For a few days there, we had the four short sentences memorized: "Been thinking about life and mortality today. I'd rather die gloriously in battle than from a virus. In a way it doesn't matter. But it kinda does." These were the words of Arizona Congressman Paul Gosar, contained inside a tweet and accompanied by an image from the 2018 film The Great Battle. They arrived in early March, right as the severity of the coronavirus was beginning to dawn on the nation. The weekend before, Gosar, a Republican, had come into close, repeated contact with an infected person at a conservative conference. He decided to isolate himself, and within a day he had issued the battle tweet. Nobody was exactly sure what Gosar was trying to say, but one thing was clear: This was excellent meme fodder. Within hours, practically every journalist, comedian, and brand on Twitter had appropriated Gosar's words and swapped in visuals of their own: an insane-looking woman holding a preposterously large Final Fantasy VII sword, security guards chasing the Philadelphia Flyers mascot Gritty, a video of two gentlemen exaggeratedly giving each other the finger on a New York street corner. Gosar (who has previously dog-whistled at QAnon and Epstein conspiracists) has a knack for tapping into the weird web zeitgeist. He's not funny, exactly, but he can be entertaining. Kinda like Twitter itself, come to think of it.