COVIDIOTS A POX ON US ALL
The 2020 pandemic has helped expose entitled entertainment personalities
“We're going to have to sit outside,” a well-known actress pre-empted when we arranged to meet recently. “And eat `substantially.' I don't want to get Rita Ora'd.”
This was less than a week after the British singer Ora had offered to pay a fine of about $17,000 and was forced to apologize for throwing a lavish 30th-birthday party at a Notting Hill restaurant during lockdown, and days before it emerged that Ora had again flouted rules by failing to quarantine upon her return from a private gig in Egypt.
But already, Ora's name had become part of our urban dictionary, a byword for celebrity selfishness. The second apology came hot on the heels of the first. After the “spur of the moment” party that was an “inexcusable error of judgment” and thrown “with the misguided view that we were coming out of lockdown,” Ora was once more self-flagellating on social media.
“I should have followed government advice and isolated myself for the required period ... I apologize again, unreservedly,” wrote the singer, whose mother, Vera, is a health-care worker.
“I feel particularly embarrassed knowing first-hand how hard people have worked to combat this terrible illness and being fully aware of the sacrifices that people and businesses have made to help keep us all safe.”
Just as well the PR team that doubtless drafted Ora's statements was savvy enough to include the line “while I realize the apologetic words of a pop star might not carry much weight ...”
The true flimsiness of those words was revealed the next day, when The Sunday Times Magazine published an interview with Ora conducted before her birthday in which she claimed that “like everyone” she was “just being patient,” and that because of lockdown her 30th would “literally be just my parents and me.”
Forget the words (she clearly has). It's the weight of Ora's actions that she and every high-profile “covidiot” who has extended a bejewelled middle-finger at the pedestrian law-abiding masses will have to carry with them long after the virus has been snuffed out.
You see, COVID-19 is freakishly sophisticated. It doesn't just attack its victims' vital organs, mess with their senses of smell and taste and in a vicious newly discovered twist, have the potential to cause long-term erectile dysfunction in men. It also finds out those spared infection.
This pandemic has busted even carefully disguised self-centredness wide open. It has exposed people's true natures, exposed bare superficiality, irresponsibility and, yes, plain stupidity.
And as the vaccine takes effect and the virus blurs into a distant, dismal memory, we won't forget the behaviour of Ora.
Or rapper Cardi B — who threw a 37-strong Thanksgiving party at her house. Or Kim Kardashian, who thought a global pandemic might be the moment to fly 30 of her friends and family to a private island where they indulged in a mass social media shoot. Or of her little sister Kendall — who, not to be outdone, threw an even bigger 25th-birthday bash with no mask-wearing or social-distancing.
It's not just the high-profile people who have been exposed by this pandemic, but all of us. And we plan an isolated Christmas, grievances built up over 10 months might come bubbling out into the open.
There were those who have always talked the “care in the community” talk but shrank back into the safety of their own households at the first signs of trouble, closing their minds to their isolated or vulnerable neighbours — and those who suddenly revealed generous and charitable sides one might never have guessed were there.
There were those who only ever phoned, emailed or texted to moan about how bored and angry they were, and persisted in countering every strenuously positive response with a negative — and those who decided that shared laughter was the tonic we needed to make it through.
There were those who sacrificed earnings, indulgences and desperately needed intimacy for the sake of everyone else's safety — and those who kept partying and carried on as before.
Perhaps many celebrity members of the “us and them” brigade are too far gone for any kind of epiphany.
After posting an apology for her Thanksgiving bash, Cardi B regressed to her essential self with the tweet: “People are trying too hard to be offended. I wonder how they survive the real world.”
I wonder how people like her will survive a POST-COVID-19 world.