In a world where the highlights of our collective existence are usually limited to which billionaire is launching a phallic tube into the stratosphere or which aging politician has recently forgotten the name of their own spouse, Australia has finally contributed something tangible to the global discourse. Something real. Something you can really sink your teeth into—though I wouldn’t recommend it unless you have a penchant for Hepatitis A and a profound death wish. I am, of course, referring to the 'poo balls' and the legendary fatberg of New South Wales.

The fatberg—a term that sounds like a rejected villain from a low-budget 80s cartoon—is, in reality, the most honest monument humanity has ever erected. Forget the Pyramids. Forget the Eiffel Tower. Those are merely the vanities of kings who wanted to be remembered for things other than their base biological functions. The fatberg, reportedly the size of four buses and currently lurking in the bowels of Australia’s deepwater ocean sewer, is our true legacy. It is a gelatinous, subterranean record of every greasy meal, every 'flushable' wipe that was a lie from the moment it left the factory, and every ounce of human refuse we thought we could simply banish to the void.

It is almost poetic, isn't it? The way we live our lives in a state of perpetual, sanitized denial, only for the physical evidence of our existence to congeal into a four-bus-sized monster of congealed lard and wet wipes. The 'poo balls'—those delightful little black spheres of disappointment currently washing up on the once-pristine sands of Australian beaches—are merely the emissaries of this underground god. They are the physical manifestations of the 'out of sight, out of mind' philosophy that governs every facet of modern life, from global economics to our own digestive tracts. We flush, we forget, and we act shocked when the ocean decides it has had enough of our internal monologue.

Naturally, the authorities are 'warning' the public. They treat it as a freak occurrence, a glitch in the matrix of civilization. How quaint. They speak of the fatberg as if it were an invasive species, rather than the logical conclusion of a society that consumes with the mindless fervor of a locust swarm and expects the plumbing of the Earth to handle the fallout. The news reports, dripping with a mixture of clinical detachment and suppressed horror, suggest the thing is trapped in a deepwater ocean outfall. This is bureaucratic-speak for 'we pumped our filth into the sea and the sea finally had the good sense to throw it back in our faces.'

On the Left, we will undoubtedly see a flurry of performative hand-wringing. The 'environmentally conscious' crowd will lament the tragedy from the glowing screens of their cobalt-mined smartphones, perhaps organizing a beach cleanup that serves primarily as a aesthetic backdrop for their Instagram feeds. They will blame 'the system' or 'big oil' while continuing to contribute to the very fatberg they despise, one artisanal-soap-scum-covered wipe at a time. On the Right, the response will be even more intellectually bankrupt. They will likely ignore the stench entirely, or perhaps argue that the fatberg is a natural phenomenon, a byproduct of a 'robust' economy that shouldn't be stifled by pesky things like 'functional sewage infrastructure' or 'environmental regulations.' To them, a giant ball of grease in the ocean is just another day of glorious, unregulated progress.

The reality is that neither side has the stomach to admit what these 'poo balls' actually represent: the total failure of the human project. We have mastered the art of digital abstraction—we can trade imaginary currencies and argue about the pronouns of fictional characters—but we still haven't figured out how to get rid of our own waste without it coming back to haunt our vacations. We are a species of toddlers playing with matches in a room made of oily rags, perpetually surprised when the inevitable fire starts to singe our eyebrows.

The sheer scale of the fatberg—four buses!—is the most telling detail. We can’t even describe our own filth without resorting to the vocabulary of the transit system. Our brains have become so colonized by the mundane that we need to visualize a fleet of public transportation vehicles made of sewage just to grasp the magnitude of our own gluttony. It is a monument to our stagnation. While we argue about the merits of various political grifters, the fatberg grows. While we celebrate the 'innovation' of another useless app, the fatberg thickens. It is the one thing we are actually producing with any consistency: a massive, undigested lump of our own choices.

So, let the Australians stare at their black spheres. Let the tourists recoil in horror as the ocean delivers its honest feedback. It is a rare moment of clarity in a world of manufactured lies. The fatberg doesn't care about your politics. It doesn't care about your 'brand' or your 'values.' It is simply there—a cold, viscous reminder that no matter how much we try to polish the surface of our reality, the truth eventually washes up on the shore, smelling exactly like what it is.