Or #Theonewiththecontroversialbirthday
Just in case you weren’t aware, there are three main differences between me and Kim Kardashian.
- She celebrated her 40th birthday on a private island with her inner circle of friends. I celebrated mine (spoiler alert: I’m a bit older than Kim Kardashian) in a nice bar with lots of my friends.
- She is married to someone who may or may not be a president of the USA one day. I’m not married to anyone.
- She has been accused of misjudging the public mood in a series of Instagram posts and tweets she posted about how she spent her birthday. I often misjudge the public mood but never in a series of tweets about my birthday.
If you wanted to squeeze another one in, you could also say she’s gained a lot more notoriety from her butt than I have gained from mine (or hers).
But I’m here to talk about birthdays, not butts, and more specifically, the accusation from several commenters that she has misjudged the public mood.
She says she went to the island, after taking a lot of safety precautions, so she and her friends could pretend things were normal just for a brief moment in time.
Isn’t that what everyone wants? It’s what I wanted before Boris Johnson announced another fairly full lockdown and it’s what I want even more so now.
My birthday is usually a big affair with only a couple of rules, including that it has to be over by Halloween. It’s several weeks of celebrations. It’s expensive but it’s a lot of fun.
This year these frivolities have been moved to January (and I’m preparing to move them every month until we reach my proper birthday month again) and so if I’d been able to celebrate on a private island I would have jumped at the chance.
But I do question the intelligence of her friends if, as she says, she really did surprise them with a trip to a private island.
Surely if you know Kim Kardashian and you know it’s her 40th birthday coming up and she asks you to quarantine for two weeks and undergo multiple health screenings, you cannot be thinking she’s going to take you to McDonald’s for a Happy Meal? They might have not realised they were going to a private island but I still question their level of surprise.
There was also the accusation by some that she was rubbing it in people’s faces by saying: “I realise that for most people, this is something that is so far out of reach right now, so in moments like these, I am humbly reminded of how privileged I am.”
She has got approximately 67,197,811 more Twitter followers than me ( I say approximately because I might have got two more by the time you read this) and although I can’t possibly speak for all of them (or indeed any of them) but maybe some of them follow her as an aspirational celebrity.
They want to get a glimpse into her showbiz lifestyle and what life is like when, for a small moment in time, you can imagine Covid-19 doesn’t exist.
And for those who found her posts offensive, I ask whether they have a car? For those in the United Kingdom, and probably elsewhere in the world too, the truly divisive moment of the pandemic came when people in England were advised to stay off public transport but were allowed to drive anywhere they wanted.
This led to countless pictures on social media of families enjoying themselves on the beaches, having a rollicking good time on hills and mountains, while car-less folk were effectively stuck in their homes with their only respite being a trip to the local Sainsbury’s to buy Hula Hoops.
I wager those with cars didn’t stop to think how their posts made car-less folk feel. You could say they were careless, or you could just say it’s sad because, unlike Kim Kardashian’s birthday, their posts didn’t generate any memes.
Look at all the amazing memes!
And, as a special finish, just look at what Kanye West got his wife for her birthday.
If this hologram of her dead dad where he’s scripted it to say how amazing her husband is doesn’t prove he has the narcissistic streak necessary to follow in Donald Trump’s footsteps then I don’t know what does.
Stay safe for another week!
Fiskal Policy 