Remember Paul Flart?

Back in 2018 an individual working as a security guard in a hospital recorded videos of his flatulations and, using the name "Paul Flart," posted the videos online for six months. At that point Monsieur Flart "went viral" (or so we are told). However, rather than achieving his declared aspiration of "making a living off of farting," he seems to have, besides losing his job as a result of his notoriety, to have subsequently slipped back into obscurity going by how little information has been made publicly available about him since.

Still, if he did not quite achieve his "dream," it seems to me that Paul Flart is nonetheless highly symbolic of the culture we have been living in for at least these past hundred years--this his particular form of the grab after celebrity that, as Upton Sinclair observed a century ago, seems to many of those enduring a working class existence the sole chance for something better (however small that chance).

It especially seems to me symbolic of the Internet--literal flatulence summing up well most of what one finds online, and what the vast majority of web users gravitate toward, helping to make it the intellectual wasteland that it is, as all those who have dared to offer (or seek) anything else in expectation of an audience have learned to their cost and, I do not doubt, frequent embitterment.