Molly Roberts: The distraction of 30 to 50 feral hogs can take us only so far

Thirty to 50 feral hogs. Three to five minutes.

"If you're on here arguing the definition of 'assault weapon' today, you're part of the problem," the musician Jason Isbell wrote on Twitter on Sunday in the aftermath of multiple mass shootings this weekend. "You know what an assault weapon is, and you know you don't need one."

"Legit question for rural Americans," one William McNabb replied. "How do I kill the 30-50 feral hogs that run into my yard within 3-5 mins while my small kids play?"

The tweet went viral, and now the numbers are all over the internet. They're entertaining, but they're eerie, too. These past three days have been filled with reports of how long the terror went on and how many died as it did. The idea of being besieged by 30 to 50 feral hogs in three to five minutes is so bizarre, it's funny; the reality of 22 people being murdered in six minutes or nine people in 30 seconds is not.

McNabb's hog tweet arrived as a contribution to a conversation about gun violence, and it appeared almost perfect for the moment. The missive and the memes it inspired are both a distraction from the awfulness of everyday life and a reminder that distraction can take you only so far.

"For sale / 30 - 50 feral hogs / never shot," one user riffed on that famously miserable six-word story.

"Feral Hog Power Ranking," announced another, before listing their top hogs in meticulous order.

Then came the crossovers. Yesterday's favorite formats for jokes resurfaced, smushed together with the subject du jour: "My [35m] feral hogs [3m, 4m, 3f, 5m, 2f, 7f, 6m, 8m . . .] are unionizing." (Look it up.) A photo of a man glancing at a passing woman labeled "30-50 Feral hogs" and away from his girlfriend, "Grim Realities We're Sick of Thinking About."

That last one gets it right. Those caught up in the temporary hogification of Twitter had likely spent the preceding day immersed in the horror and hideousness of so many dying in so short a time. We were thinking about weapons of war in Walmart, and we were thinking about white supremacy, and we were thinking about the radicalizing workings of the Web. We needed something to laugh at, just like we laughed at all those "wife guys," or the egg that was bigger than before, or any other online sensation that offers some respite from the onslaught of news that never seems to stop and never seems to get any better.

Memeification is its own form of nihilism, or at least absurdism. One statement or image gets grafted onto existing statements and images, all of them part of a continuing conversation in a language only those immersed in the Internet can understand. The starting point, however silly, however serious or however horribly sad, is inevitably iterated into meaninglessness, and meaninglessness offers an escape.

And yet even this truth reveals how entwined the night’s amusement was with the tragedy it was meant to relieve. The machine that made everyone obsessed with a horde of hogs for a few hours is the same machine that incubates white nationalism. The idiosyncrasy of any internet community’s vernacular — impenetrable memes layered upon impenetrable memes — is part of the reason outsiders can’t distinguish between trolling and earnest threats. The absurdity blurs the distinction further, and it’s part of the reason radicalization happens so easily. Everything is a big joke until it’s not.

Speaking of trolls, was the tweet that started this whole hog thing all deliberately wacky? Not exactly, according to what its author has said since. It's difficult to assess good faith on the internet, and it's hard to assess good faith in the gun debate. Maybe people really believe they can only kill garden pests by assailing them with bullet after bullet from a semiautomatic as their young children frolic nearby, or maybe people pretend to believe that to justify keeping arms designed for armies in the hands of civilians.

The thing is, the hogs are real. They're among the most destructive invasive species in the country. Except for mature males, which are generally solitary, they live in sometimes 60-strong groups called sounders, and they plunder crops and uproot lawns. Assault rifles, needless to say, aren't the answer. Maybe you can kill one or two of the beasts with a gun, but their skin is thick and, even if you take a few down, you'll miss plenty of others who will become mama and papa hogs in short order. There's no silver bullet, yet apparently there is Tannerite, explosive targets you can trick the hogs into eating before exploding them from inside, and warfarin, a pesticide that turns the pigs' insides blue as, agonizingly, they die.

The hogs are a menace. They’re a problem America still hasn’t solved, and no amount of tweets or memes is going to make them any less real. But isn’t reality what we were trying to distract ourselves from?

Molly Roberts writes about technology and society for The Washington Post’s Opinions section.