Underdog Bullshit

Via Salon that the New York Times (or, as I call it, "The Times") somehow portraying Taylor Swift as an underdog:

Swift’s current tour will take her to stadiums all over the world, including Metlife Stadium in New Jersey, capacity 82,600. Her net worth is roughly $200 million – that’s about 3,550 times the median net worth of an American household. By every available measure, she seems to be doing pretty well, and at 25, she’s probably just getting started with her world domination.

But to the New York Times, she is, apparently, an “underdog.” The paper of record used the term twice in its review of her show in a relatively intimate 13,000-seat arena in Louisiana and pulled it out for the headline as well: “On Taylor Swift’s ‘1989’ Tour, the Underdog Emerges as Cool Kid.”

Well, Taylor Swift may be a lot of things, but we’re not really sure “underdog” is one of them. Let’s back up a little bit.

Like a lot of country singers – that’s how she first broke in – Taylor Swift grew up on a farm. It wasn’t a subsistence farm in the rough part of Kentucky but a Christmas-tree farm in Pennsylvania. “Her mother worked in finance,” a New Yorker story says, “and her father, a descendant of three generations of bank presidents, is a stockbroker for Merrill Lynch. (He bought the tree farm from a client.)” In Swift’s hometown, she told the magazine’s Lizzie Widdicombe, “it mattered what kind of designer handbag you brought to school.”

I'm not here to bitch about T-Swizz or implicate that her music is any less meaningful because of this, but rather to remind you of when years ago HERE I bitched about how rich & successful people demand we see them as some sort of scrappy underdogs who through individual struggle and against all odds triumphed over their own good fortune:

I think the need to feel like an oppressed underdog who has succeeded against all odds is as American as apple pie.  One thing America is fascinated by is the ruling class of the uber-wealthy, and the more uber-wealthier they get the more we're fascinated by them, and yet they always feel like they have to win some public relations war for our affection that doesn't exist, be it corporations crying foul on being asked to pay taxes, or NFL owners having to swallow only making a trillion dollars a day.  Nobody likes to admit out loud "part of my success is due to economic and social conditions cemented long before I was even born"; we must be made to believe that Successful Person X was left to die in a dumpster, then pulled himself up by his own bootstraps and became a real rags to riches story.  Nobody's happy simply to have been given the keys to the kingdom, they also hafta portray themselves as "victims."