In the Outbreak, Celebrities Try to Do What the President Won’t - Vanity Fair

These mega-shared posts may have some positive impact—or they might just be something to pass the time, blips to retweet and chuckle about in the service of having done something, giving us all a new bit of ephemera to commune over as the air tightens around us.

As long as these celebrity pandemic tips and entreaties are saying the right things, giving a close enough version of The Right Advice, I suppose it doesn’t much matter whether they’re rooted in entitlement or a genuine desire to help—if they’re coming from a place of true compassion or from a (darkly relatable) urge to publicly scold people. Sure, the many famous folks on Twitter who seem to have suddenly acquired medical degrees in the past week do induce some exasperated eye rolling. (It seems, sometimes, that their noise is drowning out the voices of people with actual expertise, or stoking fear rather than allaying it or channeling it into something practical.)

But theirs is, really, only a reasonable response to a galling lack of a central, cogent directive. These didactic tweets from famous non-experts seem born of a commonly recognizable worry, verging on terror—a consuming feeling of helplessness as we look up and see no organized system whirring above our heads. There’s no relief right now to be found in looking to the people meant to be in charge of us, who are supposed to be offering the calming recitation of instruction. So we turn to celebrity—as we consistently have in the years since the internet began atomizing us into factions, coalesced around shared aesthetic values and personalities.

Fans pledge their allegiances, taking cues from their chosen idols, while also, on occasion, urging them to speak out about charged topics; to publicly change their minds; to call out or condemn a person, a practice, whatever. I’ve always seen this largely one-sided dialogue as a strange and ultimately harmless function of being famous online, a frivolous chatter that only occasionally erupts into something tangible. But now, in the absence of any official competence, celebrities are being asked—and have been taking it upon themselves—to become ordering forces, to fight the proliferation of a bad thing when few formal entities will.

Most of what we’re seeing from celebrities right now is unremarkable. In aggregate, though, stepping back and considering the whole of all these plaints—not just from actors and singers, but media people and academics and really anyone with an online following—you see the desperate howl at the center of the swirl, ringing around a boggling void. What a scramble Washington’s fumbling has created, a collective effort to bear up under the weight of cruel and indifferent stewardship. The rich and famous are far from union reps, or educators, or the rare reliable politician. But they’re what we’ve got for now, I suppose.

Emotions about this swiftly developing disaster change quickly. I’ve been knee-jerk annoyed at our celebrity caretakers for all their self-regarding clamor, but have also felt soothed by their ardency. They’re just trying to help. Mostly, really, there’s a bitter frustration about their seeming necessity—the terrible resignation of thinking, Well, at least someone is saying something. It’s sad, and scary, to see where we run for consolation and guidance when the assumed structure of the country has been so casually dismantled. Politics is lost; only clout can save us now.

I look at Flightradar24 in the midst of this and don’t experience the awed, hushed peace it once gave me, watching so many things moving in careful, satisfying concert. I see now only big planes potentially full of disease, let up into the air at such great risk, by people doing so many things wrong. But there in that heedless tangle was, hey, that little plane, puttering over Austria, urging us in its pleading squiggle to stop. Flightradar24’s tweet about that pilot’s pointed trip got more than 13,000 likes. Which is something. Or, not nothing, at least.

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In the Outbreak, Celebrities Try to Do What the President Won’t - Vanity Fair

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