Pandemic and celebritidom

Is the emergency blowing up staid concepts of celebritidom?

Celebrity culture glorifies them not just for their performances or personas but for their wealth itself — their blowout child birthday parties, car collections, plastic surgeries and property ownership.

...But if I’m going to pay attention to celebrities at a time like this, their contribution better be charming or deranged enough to distract me from the specter of mass suffering and death.

The denizens of celebritidom are now being issued demerits for being wealthy and famous and helpless like mere humans, and this reads to me like angry scapegoating. Celebrities can't solve this viral crisis, and no that isn't being suggested as necessary by article writer Hess, rather, the sin is celebrities exhibiting bad form (arbitrated by the NY Times, leaving newsgathering behind to do some school-marming) and while the article seems like an iconoclastic reaction against the celebrity gods, it also reads like Luther nailing the thesis on the Wittenberg door, i.e., it's still the same religion, but the writer wishes for the dogma to be reformed.

Amanda Hess "critic-at-large for the New York Times" finds conflict between the world of celebrity, which of course is helpless before the spreading death-dealing capacities of the virus, and the 'proper' attitudes exemplified by Britney Spears (lauded in Hess's NY Times article). But this avoids the obvious: holding the correct attitudes is as helpless before the virus as any other attitude.

Hess notes that "...the #guillotine2020 hashtag is jumping" and that reminds me of the French and Russian revolutions, where hated rulers were overthrown so that even more violent and hateful rulers could come in their place, spreading violence and injustice on an exponentially larger scale.

The search for angry solace is at New York Times