How’s everyone’s weekend going?
Thanks for spending a portion of your Sunday with the Six.
Let’s get right to it.
TAYLOR SWIFT, POLITICAL PROVOCATEUR
By now, we’ve all seen the photo. Superstar singer Taylor Swift, dressed in a red sweater and same colored lipstick, engaged in a post-game embrace with her boyfriend, NFL player Travis Kelce, moments after Kelce’s Chiefs beat the Baltimore Ravens Sunday to win the NFL’s AFC Championship.
The image became an instant sports-meets-entertainment mash up and encapsulated their mass media romance, one that has captured the hearts and minds of Americans.
(Marilyn Monroe and Joe DiMaggio? Gisele and Tom? Posh and Beckham? Taylor and Travis surpasses all historical celebrity couples as it pertains to pure entertainment currency.)
Next Sunday’s Super Bowl will likely draw 100M+ viewers. It’s big business for the NFL, television partners and sponsors. Swift’s attendance at Chiefs games, weekly luxury box cutaways and fashion outfits have proved to be a bountiful partnership for The League. And her everything/everywhere omnipresence has predictably turned into bad take content fodder for corporate media brands.
Colin Cowherd, a sports (allegedly) talk host for Fox Sports Radio, went on his show and admonished Swift haters as “lonely insecure men” and said we should judge people by “the silly stuff that bothers them.” I don’t know if Cowherd is angling for a self-help book deal with his evangelical mumbo-jumbo but people complaining about stupid stuff doesn’t make them lonely and insecure. It makes them human. In his monologue, Cowherd proceeded to make a sexism argument and I just tuned out. Cowherd has a big audience and undoubtedly as he sprinkled his holy words amongst the huddled masses, they were on bended knee making signs of the cross. Swift is nothing more than fresh content meat to be consumed by the legions of Cowhead Clapping Seals.
Her emergence into mainstream culture presents an opportunity for another segment of the Media Industrial Complex: the conspiratorial far right.
There was Jessie Walters, the snarky Fox News host, sparking the “psyop” flame with a segment conflating Swift’s interest in Kelce as part of a plot by Democrats to turn the presidential election blue. Walters fails to mention how Swift likes to wear primary colors that match those of the Chiefs and actually released an album titled “Red.” If there was a real deep state conversion plot, wouldn’t Swift sniff the jock of a player on a blue-colored team, say a New York Giant? Walters is a bit of an instigator––that’s part of his appeal––so it’s hard to know how much of the Swift hooey he actually believes. But he’s a smart commentator in that he understands that as a right-leaning thought leader with millions of viewers, his bluster gets picked up by the alt-right grifter outlets, who convert niblets into rants about the legitimacy of Swift’s treacherous scheme to give President Biden a second term.
Maybe there are people who believe that to be true. They are consuming the content, just like those of us who think it’s baloney. And that’s all that matters to its producers; we read it, watch it, flip to it.
Because Taylor Swift is inarguably the biggest non-sports celebrity on the planet. And Kelce, through his ubiquitous State Farm commercials separate from Swift, is now one of our most famous athletes. The pairing of Kelce and Swift is a perfect match made in integrated marketing heaven. We as a society are transfixed by celebrity and it was only a matter of time before Swift’s relationship with Kelce went from meet cute (it’s so adorable that Taylor hangs out with his mom at the football games!), to tabloid dispatches (will Travis propose? Baby names?) to what it evolved into this week––crazy, creepy, covert, nutty bull jive.
In previous decades, a photo of a rugged football player hugging a gorgeous, glamorous woman would be looked at as a snapshot of the American Dream. Columnists would write, opinionists would opine: we all should aspire to be in his or her shoes.
Our culture no longer sees it that way. That’s too nostalgic, too sentimental. Instead, the Swift-Kelce pairing is viewed as a transactional pairing, arranged to gin up conspiracy theories on elections or used as a segment topic for swellhead commentators to lecture audiences on how men should behave.
