Coronavirus! You stole my limelight! How dare you!
Now that the whole world is showbiz, and is therefore rated in terms of winners and losers, who’s in and who’s out, who’s hot and who’s not, let’s see how various acts are faring now that a teeny-tiny virus with little red guys sprouting out all over has taken centre stage.
Greta Thunberg’s people must be tearing their expensively cut hair out. They were just getting their act the big gigs and then COVI D-19 crashes the show! A lay-off is not going to help Our Lady of the Ozone, already well into the 14th minute of her Warholian quarter of an hour of fame. Her youth is what she trades on, the broad principle being that the people who listen to her have a mental age roughly the same as her actual age, and her youth is slipping away. Soon, she’ll be playing the arse-end of Vegas, on the bill with the surviving members of The Mamas and the Papas, if there are any.
Extinction Rebellion are also desperately trying to get themselves back into the Klieg light of attention. One minute their theatrical events were the talk of the town, but now that people are worried about their own extinction, the rebels without really all that much of a cause – at least not one rooted in reality – are becoming increasingly irrelevant. They are considering a suicide as a statement later this year. Crowd-fund, please.
Then there are Waldorf and Statler, otherwise known as Biden and Sanders, both still in the race to see whose Zimmer frame gets a chance to be parked in the Oval Office. Curiously, King Virus might actually work for the Democrats, as people might not notice that for all the talk about diversity and the need for a presidential nominee who was anything but an old, white, straight, male, they just got down to the last two old, white, straight males. The black guy and the Oriental maths guy – it’s maths, not math. It’s the English language, we get to say how you say stuff – and foxy Tulsi (the only one who mentioned free speech, which led to her being savaged by diesel-dyke Clinton, and the media didn’t like it either), the gay guy who even had ‘butt’ as part of his name, they were all just feed for the horses.
CNN and MSNBC, whose ratings are going down faster than Michael Moore’s dinner, might have been expected to introduce some non-Trump-centred gravitas into their news shows. You know, talk to some virus experts, nurses, epidemiologists and what have you. Instead, Anderson Cooper – he is the one who looks like a Thunderbirds puppet without the fine wires – gave wholly unwarranted air-time to Anthony Scaramucci (don’t you just want to say his name twice and ask him if he’ll do the fandango?), the advisor so incompetent he lasted just 11 days at the White House. MSNBC followed suit with this talentless greaseball, and we assume the ratings curve plummets ever deeper.
Big tech are having a good game, as the virus has given them a brand-new excuse to take down and demonetise various content providers whose politics they don’t like. Of course, that’s not quite how they phrase it, but posing under the halo of denying access to fake news, they get to shut up dissenters, same as it ever was. YouTube have stated that videos about coronavirus don’t even need to break their gossamer-thin ‘community standards’ guidelines. If the YouTube propagandists want it off the air, it goes off the air. And they get to tell everyone that it was the algorithm.
Politicians in Britain, both on the left and right wings of the one big party that effectively runs things, are a little edgy. Social media has been humming with people banding together and acting on a local level… without government! This worrying trend is leading countries to continually downsize numbers in terms of public gatherings. We do not want people doing things for themselves, thank you very much.
The CEOs of the major toilet-roll manufacturing companies are, of course, some of the biggest winners in all of this, as people leave what little soap-opera honed common sense they had at home and slug it out in the aisles for this new luxury good. When those CEOs award themselves mega-bonuses in the next financial year, they might be forgiven for thinking that shit really did just get real.
Racism is having a good epidemic, with the World Health Organisation seemingly spending more time scolding people for calling a virus that began in China ‘Chinese’ than trying to cure the problem. Horse-faced dimbo popsy Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has pointed out the racism of not eating in Chinese restaurants. Well, to us it seems like a dash of common sense not to want to be the least racist person in the graveyard. Trump, of course, is a racist whatever he does. He just is, k?
Certainly, coronavirus must be challenging 9/11 for the longest news cycle ever, and it is difficult to see what will knock it off the front page the way that David Beckham’s metatarsal, if memory serves, did with the Twin Towers attack all those years ago. And, while the establishment media has its sure-fire subject matter for the immediate future, social media is not far behind. New figures show that the number of coronavirus experts on social media who have no knowledge of medicine whatsoever has just overtaken the number of actual cases.
So, if you want to go up against COVI D-19, you had better some act together. There have been a few viruses over the years, by the way. Can we not give them names? Storms and hurricanes get names, why not viruses? Virus Vinny, for example. That would help us to visualise the enemy as a sort of evil Joe Pesci.
Whatever happens, stay safe, stay indoors and read more books, wash your hands often – if you already have OCD disregard that – and the next time you eat Chinese, lay off number 42. It’s the bat soup.
Photo credit: Anders Hellberg
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