Breaking news: Margaret Atwood is undecided about whether or not to get vaccinated for H1N1. Rick Mercer is going for it, but Anne Murray says she’s just going to use plenty of hand sanitizer.
Swine flu fears are now art and entertainment news – an appropriate comment on a society that has become obsessed with sickness.
Art imitates life, and life these days is inundated with talk of the dreaded flu virus. You can’t open a newspaper or turn on a television newscast without being exposed to a panic-inducing story about dwindling vaccine supplies or schools being shut down to avoid the spread of sickness.
But talk of the virus in arts and entertainment just exploits the fears of a world in the midst of a pandemic.
And panic is profitable. For instance, in the past month many of the most popular stories on the Canwest News Service website, as measured by the number of times people click on them , have been about H1N1. People ravenously consume swine flu stories, and the media make sure no one goes hungry.
Now it seems entertainers, artists and marketers are jumping on the frenzied band wagon.
A recent Saturday cover of a major national newspaper featured recognizable Canadian artists and entertainers like Atwood, Mercer and Murray speaking out about H1N1. The Smithfield Gallery in London, U.K, held a “sick” exhibit last month which displayed a spindly glass sculpture of the H1N1 virus cell, carefully created by artist Luke Gerram. Even the fashion world is on board, with Japanese clothing company Haruyama Trading Co. advertising an “anti-flu” business suit, coated in titanium dioxide, for the busy executive who can’t afford to get sick.
But none of this fear-based “art” and “entertainment” can even compare with Baby Sniffles.
A major toy company is marketing a sniffling, sneezing interactive doll as one of the toys with buzz this holiday season; the toy that should appear on every child’s wish-list and every parent’s credit card statement. Baby Sniffles, whose real name is being withheld, stuffily utters phrases like “my nose is running” and “I feel sick.” She comes with her own miniature thermometer, medicine bottle and tissue box. For all intensive purposes, Baby Sniffles has the flu.
The television commercial shows a curly-haired, dimpled little girl feeding the wheezing doll medicine and fetching her facial tissues, but the subliminal message might as well read “Hey kids, even dolls can catch swine!” or “Teach your toddler to be swine flu savvy!”
Baby Sniffles is the personification of an obsession with sickness that has gotten, well, just sick.
H1N1 is the first flu pandemic the world has faced in over 40 years, and it would be irresponsible of the media not to supply detailed coverage to keep the public informed. The fact that more than 30 people in Ontario have died of the virus since April – two of them previously healthy children – is devastating.
But when entertainers, artists and, worst of all, marketers prey on people’s fears to make a profit, it’s hard to know whether to cry from despair or of laughter.
Either way, maybe Baby Sniffles can spare a tissue.