Good People

email nostalgia, Wicked and aesthetic morality.

Galinda you're a martyr!

It was the early noughties, a time when the internet was still emergent and took itself less seriously. Twelve year old Grace, who took herself very seriously, is getting her first hotmail account so that she can speak to boys on MSN messenger email friends in America. Back then there was no awareness that a string of letters and numbers could stay with you for years, if not decades. It was a good time to be online.

Curious about others experiences, I recently asked some friends what their first email addresses were. Highlights include:

miniskinnybaker@hotmail.co.uk / youllneverwalk_alone@hotmail.com / purplepastarules@hotmail.co.uk / angelbaby275@yahoo.co.uk

In-jokes and music lyrics appeared to be a strong theme in email prefix selection. It seems I had a slightly different mindset to my friends when it came to getting my first hotmail account. My first email address wouldn’t be frivolous! It would be a way to communicate to everyone something substantive about me; that I was a good person, thank you very much.

A little context: my digital adolescence took place during a specific political inflection point. Coldplay were using their platform to promote Oxfam campaigns and makepovertyhistory was faintly on the horizon, a 29 year old Zadie Smith had just published On Beauty whilst Tony Blair was knee-deep in an unpopular war.

Headlining Glastonbury in the summer of 05, Chris Martin used black marker pen to colour in a large equals sign onto the top of his hand. Like this: = . It was a visual nod to Oxfam’s Make Trade Fair campaign which pushed for equitable trading standards between the global north and south¹.

Very much entranced by Oxfam’s patron saint, a twelve year old Grace chose fairtradenotfreetrade@hotmail.co.uk as her first email address. Admittedly it was a bit a mouthful. But it said to others aware of the campaign, look! I’m using my email address for a good cause! I used it pretty religiously until it became clear that a 21 letter prefix was longer than most online forms would allow. Something more anodyne and less political took its place, but fairtradenotfreetrade will always be special because it will always be my first.

I was reminded of my morally fervent email address as I watched Wicked last night. I’d never seen the stage play so came to the cinema without any preconceptions. It hits a home run on pretty much every cinematic criteria - from costume to performances and staging. But more pertinently for us, it feels thematically very in tune with the current discourse; discussions about the silencing of voices, exclusion of minority groups and political populism are very on the nose without feeling try hard². At one point the Wizard of Oz explains to Elphaba and Galinda that ‘Where I come from, everyone knows the best way to bring folks together is to give them a really good enemy.’ Sounds familiar.

I was particularly struck by one aspect of Galinda’s character, and that’s the sense in which she desperately wants to be seen as being good person, but ultimately fails to practice the tenets that she preaches about to others. She signals her virtue on an aesthetic level, but that’s about it. Whenever her values are tested or come up against any real challenge, she opts to abandon them. Her ‘values’ are mere lip-service which crumble in the face of political power.

The re-election of Trump has made me question why people are so willing to visibly disavow those who present themselves as ‘good people’. Increasingly, people seem to recognise the hypocrisy of those who present themselves as ‘good’ whilst failing to uphold the moral tenets that they purport to care about so deeply. They watch Biden pardon his son, and continue to arm Israel, whilst preaching about how terrible Trump would be for democracy. We are the good guys, say the Democrats, without doing much to support that claim.

The German philosopher Frederick Nietzsche argued that the categorical distinctions of ‘good’ and ‘evil’ were deeply harmful to societies, essentially leading to dichotomous scenarios like the one we see play out in Wicked. The lure of presenting oneself as ‘good’ is a dangerous one, for humans aren’t perfect, they are just human beings. When political progressives silo vast swathes of society into ‘good’ or ‘bad’ categories they arguably create a noose with which to hang themselves. Nobody is totally good or totally evil, and it is dangerous to pretend otherwise.

Is it wrong to want to be ‘good’, to want to make society a better place? Not in and of itself. The problem is when we want to be seen as being good - when we pursue it as an aesthetic ideal rather than something which informs our everyday actions. For too long, those of us who identify as ‘progressive’ have spent more time indulging in the aesthetics of goodness rather than considering what it actually looks like in practice. Arguably this is something that the dawn of the internet has facilitated. Easy clicks. Unless the left is able to actually alter the enormous social injustices of our time, their words will continue to ring hollow in the ears of voters for decades to come.

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P.S - I am dying to hear the stories of your first email address. Share them in the comments below!

P.P.S - Spare a thought for parents as their Spotify unwrapped shares some home truths.

1. The campaign was effective. As of today, fairly traded products are available in every large supermarket and its existence has contributed to all major retailers following monitoring their supply chains with much more rigour.

2. Kudos to Mark Kermode for putting language to this in his review of Wicked on the Kermode and Mayo podcast.