Michael McCaffrey lives in Los Angeles where he works as an acting coach, screenwriter and consultant. He is also a freelance film and cultural critic whose work can be read at RT, Counterpunch and at his website mpmacting.com/blog.
Coronavirus is a terrible malady that is killing people and the global economy, but it isn’t the most pernicious pandemic afflicting the globe right now. No, the most diabolical disease currently in circulation is the dreaded Celebrivirus.
The onset of the Celebrivirus starts with a steady stream of verbal diarrhea gushing forth from empty-headed, self-absorbed, attention-starved celebrities, which is quickly followed by convulsive puking and rage headaches from the rest of us.
The most recent outbreak of Celebrivirus began with a plethora of Covid-19-related videos from a cavalcade of self-aggrandizing stars.
For instance, Matthew McConaughey thought that now was a good time to espouse his incoherent optimism regarding coronavirus.
The Typhoid Mary of Celebrivirus, Madonna, rose from the grave that is her moribund career so that she could, in the nude of course, benevolently inform us that Covid-19 has, in fact, made us all equal.
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publicly lamented that she was “stressed” over the coronavirus. Not having to worry about losing her job, or being evicted, she’s struggling with her stress while safely tucked away in her mansion with her husband, daughter and her gobs of money.
Serena explained, “I don’t hang out with anyone, and when I say anyone I mean my daughter. She coughed, I got angry and gave her a side-eye. I gave her that ‘angry Serena’ and then I got sad.”
Shock of shocks that Serena’s number one priority is the well-being of Serena, and not the health of her toddler daughter. Serena has a boatload of tennis championships, but it seems like the title that will forever elude her is Mother of the Year.
The Celebrivirus that forced McConaughey, Madonna and Serena to compulsively share their idiocy, has also mutated into song version.
Self-adoring U2 frontman Bono caught the Celebrivirus bug and decided to share with humanity an original song he conjured related to Covid-19. Yikes… this song is pretentious, even for Bono, the Crown Prince of Pretension. Note to aging restless rockstars recording shelter-in-place mediocrity: At least make it remotely decent before you drown us in pompous indulgence.
The most egregious of all the Celebrivirus videos came from Gal Gadot of Wonder Woman fame, who recruited a bunch of her patronizing and condescending celebrity friends like Kristen Wiig, Jamie Dornan, Mark Ruffalo, Amy Adams, Sarah Silverman, James Marsden, Natalie Portman, Sia, Labrinth, Pedro Pascal, Zoe Kravitz and Will Ferrell, who looked like he had just ingested his body weight in cocaine, to sing a truly nauseating version of John Lennon’s iconic kumbaya knock-off ‘Imagine.’
On the best of days, ‘Imagine’ is a cringe-worthy number, but in the hands of these smug and self-satisfied jackasses it rockets into the stratosphere of saccharine dreadfulness.
If John Lennon were alive to see this cloying, celebrity-fueled monstrosity he would beat Mark David Chapman to the punch and shoot himself in front of the Dakota Building just to end his own mortification and misery.
The fact that these filthy-rich stars, not a single one of which is not a multi-millionaire, chose to un-ironically sing the lyric, “Imagine no possessions, I wonder if you can, no need for greed or hunger, a brotherhood of man,” when there are millions of people potentially facing evictions from their apartments, foreclosures on their homes, losing their jobs and life savings, not to mention the fear of getting sick and dying, is a staggering testament to their delusional fanaticism and fatuousness.
Yes, Wonder Woman and friends, people can imagine life with no possessions because most of them live a life with few or no possessions…especially now, since the ranks of the unemployed are swelling from the coronavirus depression.
It is easy to sing about a world of no greed or hunger when you are rich and nourished. I wonder if they hum “Imagine” to themselves as they drive past the filthy hordes living in cardboard boxes on the street?
It would have been less offensive if Gal and her cornucopia of celebrity clowns started a band named The Marie Antoinettes, then wrote and performed their new song, titled “Let Them Eat Cake.”
They are so in the thrall of the Celebrivirus they actually thought their syrupy crooning from the security of their golden-gated castles would ingratiate them to the masses rather than inflame hatred.
When I watched these various vacuous and vapid Celebrivirus videos, I didn’t have the insipid ‘Imagine’ playing in my mind. No, my soundtrack was Radiohead’s ‘Paranoid Android’ with its wishful lyric, “when I am king, you will be first against the wall, with your opinion which is of no consequence at all”.
On the bright side, at least the Celebrivirus is bringing ordinary people together out of common animosity toward these narcissists. I know hate is supposed to be bad, but I think in this case it is healthy and helps to keep our collective immune system robust.
As for a cure for the dreaded Celebrivirus, scientists have found only one…and that is for celebrities to simply keep their moronic mouths shut. In other words…there is no cure.
