Taylor Swift is a medium good person

nice braid, Taylor

I like it when a celebrity does something nice. When Lizzo sends a fan her award show dress so the fan can accept her own award, that’s nice! When Guy Fieri serves meals to firefighters fighting wildfires, very good. Glad to hear it. It’s natural to want people we admire to be worthy. To think, yeah, they earned their wealth and success by being not just talented, but good people!

Now, I don’t resent talented people with wealth and success (much). I think it’s okay to praise celebrities when they are nice.

But.

Historically, we the internet fall fast down that slippery slope. One minute a celebrity does a single good deed, and the next we’re ready to canonize Keanu Reeves for dating a woman 8 years younger than him. We the online can’t just acknowledge someone doing a good thing then move on. We have to put them up on a pedestal and develop a mythos where the celebrity is a near-god who deserves our worship and money and unconditional trust.

If anything, we should canonize him for this

I wish I could just say, “That was nice!” about a celebrity. But I don’t anymore. Because the cult of personality around politicians, businessmen, and celebrities allows them to get away with things they shouldn’t be allowed to get away with. It makes it easy for people to excuse bad behavior. The internet has taken the natural human tendency to feel like we can accurately judge the character of a notable figure we’ve never actually met, and intensified it to an unbearable degree.

Which brings me to Taylor Swift, who I believe to be a medium good person.

even though she wrote “Welcome to New York”

If you weren’t online this week, fast summary: Taylor Swift concert tickets on sale. Insane Ticketmaster disaster ruining millions of people’s days and probably costing like a billion dollars in wasted time or something. Ticketmaster is a villain, as John Oliver and his team already outlined. After several days of silence, Taylor Swift announced that she was mad! And she was going to do something about it the next time.

This was a good thing for Taylor Swift to do. Ticketmaster does hurt artists and consumers. There are only like 5–6 artists who would have enough power to just say screw Ticketmaster altogether. Taylor Swift is one. She didn’t have to make a statement, and she did.

Good for you, Taylor!

But.

The fans are out already tweeting about how NOBODY CAN SAY TAYLOR DOESN’T CARE ABOUT HER FANS and YES MOTHER YOU STAND UP TO THE POWERFUL AND WICKED TICKETMASTER! YOU RISK YOUR RICHES!!! FINALLY, A GOOD CELEBRITY!!!!!!!!!!

Except:

Here is verbatim what TSwift promised to do:

“There are a multitude of reasons why people had such a hard time trying to get tickets and I’m trying to figure out how this situation can be improved moving forward.”

She did say some nice stuff about her fans as well, but in terms of promising future action, she didn’t actually do anything.

She might! She might in the future use her powers to join the DOJ in legal action against Ticketmaster. Taylor has never been someone afraid of followthrough. And she has, in the past, used her power to negotiate better deals for artists with Spotify. That was a really good thing for her to do also! She used her immense influence to help the less fortunate.

She did it!!

But I can’t say that Taylor Swift did a nice thing.

I think she made a statement about Ticketmaster because she had good intentions. She is a medium good person. She isn’t purposefully unethical. She answered to a situation she had partial responsibility for, and made her fans feel heard. She has encouraged people to vote. She warned us all about John Mayer.

But she’s not a saint. If she were, Jesus would have warned her about releasing “ME!” as a single. And she is super freaking rich. Like half a billion dollars rich. Speaking of Jesus, he was right about one thing — rich people don’t get into heaven that easy. (Okay, he was also right about a bunch of other stuff too.)

All of this to say: I wish I could say a celebrity is good! I really do. I think Kristen Stewart is good. And Lucy Liu. And Gillian Anderson. And former Bachelorette Rachel Lindsay. But now is not the time. Now, faint praise becomes toxic standom in about a week. And it prevents us from actually holding people in power to the standard to which they deserve.

That said, if you decide to hand out tickets Tay, I’ll take ‘em.