Curmie has two partially-written posts, one of them soon to pass its sell-by date and the other getting closer and closer. He’s promised Jack Marshall at Ethics Alarms a guess post on plagiarism, which would also be published here. He’s got a book review due (ahem) imminently and hasn’t finished reading yet. But sometimes you gotta do what you gotta do. So… let’s talk about Taylor Swift, Travis Kelce, and the Kansas City Chiefs.
Curmie assumes that you, Gentle Reader, know the basics of
the brouhaha. A few notes on Curmie’s
position in all this:
Curmie has no interest in whatever romance may or not have
developed between the two thirty-something stars of their respective
industries. He hopes they’re happy. That’s it.
Curmie will be rooting for the Chiefs in the Super Bowl, but
that’s because for seven years he lived closer to Kansas City than he ever has
to another (American) city with a major sports franchise. He never saw the Chiefs play live, but he did
see a few Royals games. Anyway, the
Chiefs are a secondary favorite in our household, behind the New York Jets and
the Cleveland Browns, the decades-long favorites of Curmie and Beloved Spouse,
respectively.
Curmie will, however, be cheering for Kansas City a little
louder than usual this year, although he has nothing against the 49ers, simply
to piss off the right-wing idiots (apologies for the redundancy).
Curmie is not a Swiftie by any stretch of the
imagination. He could name a couple of
her song titles, but only because they’ve been mentioned as obviously witty
comments by friends; he wouldn’t recognize one of her songs if his life
depended on it. Curmie does, however, have a dear friend
who, for a couple of years, occupied the office directly across the hall from
his in the poorest sound-proofed building you can imagine. She is far more attuned to popular culture in
general than I am, and she is a Swiftie.
Occasionally, if she’d had a bad day, she’d knock on my door and say,
“I’m sorry; I just need some Tay-Tay.”
She’d turn on the tunes. She’d keep
the volume low, and with both our doors closed I could tell there was music
playing, but not much else. That’s the
closest I’ve ever come to knowingly listening to a Taylor Swift song.
Just because Curmie isn’t a fan, though, doesn’t mean he has
anything against her or her fans. (Let’s
face it, sexagenarian men aren’t exactly her target audience.) She is arguably the biggest pop music
phenomenon since the Beatles, or at least since Michael Jackson, and she wears
her celebrity extraordinarily well. She
is generous with both her time and her money: visiting terminally ill young
fans, giving the bus drivers for her tour literally life-changing bonuses,
contributing tens of millions of dollars to food banks in cities she performs
in… the list goes on. It’s estimated
that she gave away something in the neighborhood of $100 million last year.
True, she can afford it, but so could a lot of other folks
who hoard their wealth like a dragon in a cave or build shrines to
themselves. She appears to be a
genuinely good person, which is pretty rare amongst the glitterati. Everyone who’s actually interacted with her
finds her, in the words of Ed Kelce (Travis’s father), a “very sweet, very charming, down-to-earth young
woman.” Travis’s mom and brother,
and his coach, Andy Reid, echo those sentiments. The only people
who have anything bad to say about her, apparently, are the incel crowd of
babbling reactionaries.
Travis Kelce is no slouch at his job, either. He is arguably the greatest tight end in the
history of the game, and if he isn’t at the very top of that list, he’s pretty
damned close. He’s also become a
sought-after endorser of everything from credit cards to insurance to
vaccinations. He isn’t exactly in her
league in wealth or international fame, but he’s a multimillionaire and a legitimate
celebrity, so the couple have the benefit of not being in the same business (and
therefore not competing with each other) but also understanding the vicissitudes
of notoriety.
Oh, and this is the fourth time in five years Kansas City is
making an appearance in the Super Bowl.
They were good before Tayvis (Travlor?) even met; they’re good now. Still, Vivek Ramaswamy, perhaps the only person in the country to challenge Donald Trump for both narcissism and stupidity, has proclaimed that the Super Bowl will be rigged to favor the Chiefs (against the team representing the city most associated with good ol
The paranoia had already reached epic proportions both before and after the AFC Championship game between the Chiefs and the Baltimore Ravens. Games with the referee assigned to this game, you see, are won by the visiting team more often than games with other referees are… and (OMG!) the Chiefs were the visiting team. QED, right?
Well, even apart from noting the small sample size, it’s
worth mentioning that the referee, out of all the officials in the game, is
probably about the least likely to actually affect the outcome of the game. Yes, he’ll make (or not make) offensive
holding calls on some pass plays, but so does the umpire. But the most significant calls, especially in
the NFL (as opposed to college), are on pass interference, and the referee, who
lines up 15 yards behind the tight end, is pretty unlikely to be involved in a
call 40 yards downfield.
Of course, there was one no-call on a pass play in the
endzone that resulted in a Chiefs interception instead of a first-and-goal for
the Ravens. Replay showed that a Chiefs defensive back made contact with the intended receiver
prior to the arrival of the ball. (NFL
fans know that the surest way to know it was a bad call is that “rules
specialist” Gene Steratore said it was a
good one.) But that replay also showed
that there was no conceivable way the pass could have been completed. Should it have been a penalty? Yeah, probably, but it was a close call and the
zebras will always get one or two of those wrong.
