Drama in the Time of Corona
17th March 2020
ZMan feels about the same way I do.
First, I want to thank my family for being with me through all of this. I could not get through this without them. This has been a trying time for all of us. I’m here today to announce that I have tested positive for the coronavirus. I’m coming forward in the hope that I will continue to inspire people suffering from this horrible burden to keep bravely fighting and dreaming. I also hope this will help break the stigma white men have attached to this condition and the sufferers of it…
That is a little taste of what will no doubt be a feature of our lives in the coming week, as famous people take turns staring in their own corona drama. It has already started a bit, with people like Tom Hanks and others announcing they have tested COV-positive, but the flood gates will surely open once we run out of hoarding stories. You can be sure that musical performers are plotting some sort of corona-aid performance, perhaps done on-line, to draw attention to themselves.
‘Social Media’ has made this a world stuffed full of narcissists, with a corresponding rise of Nosy Parkers who seem to think that they have a natural right to peer into every dark corner of other people’s lives — and tell them what to do.
We live in an age in which everything is a performance. Not just any performance, of course, but a morality tale. The “famous person making the dramatic announcement to the public” version is pretty common. Twenty years ago, famous homosexuals would have dramatic coming out ceremonies. Some would make a drama of announcing they got the AIDS. The point of the performance is for the actor to get both sympathy and admiration for being a heroic victim, bravely fighting on.
My attitude toward victims is that they ought to go ahead and just die already. From the days of ‘ghetto blasters’, where every punk in the Hood thought his squalid life deserved a sound track, to today’s social-media snowflakes, who are convinced that theirs is a unique tragic existence deserving of documentation, it’s just one boring intrusion after another. (This is why I avoid Twitter and Facebook. There are enough boring aspects of my life already, I don’t need to borrow from other people.)