Masks Are for Plebs
Different rules for AOC and other celebrities
LET’S face it: AOC is a genius. By “genius,” I mean “massive talent,” not “extremely smart.” Barbra Streisand is a genius singer, but you wouldn’t want her analyzing your X-rays. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-Moscow) may be so dumb, she hadn’t heard of John Maynard Keynes’ famous (-ly wrong) prophecy about a 15-hour work week until years after graduating college with an economics degree (and also thought his name was “Milton Keynes”), but she is in a class of her own when she’s doing her job, which is getting people to look at her.
In a room full of dimwit divas at Fifth Avenue’s annual irony-free version of the Zoolander walk-off, Ocasio-Cortez easily bested them all. During the Met Costume Gala, the sole object is to get looked at by the most people, and AOC’s Tax the Rich dress was probably looked at by more people than all the others combined.
Dominating in that space was like winning a bushy-mustache contest in a room that contained Joe Stalin, Friedrich Nietzsche and Frida Kahlo. It’s Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s world, and the rest of only live here . . . on Planet Stupid. (The richest 10 percent already paid 71 percent of taxes, and the bottom 60 percent pay zero income tax.)
Lost in all the marveling at AOC’s cheek and/or cheeks was that the peons at the event (which required vaccinations) were wearing masks, but the celebrities got to schmooze and kiss and hug and clink glasses without ever smearing their makeup on face masks.
Does the Delta variant care if you were once on the cover of Vogue or had a hit song? The Party of the People just can’t stop parading through places where the working stiffs Katie Couric dubbed “the great unwashed” are literally forced to hide their faces lest they exhale upon the primped and anointed.
Bolshevik Barbie — the Radical Chick, that humble Tesla-driving architect’s daughter from Westchester County who enjoys parking illegally behind the Jeff Bezosowned Whole Foods in DC — cares only about the optics of whatever she’s doing. Which is another way of saying that, like Rihanna and J.Lo, she just wants to look good.
However, to everyone but AOC’s fans, the optics were: Why do fancy people get to go maskless while the rest of us have to Pampers-strap our faces?
At the Met, suffering proletarian Morlocks in masks served Champagne to the elegant Eloi, took pictures wearing masks, pulled security wearing masks, even stumbled behind the royalty wearing masks so they could do things like hold up AOC’s train to keep it from getting dusty.
A sign posted at the museum entrance states plainly, “Face coverings for all visitors age two and older are required, even if you are vaccinated.” And everyone age 12 and up has to be vaccinated to get in. Party or no party, middle-class people and their twoyear-olds have to mask up at the Met, but AOC does not, because a mask would spoil her look. All socialists are equal, but some are more equal than others.
Optics, optics. Last winter, with California being hit hard by COVID, Governor Gavin Newsom and his lobbyist pals partied without masks, indoors, at the most famous restaurant on the Left Coast, French Laundry. In August, Barack Obama and hundreds of his closest friends partied maskless in a tented and enclosed outdoor space, also known as “indoor space.”
Some 200 servants, footmen, menial minions and lackeys reportedly wore masks. The message was, “Don’t breathe on us, serving class!”
Down in DC, Mayor Muriel Bowser partied indoors at a July wedding with no mask, then claimed she was eating (she wasn’t), then gave up and attacked the reporter (Tiana Lowe) who nailed her.
If you don’t need a mask when you’re vaccinated — and you don’t! — that rule should apply to everyone. Even in that made-up story about Marie Antoinette, the queen of 18th-century mean didn’t say, “Let them eat cake, but then cover up their ugly faces immediately so I don’t have to look at their peasant mugs.”