Kylie Jenner has a pair of chopsticks worth $450 dollars that she showed followers on Instagram recently. As a result of this display, a deluge of condemnation and denouncements have fallen upon the girl, angry and furious scolding from the ‘outrage addicts on social media’. Let me explain. Kylie Jenner is a Kardashian. A Kardashian is a limited edition designer celebrity, a very specific species that doesn’t sing, act or write but just overleaps those barriers to entry into the world of stardom and merely becomes famous without exhibiting talent. No, she doesn’t even play for a major sports team. Instead of scoring goals (or “touchdowns” which Americans seem to prefer instead of those, or even “home runs”) or knockouts or dunks, she scores tabloid headlines. Instead of featuring in hit movies, she is the star of a series of tabloid stories. She is a TV star, I understand, being a marquee member of the hit reality TV show ‘Keeping Up With The Kardashians’, which I am made to believe is like an amped-up version of every drama queen and drama king’s Snapchat stories. The plot of these shows as far as I can gather from what my remotely-working research team has sent me, is that fabulously rich people expose their fabulous wealth for others to watch with mixed emotions — envy and admiration, scorn at silly rich people problems and fascination with their fabulous lifestyles. So Kylie, who plays the role of Kylie in the show, took to her Instagram account to display a pair of chopsticks. They are designed by Louis Vuitton, a person who professionally emblazons his initials on items and then marks up the price. I crap you not, there is a Louis Vuitton toilet out there that costs $100,000 because it has the letters LV on it. And a keychain that costs $200 so you can lock yourself expensively in as you poop out the dinner you spent even more hundreds on, now that it has become something as worthless as … as well as worthless as what everyone’s food becomes when it is taken to the toilet. So when Jenner opens a Louis Vuitton box and removes a pair of chopsticks, what shall we expect? Of course, it is going to be ridiculously overpriced, ostentatious and probably inconveniently diamond-encrusted. There was a small storm of backlash at this post, the thrust being how tone-deaf and insensitive it was to show off wealth at a time when struggling people around the world, in the midst of this pandemic, are losing incomes. The comments felt that this was not the time to flaunt wealth. But then again, she is Kylie Jenner the Kardashian. She is just doing her job. Her job is to show you that she has a lot of money. More money than you slithering in the slime, you peasants, you poors. That’s what she is here for. It is how she earns her own income. All those who earn their living in the Kylie Jenner industry would be worse off if she was like the much-lesser-known Mikayili Ochieng from Kisumu, whose Instagram features him eating roadside cassava with his fingers. That man has eight followers and half of those are his cassava sellers. Of course, there is a time and place to flaunt excessive wealth, a time and place to show off your overpriced toothpicks, and it is tasteless to wave dollars at people who are poorer than you are, but then again, if you look to Kardashians for taste, you are facing the wrong direction. Turn around. If you see Trump golfing, keep turning. When you come upon a modest millionaire donating sanitizer, testing kits and money to health centres and research, you can stop spinning. If it’s any consolation, someone got an income of $450 out of this. A chopstick seller.