Whatever cynical narrative they want to spin, we shouldn’t take the bait.
But we do. Habits are hard to break.
Let’s proceed with Six.
1. The Cost of Being A Welcoming State: Billions.
The situation at the border will no doubt become a key issue when voters go to the polls in November. Use of the word “crisis” seems inappropriate at this point. Untenable a more apt description as our country simply cannot absorb the expense of illegals (they are illegals). In “welcoming states” such as Illinois, the cost of “asylum seekers” has reached staggering totals, over $2B (that’s billion!) and growing according to this report via Wirepoints: “Illinois and Chicago continue to incentivize more migrants to Illinois with free housing, free healthcare, free education and more.” Who wouldn’t want that deal?
2. College Sports Giants Struggle To Get Rescued By Congress.
Wednesday night, a women’s basketball game was played in Evanston between Northwestern and Iowa. I scanned ticket broker sites day of and the cheapest ticket for the game was $508. One player, Hawkeyes star Caitlin Clark, is most responsible for the insanely high ticket price. She is rightfully benefitting from the deregulation of amateur athletics over the past few years, reportedly earning well over $1M this season. Clark is the exception––she’s worth it––but new norms must be established in this era of player movement and compensation. Politico with a story on how the NCAA, powerless over what’s happening, is struggling to get Congress to help set guidelines. They’re a little distracted by the wars, border and economy.
3. Swiftballers: NFL Never More Popular With Women.
More on Taylor Swift (why not?): the popularity of the NFL among women remained steady for several years, but has increased swiftly (ha!) over the course of the past several months. According to a study reported on by the NY Daily News, from July to December of last year, the percentage of Gen Z and millennial women who had a favorable opinion of the NFL increased by 11 percentage points over that period of time. From the study: “The data makes it clear…Taylor Swift’s legions of young female fans tuning in to watch her support Travis Kelce is undoubtedly the X-factor that propelled the NFL’s popularity among women to new heights throughout the 2023 season.” She doesn’t need the money, but the NFL should write a big check to Swift for her love of all things football.
Courtney Dauwalter is the only ultrarunner to win the sport’s “triple crown” of three 100-mile races in a season, setting a new record for each course. A teacher, she only began running full time in 2017. She regularly wins races ahead of male competitors—once beating the nearest man by ten hours. From this story via BBC News her domination of the sport has “sparked questions, debate and research into whether ultra-endurance distances might be among the only sporting arenas where the playing field between the sexes is effectively leveled.”
5. Is Jimmy Sabatino The World’s Loneliest Prisoner?
It’s considered the prison of prisons, ADX or U.S. Penitentiary Administrative Maximum. Located in Colorado, ADX houses some of the most notorious criminals of modern times, such as former Mexican drug lord El Chapo. Inside ADX, El Chapo and one other man hold the most restrictive of statuses “entombed behind double doors in a seven-by-twelve-foot cell in the most silent corner of the supermax. The bed is a concrete slab covered by a thin foam mattress, the view a patch of sky visible from a high, narrow window. Meals are delivered through a slot in the door.” They cannot speak to anyone and are monitored 24 hours a day. Who is this other prisoner? This fascinating piece from Westworld introduces us to Jimmy Sabatino.
6. Amelia Earhart’s Plane vs Airplane. I Choose Airplane.
News came down this week that a former U.S. intelligence officer may have found the wreckage of Amelia Earhart’s plane. Makes sense as in the past year, we went through the latest round of JFK assassination subplots and eliminated millions of UFO skeptics, apparently. I always thought Earhart’s in-flight navigation failed, she ran out of the gas and crashed into the ocean. Oh well…as a diversion from all the morbid nautical talk, we at the Six thought we’d link out clips from the funniest movie of all time involving an airplane. We have clearance Clarence!
Thanks for reading everybody and have a great rest of your weekend.
Have a suggestion for The Sunday Six? Send email to jonjkerr@gmail.com.
"Pain Cave"? That's a reference to the Wayne and Garth song, right?