Naturally, the biggest complainer was Ravens receiver Zay Flowers,
who pretty much said he expected the officials to be crooked. Zay…
Dude... If you really want to see the
person most responsible for the Ravens’ loss, look in the damned mirror. Taylor Swift didn’t follow up a good play
with a much deserved taunting penalty that moved the ball out of the red zone. The officials didn’t fumble just outside the
goal-line for the Chiefs to recover for a touchback. The NFL brass didn’t prove their childishness
by slamming their hand into a bench and getting injured in the process. Grow up, bro.
Of course, the conspiracy theorists want to have it both
ways: if the Chiefs win, it’s for some nefarious purpose; if they lose, it’s
because Swift is a “distraction,” and therefore bad not only for the Chiefs,
but for football in general. You know, like
how the Marilyn Monroe/Joe DiMaggio relationship destroyed baseball. (To be fair, the Yankees went “only” 103-51
that year, failing to reach the World Series.)
There is at least a little rationale for the fear that Swift might endorse Biden; she did so last time, after all. But her support of Biden, like Curmie’s, seems more to be a rejection of the alternative (see here and here, for example) than enthusiasm for an octogenarian who wasn’t the sharpest knife in the drawer a couple of decades ago. And I feel confident that such an announcement, should it occur, will take place not at half-time, as some moron suggested, but after a discreet post-Super Bowl interval. The woman is too smart and too classy to do otherwise.
Moreover, the effect of any such endorsement is likely to be negligible at best: the same poll that said that 18% of voters would be more likely to vote for a Swift-backed candidate also revealed that 17% would be less likely to do so. Luckily, both numbers are unadulterated bullshit. Curmie is likely to vote for a candidate endorsed by Swift because our politics are more or less aligned, not because of the endorsement. There
The terror is real, though, amongst the red cap
brigade. James Carville has a point in arguing that “it’s massively entertaining to watch people this
stupid go public.” It would indeed be rather amusing if it weren’t so
pathetic.
Taylor Swift is not responsible for the fact that every idiot
producer (again, apologies for redundancy) for Fox or CBS or ESPN or whoever
wants to show her reactions to whatever happens on the field; in fact she has
repeatedly asked them to stop. The only
good news here is that some little girls get to share some dad-bonding when their
heroine is shown on-screen for an average of about 26 seconds per 3 ½ hour game.
In MAGAland, however, this amounts to Swift’s setting
herself up as an idol—this
from folks who worship at the feet of the world’s most narcissistic grifter (or
is it the most grifting narcissist? Both,
I guess). Among other things, she has
been called “ugly” (remind
me not to go to that guy’s optometrist).
She took her private jet to the game in Baltimore, and
according to Fox News it “belch[ed] tons of CO2 emissions.” Of course, if she’d travelled commercial, she’d
be held responsible for congestion at the airport. Moreover, Curmie isn’t so sure about those
numbers. According to a table on the Guardian
website (accompanying an article urging readers not to fly because of environmental
concerns, so it’s not likely to under-estimate the emissions), Swift’s short
flight would generate barely 100 pounds—5% of a single ton—of CO2. That’s still a lot, but those Fox News
numbers are looking rather sketchy.
Imagine that!
Fox Chief Conspiracy Theorist talking head Jesse Waters pushed the idea that she was a Pentagon psy-op asset. (Well, he didn’t say she was one, only that they’d considered the idea, but he said it in a tone that suggested that his nothingburger of a revelation actually meant something, and the average Fox devotee is too stupid to recognize the dissonance.) The Pentagon shot that down, and rather cleverly, at that. When was the last time, Gentle Reader, the Pentagon was the more trustworthy source in a dispute? Miracles happen!
And, of course, there’s The Donald himself getting all hot and bothered that he wasn’t Time’s Person of the Year, proclaiming himself more popular than she is and with more devoted fans... and declaring a “holy war” on her should she dare to express a political opinion. Trump proves yet again how mentally unstable he is, and that he is not even close to being an appropriate candidate for the presidency, much less actually winning the election. But that has been clear for a long time, well before the incompetence of the Hilary Clinton campaign got him elected.
Swift was even criticized for not mentioning her
boyfriend in her acceptance speech for winning the Best Album Grammy. It pretty much goes without saying that the
project in question was completed before she even met Kelce. Instead—OMG!—she thanked her
collaborators on the album! What is that
about?
Curmie’s favorite, though, has to be this post from “Alpha Male” Nick Adams: “By being on the team that won the AFC Championship, Travis Kelce will receive a bonus check of around $70,000. For those wondering why Taylor Swift is dating Travis Kelce: are things beginning to make sense now?” Curmie has a reasonable retirement portfolio and a fair bit of home equity. That said, if you were to pay Curmie the same percentage of his net worth that $70,000 is of Taylor Swift’s, you’d get plenty of change back on a $10 bill. To be fair, Curmie has seen it argued that Adams is really a leftie troll, similar to the character created by Stephen Colbert a few years back. If so, he (she? they?) is brilliant. But a glance over a few days’ worth of his X account suggests that he really is just another nasty moron.
What is this all about? Is Taylor Swift the target of the broflakes (what a delightful term!—kudos to whoever came up with it) because she’s a successful woman who terrifies weak men? because she is precisely what their pseudo-Messiah pretends to be and isn’t? or just because she’s a decent human being and they avoid those folks like Dracula avoids crucifixes? A little of all three, one suspects.
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