A Game for the Watching

I may have to watch the Super Bowl.

I wasn’t really planning on doing that this year. I’ve been losing interest in American football for a decade and a half, and while I will admit to being more interested when my own team is doing well the sad fact is that the Eagles folded like a wet paper tent over the last two months of the season and are now spending the winter trying to figure out what went wrong – a familiar spectacle, if you’re an Eagles fan. You can find the Super Bowl commercials online these days so that’s not much of a draw anymore, and the halftime shows have never interested me on their own. Plus this year the game will be a contest between Kansas City, which is just the latest version of New England except without the accompanying stench of corruption and which has played in twelve of the last fourteen Super Bowls (or something like that; the numbers get fuzzy after a while), and San Francisco, a team that already has more championships than they can count.

Dynasties are boring.

I probably would have wanted to watch if Detroit were in it – you can’t be that bad for that long and then make it to the championship game without generating at least some interest. But they too will be watching from their living rooms, which left me not all that excited to do the same from mine.

But then TrumpWorld (tm) melted down into a puddle of childish butthurt and unhinged conspiracy theories, as they do, and now I’m finding it hard to stay away.

Unless you’ve been hiding under a rock when it comes to American sports and culture, you probably know that Kansas City tight end Travis Kelce – the brother of Eagles center Jason Kelce, which automatically makes him a good person in my book – has been dating Taylor Swift for the last few months. She has in fact been attending games for most of the public part of their relationship. I suspect that as a relatively famous and reasonably wealthy person himself, Travis Kelce is one of the few people who can approach Taylor Swift on anything even remotely like an equal footing, and while I can’t say my world revolves around either of them I do wish them well.

So here are your players:

Travis Kelce: a very good football player who plays on a team that has been to the Super Bowl more often than not in recent years.

Taylor Swift: arguably the most popular recording artist in the world right now, in the middle of a tour that has literally grossed billions of dollars already, and the focus of attention for an army of adoring fans.

In other words, two famous and influential people at the center of their respective worlds. It really isn’t much of a surprise that they are dating if you think about it that way, and they are behaving as much like a normal couple as they can under the circumstances. They seem happy together so far.

Naturally, the paranoid schizophrenics who make up the bulk of TrumpWorld (tm) are seething with insensate rage at this.

Well, they do that at pretty much everything to be honest. Spittle-emitting rage is their default setting. But this seems even more screwed up than usual.

This might be because Swift went onto her Instagram account in September to tell her fans to register to vote – a civic minded public service announcement of the kind that used to be considered a nonpartisan good, but which, in an age where the American right wing is now actively hostile to the very idea of democracy, was seen as problematic. It might also be because Kelce has appeared in advertisements promoting basic science (i.e. Covid vaccines) and American near-beer (Bud Light), both of which are anathema to TrumpWorld (tm) denizens for various reasons.

TrumpWorld (tm) is now filling the airwaves and internet with such choice examples of psychosis as:

1. Taylor Swift is an agent of the Pentagon. The source for this was Fox News talking head Jesse Watters, who thinks she’s a DoD psyop asset promoting NATO. I’m not sure where Kelce comes into this, but I’m sure he’ll tell us whether we want him to or not. Remember when right-wingers used to support the US military? Good times, man.

2. Swift and Kelce are not an actual couple but are instead a nefarious propaganda show staged by that Machiavellian puppet master Joe Biden (whom right-wingers also routinely accuse of being senile, and good luck trying to point out the obvious stupidity of holding both of those views at once). This comes from, among other people, former GOP presidential candidate and wannabe dictator Vivek Ramaswamy, who once flatly argued that the Constitution should be ignored if it interfered with right-wing policies.

3. Swift will come out at halftime to endorse Joe Biden. This is a direct accusation from Trumpanzee media figure Mike Crispi, who also believes that the NFL scripted the entire playoffs to make this happen. Crispi is allowed to walk the streets unmedicated, if you're wondering.

4. Kelce and Swift are only doing this to promote abortions, a fascinating bit of hallucination promoted by Trump Youth leader Charlie Kirk.

5. Or, my personal favorite, which appeared on the far-right propaganda outlet OAN (“Because Fox News is too liberal!”), that Biden forced Taylor Swift date Travis Kelce as part of a larger deep state psyop campaign to brainwash children to focus on sports instead of whatever blasphemous version of Dominionist Christianity OAN is selling this week. As if American kids need help doing that. As if anyone could force Taylor Swift to do anything she didn’t want to do.

And on and on. Really, it’s astonishing the depths of depravity that can be achieved by TrumpWorld (tm) when they put what they insist on calling their minds to it.

On the one hand, this is conclusive evidence of a widespread and troubling mental health crisis that should be treated with appropriate seriousness by professionals.

On the other hand, though, I do now feel obligated to watch the game, if only to support the happy couple.