When we put celebrities in a box marked "entertainers", humanity loses. If we fail to see that someone's ability to play lead guitar or pretend to be someone else in fact qualifies them to be anything from a public heath expert to a nuclear scientist, then we don't just do ourselves a disservice. We do our children a disservice; we do our grandchildren a disservice. We basically fail Earth.
This week, it is the turn of Clueless star Alicia Silverstone to battle valiantly against the suggestion that she is not a superior life form. To her website The Kind Life, then – described as "a community around Alicia Silverstone" – where we learn of what can only be a sinister plot to distil the purity of People Like Her. To wit: where the hell does donated breastmilk even come from?
The potential answers to that question have horrified Alicia so much that she has decided to go right ahead and launch a service via which her followers can donate and seek breastmilk, safe in the knowledge that the transaction has been facilitated by a celebrity with the right ideas (not the actual blurb she's gone with, admittedly). But what was it that inspired the Kind Mama Milk Share?
Let's allow self-effacing vegan Silverstone to take up the tale. It seems she was moved to set up the service after a friend's struggles to feed her newborn son. "Because of a breast reduction surgery," Silverstone explains, "she was unable to make enough milk for him, no matter how much precious boobie time they spent together."
And it was this that led the friend into the incredibly wicked-sounding world of philosophically inferior breastmilk donors. "She tried reaching out in her community for donor milk," explains Silverstone, "but it was almost impossible to figure out what kind of lifestyle choices the donors had made."
Did you ever? It beggars belief that, following one's boob job, one's offspring might be forced to drink milk selfishly provided by humanoids who have made substandard life choices.
Silverstone agrees, adding: "She had a right to demand better for her baby."
Thus madam has swung her disciples into action and launched her own online breastmilk exchange, with Silverstone pointing out that she is launching the Kind Mama Milk Share "because we are a community of beautiful souls who recognise the importance of food as health".
With comments from adoring fans characterised by the likes of "future generations thank you in advance", Silverstone is unlikely to be troubled by dissenting voices, officially launching the scheme with a throwaway: "It goes without saying that common-sense precautions should be taken."
And yet, does it go without saying? Not for off-message Mean Lifers such as doctors and the US Food and Drug Administration, it seems, who have previously felt moved to point out that milk from unscreened donors can harbour bacteria and viruses including HIV.
To which the only reasonable response is: oh doctors, please get with the programme! These people are not "unscreened" – they are Kind Lifers, which is to say they are fellow travellers in "a community built around Alicia Silverstone". And if that isn't late-stage capitalism's ultimate kitemark, then Lost in Showbiz simply despairs of where society is headed. Join me on the Kind Life escape pod today, and let's leave the benighted of the planet behind.
Source: Guardian.co.uk
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