Sports as Politics, Politics as Life
What the Super Bowl, Taylor Swift, and Politics say about the real purpose of our lives
When Travis Kelce got off the bus at the Allegiant Stadium for Super Bowl LVIII, America found itself a new leader. He was now presidential material. This was a prelude to his golden escalator moment, a prelude to his empire, his gargantuan wrath of Victory. He’ll be winning so much, he’ll get tired of winning. He was bedizened in a full head-to-toe suit of coruscating freckled crystals. He was carrying a manpurse, forehead-size wraparound sunglasses, a swagger of masturbatory conceit. His grizzlyman beard festering in their perfumes of a wild overgrown mane of pubes. The brain damaged football player is a real celebrity now, and his wardrobe revolution shows it. Since dating Taylor Swift, he has maintained a certain calamitous glow, a rhinestone air of importance. He is fucking the most famous celebrity in the world. And his walk off the bus was a point to prove that he was doing just that. Everyone watching the Super Bowl thought about it at least once, thought about what that must look like, what sort of Twister-limbed contusions of romance they proved when in intercourse.
I am skeptical. I go along with the theory that Swift is not only a virgin, she is a sexless automaton, remaining as the most universal apotheosis of libidinal angst. She’s mostly dated other musicians before, remaining in the relatively solitary bastions of public and private affairs. And so her past relationships have remained mostly suspenseless flaps of gossip, the Matty Healy types, never succeeding in striking the universal American nerve that makes us all care. As fans, we care about her songs as breakup songs. We care after the relationships end. But football is the holy grail of American gossip and stardom and politics. It’s all so obvious now; you can almost feel her wondering why it took her so long to finally figure it out.
Dating Travis Kelce seems like a coordinated political move because it is, and the cross-pollination of their personal values bloating their respective industries to an even larger size.
As of late January, Taylor Swift has brought an estimated $331.5 million to the Kansas City Chiefs. She alone has the power to sway elections, to build armies and empires in the football world, a world she presumably had little interest in before dating Kelce. And everyone knows this, which is why the many theories spread and bets were placed that the Super Bowl game was fixed in the Chiefs’ favor, and Taylor Swift was going to endorse Joe Biden on the field while celebrating. Joe Biden even leaned into this, making an Instagram post after the Chiefs won. It’s a photo of Biden, smiling with his plastic dentures gleaming white, and demonic Illuminati laser eyes, and the caption “Just like we drew it up, @Chiefs”. Drake bet $1.15 million that the Chiefs were going to win, not because he thought the Chiefs were necessarily a better team—in fact, the betting world had the 49ers favored to win—but rather, Drake was betting on Taylor Swift. He even said so. He knew that she had done her due diligence and hadn’t picked a loser.
On Sunday morning, hours before the Super Bowl, Donald Trump took to Truth Social to stir his name again into the Swift saga.
Because if you don’t inject yourself into her world, then you are already losing, you are already out of the conversation, the hourglass of irrelevancy slipping away with each day. As Thoreau said, “To a philosopher all news, as it is called, is gossip, and those who edit and read it are old women over their tea.” But there’s nothing left for us but gossip; it’s the common denominator of our humanity, a signal that we care about the lives of others. Trump knows this, as he knows more than anyone how to be a celebrity. He knows the barbarity of his showmanship, the clumsy desperation his fans will deride Swift as their political opponent. He has demanded repeatedly that he is more famous than Swift, and like all brands and brand recognition, we Americans elect celebrities to rule over our fate, to declare the storm-shrouded destiny beyond the last horizon. We do it everyday. Because Donald Trump isn’t running against Joe Biden, he’s running against Taylor Swift. Just as Drake placed a $1.15 million bet that Taylor Swift was going to win the Super Bowl, we are waging a political war between Trump and Swift. As Rolling Stone reported, the Trump campaign is preparing to wage a “holy war” against Swift and her expected endorsement of Biden in the 2024 election. This is America: sports as politics, and politics as life. We are all addicts, toothless junkies scratching our necks raw for another fix. Give us celebrity! Give us gossip! Give us life!
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