

Yeah, that sounds like a blast! Let's all pay money for the privilege of letting a giant corporation piss us off while we try to work for them! MMORPGs are games without the fun and twice the price, and the sooner people start realizing this, the sooner we'll have less gang-related fights over the speed bonus for dark elf hobbit troll orcs with saving throws.

Do you know of any other trends I left off? Drop me a line and let me know so I can create one gigantic comprehensive list of terrible trends that America must overcome before we can evolve into the perfect nation of SUVs and endless "Friends" reruns on every channel that our forefathers envisioned when they established independence from Canada and wrote the Constitution on the back of a Michelobe Ultra bar napkin.

– Rich "Lowtax" Kyanka (@TwitterHasBannedAllMyAccountsEver)