It turns out that all those onerous health-and-safety requirements were only for the regular people this whole time.
It turns out that all those onerous health-and-safety requirements were only for the regular people this whole time.
S ay what you will about the WASPs of old; at least they tried to keep up appearances. Our current set of carriage-trade elects? Not so much. They’ve got the noblesse bit down, sure enough. But the oblige? That part’s kind of a buzzkill, n’est-ce pas?
They’re still into setting the rules, of course. Hell, that’s how you can tell they’re in the club. It’s just the leading-by-example part they’re struggling with. What happens in Hollywood stays in Hollywood, see? And the rest of you can go stuff it.
Up until this point in the pandemic, the worst examples of elite rule-breaking have been discrete. Gavin Newsom hit up the French Laundry. Gretchen Whitmer popped down to Florida. Chris Cuomo said that he was hiding in his basement, when, in reality, he was out and about in the Hamptons. Now, the habit is being ruthlessly collectivized. If, like me, you tuned in by accident to last night’s Emmys and saw a vast crowd of unmasked celebrities embracing one another, you will understand what’s changed. No longer are we talking about a hypocrite here and a hypocrite there, but about an entire cast of tartuffes. Falsity, it seems, is a highly contagious disease, and there is safety to be found in numbers.
Remember all those saccharine paeans to the common good? Those Pecksniffian appeals to do the “right thing”? Those badgering reminders that “we’re in this together”? Yeah, those couldn’t outlast a single letterpressed invitation to the Met. In one hand, our elite class had its longstanding message that masking is crucially important; in the other, it had the chance to go to a really lush party. And the party won in a landslide.
Not for everyone, of course. That would have been gauche. No, the party won for the sort of people who were invited to the party. The staff? They were masked up to the eyeballs, because these days you just can’t be too careful around people carrying trays.
In San Francisco over the weekend, Mayor London Breed explained that the video of her enjoying herself maskless at a jazz club doesn’t count when you really think about it, because, unlike you, she is really into music. “My drink was sitting at the table,” Breed said when pushed on the matter, and “I got up and started dancing because I was feeling the spirit and I wasn’t thinking about a mask.” Which is an absolutely spiffing excuse if one assumes that the mayor of San Francisco is alone among her fellow citizens in desiring to spend her evenings without a large piece of cloth strapped across her face. Exonerating herself further, Mayor Breed suggested that “we don’t need the fun police to come in and micromanage and tell us what we should or shouldn’t be doing.” Which, again, is a ripping justification if we assume that everyone else in San Francisco is just dying for close supervision.
Alas, as one of those hoary old equality-under-the-law types you’ve heard so much about, I do not actually think that Mayor Breed is different from anyone else. Indeed, I think that, as a result of her position at the sharp head of the “fun police,” Mayor Breed has the most responsibility to follow the law of anyone in San Francisco. And though it may be irksome, I think that the same goes for the celebrities, TV anchors, CEOs, and members of the United States Congress who have been lecturing us for nearly two years now about the need to muck in, but who were apparently happy to forget all that they had said once the photographers showed up.
Historians looking back at this period in our history may well come to regard this week as the moment the dam began to crack. It is tough during the best of times for America’s elites to make demands, but, when the citizenry turns on its TV sets and sees the very people who have been lecturing it begin to cavort around without a care, the project becomes ineluctably futile. Of all the ills in all the world, duplicity is the hardest to recover from. And, despite the best efforts of our feckless smart set, there can be no herd immunity from its effects.