Taylor Swift is Time magazine’s Person of the Year, ending the suspense that, in the days and hours leading up to the announcement, was nigh on unendurable. Recalling football coach John Mackay’s line along the lines of: “win or lose, there will be 600 million people in China who don’t give a damn.” 

It does require some imagination, however, to come up with anyone who might have been a better choice. The world of politics is depressingly barren. There is no national leader, certainly, who would even make the first cut.

Joe Biden? Come on.

Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky got the nod last year, but a repeat would have been a long reach. You could almost argue that being named Person of the Year jinxed him the way that being on the cover of Sports Illustrated has doomed so many athletes and teams, going back, at least, to 1957 when the magazine’s cover featured the University of Oklahoma football team. The Sooners, as they are affectionately known, had won 47 consecutive games and would be playing unranked Notre Dame that weekend. The magazine’s cover line read, “Why Oklahoma Is Unbeatable.”

Notre Dame won 7–0.

Being named Person of the Year (or, as it was until 1999, Man of the Year) isn’t necessarily a vote of confidence — or, as the ad guys might say, “a guarantee of future success.” Hitler got the nod in 1938. And one of his collaborators, Pierre Laval, was Man of the Year in 1931. Fourteen years later, he was convicted of treason and faced a firing squad. Rudy Giuliani was Person of the Year in 2001 (and well deserved, one thinks), but if the designation had come with a trophy, the mayor would likely be trying to pawn it today.

Stalin was a two–time winner. Ayatollah Ruhollah Musavi Khomeini got it once. Three different popes have been Man of the Year.

Sometime, the winner wasn’t actually a person at all. In 1982, the computer got the nod. If there had been a cash prize, one wonders, who would the check have been made out to?

The “Endangered Earth” was named “Planet of the Year,” in 1988, and since we are talking about celestial bodies, here, which one would have been runner-up? Our sun would seem to be the logical choice. Where would the Luce empire have been without it?

The spirit of the award in 2006 was narcissistic. The winner being “You.” Because you were “content creators” for the World Wide Web. We should have turned the award down.

Calvin Coolidge was president of the United States when Lindbergh was Time’s first Man of the Year. Neither Coolidge nor his successor, Herbert Hoover, copped the award. But Franklin Roosevelt was Time’s man of the year in 1934, and every president since has won the award at least once. But one wonders if, in the case of Joe Biden, time (no pun intended) might not be running out. After all, this year, he lost to an entertainer. (READ MORE from Geoffrey Norman: Football Isn’t Life or Death)

Swift, in fact, is the first clear-cut win by someone in her line of work.

Elvis was never Man of the Year. The Beatles got a pass from the editors of Time.

And that, when you think about it, might be the most interesting element of this year’s choice. There were plenty of entertainers around when Time named Charles Lindbergh Man of the Year. Still, for some reason, the editors chose an aviator over Hoagy Carmichael.

One suspects that there are millions who could, today, sing the lyrics to any of Taylor Swift’s big hits but not tell you the name of the person representing them in Congress. Or identify a single Supreme Court justice. Or find Israel (much less Gaza) on a map.

Disparaging Swift’s generation is sort of like kicking a crippled dog. The fans aren’t to blame as much as are the generations that brought them up and indulged them mercilessly. That story is too old and too worn to be told yet again. But Taylor Swift’s popularity, which crosses the border into worship, makes the case itself.

Swift is being pressured, it is said, to take a stand of some sort on the war between Israel and Hamas. According to a headline in the Daily Beast, “Taylor Swift Faces Pressure on Both Sides of Israel-Gaza War.”

One hopes that she takes a pass. That she reads and contemplates, instead, the lyrics of one of William Butler Yeats’ biggest hits: 

On being asked for a War Poem

I think it better that in times like these 
A poet’s mouth be silent, for in truth 
We have no gift to set a statesman right; 
He has had enough of meddling who can please 
A young girl in the indolence of her youth, 
Or an old man upon a winter’s night.