The past few years have been wildly chaotic, with unexpected horrors lurking around every corner, but we’ve always had one unwavering consistency to rely on when times get tough - the steely determination of celebrities to place themselves at the centre of every narrative, no matter how inappropriate.
“Inspired” by the Russian invasion of Ukraine, former 90201 actor AnnaLynne McCord composed a gloriously unhinged poem, in which she fantasizes about mothering baby Vladimir Putin. Then, she recorded herself earnestly reciting the poem and posted the video on Twitter, seemingly expecting the internet to applaud her gentle, imaginary parenting.
Completely disregarding complex geopolitical realities, McCord describes, at length, how her motherly instincts would turn Putin into such a self-assured and warm person that the invasion of Ukraine would never happen - not on her watch.
It’s a bit like one of those “would you go back in time to kill baby Hitler?” hypotheticals, that replaces the word “kill” with “love.” A nicer sentiment, I suppose, but a response to a question that absolutely no one was asking.
McCord’s ill-fated instinct to make an international tragedy about herself instantly drew comparisons to the now-legendary “Imagine” video conceived by Gal Gadot, in which she and a handful of short-sighted celebs attempted to cheer up the quarantined masses through the magic of music.
It goes without saying that McCord’s video was met with widespread mockery, as Twitter gleefully poked fun at the actress.
McCord’s bizarre, self-indulgent poem might even be worse than “Imagine,” but she didn’t seem to understand the backlash. Her follow-up interview with Buzzfeed saw her double down on her self-centered perspective, as she speculates that perhaps she could have turned into a dictator herself, had she not been such a good person.
“I know how I could easily have moved in the direction of becoming a dictator myself,” McCord told BuzzFeed News. “If certain circumstances of my life were different, were I a little less bent toward healing and more toward vindication, I could have been a darkly powerful person.”
But McCord wasn’t the only celebrity to respond to the tragedy with a cynical act of self-promotion; Peacemaker star John Cena also managed to make the invasion of Ukraine all about himself, by tweeting:
"If I could summon the powers of a real life #peacemaker I think this would be a great time to do so."
It should be noted that Peacemaker’s “powers,” as depicted in the show, are non-existent; the character is a superhero simply because he’s willing to shoot and kill people, which imbues his already-tasteless tweet with a dark undertone that I doubt he intended.
At time of writing, neither Cena nor McCord have deleted their tweets, which says a lot.
When tragedy strikes, it seems we can always rely on celebrities to unite us in laughter and second-hand embarrassment; what would we do without them?
