How the Bible and Paradise Lost Explain Taylor Swift-Travis Kelce Derangement Syndrome
This year’s Super Bowl not only marked the beginning of a new NFL dynasty; it also was the crowning event for our newest world-famous celebrity couple: Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce. Theirs is obviously not the first celebrity romance; it is not even the first sports star-starlet romance.
From Joe DiMaggio and Marilyn Monroe to Brooke Shields and Andre Agassi up through David Beckham and Victoria “Posh Spice” Adams and Tom Brady and Gisele Bündchen, the story of popular/winning-athlete-attracts-popular/pretty-girl has been a tale as old as time—or at least as old as modern media. The rational parts of our minds are well aware that the overwhelming majority of these kinds of relationships tend not to last; after all, how many celebrity relationships of any variety have endured, aside from Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward’s marriage? But this knowledge has not prevented the irrational parts of our psyches from leaping to the wildest conclusions about this latest athlete-starlet couple.
Like Kelce and Swift, Adam and Eve were singular in their fields (they literally had no other competition) and, materially speaking, as well off as any human beings could ever hope to be.
From Covid-related conspiracies to election manipulation to George Soros and the CIA (yes, all the usual suspects are here), no theory about the Swift-Kelce relationship appears to be out of bounds for the couple’s detractors. Add to the tinfoil-hat brigade the strangely high number of football fans who have expressed their anger at the amount of attention that NFL broadcasts devoted to the Swift-Kelce relationship (which was typically no more than one minute of airtime, according to most analyses), and what we have is one of the most bizarre brews of toxicity and Debbie Downerism that we have seen in American culture in a very long time.
All of this is enough to make one wonder, simply, Why? Why all the acrimony directed at these two people? Why have so many people’s ire been raised at the prospect of a relationship between the world’s most popular pop star and the world’s greatest tight end? Why can’t we just let these two highly accomplished people be? And, perhaps most importantly, why can’t we let ourselves be at peace with the reality that uber-successful good-looking people will want to be with one another, and that there is about as little that we can do to prevent that as there is that you or I would be able to tackle Travis Kelce?
In order to understand the phenomenon of Taylor Swift-Travis Kelce Derangement Syndrome, we need to go back to the beginning—not to the beginning of their relationship, but the beginning of what the Bible tells us was the world’s very first romance—the union of Adam and Eve. Like Kelce and Swift, Adam and Eve were singular in their fields (they literally had no other competition) and, materially speaking, as well off as any human beings could ever hope to be, having the entire Garden of Eden at their disposal without any need to work, pay taxes, worry about inflation or fret over geopolitics. Any other intelligent creature who would have happened to have been around them would surely have smiled at the sight of this couple and would have immediately understood that these two unique, blessed individuals are clearly meant for one another—right?
Lurking underneath the venom that is being spewed at the Adam and Eve of pop music and NFL football is a tortuous envy and a spiteful resentment toward two gifted, extremely successful individuals.
Wrong, according to John Milton, author of the English epic Paradise Lost. In Milton’s audacious, still-startling retelling of the story of Adam and Eve, when the satanic serpent, the only other intelligent being in their vicinity, sees Adam and Eve together in the Garden, instead of wishing them well and moving on with the rest of his day, the serpent—who at first hesitates to go through with his plan of corrupting humanity—decides to proceed with his malicious plot. Although seeing the beautiful world makes him feel a pang of remorse for what he knows could happen to this world were his plan to succeed, seeing the strong Adam and the beautiful Eve—and knowing that he does not enjoy the love that they have with each other—fills him with such envy and spite that he doubles down on his malevolent plans: “the more he sees / Of pleasure not for him ordain’d: then soon / Fierce hate he recollects, and all his thoughts / Of mischief, gratulating, thus excites” (IX.470-472). What finally pushes Satan to bring evil into the world is his resentment—his attitude of spite (rather than of equanimity) toward the things he cannot have.
Lurking underneath the venom that is being spewed at the Adam and Eve of pop music and NFL football is a tortuous envy and a spiteful resentment toward two gifted, extremely successful individuals that have things (including a relationship with one another) that we will likely never be able to experience. But knowing as we do now what the serpent’s envy and resentment produced—the unleashing of evil and corruption into the world—we need to consider well how we react to a relationship between two talented, exceptional people. Do we really want to assume the role of Satan in this story, and inject more poisonous hatred and malice into the bloodstream of public life? Or would we rather do the more difficult but essential soul-saving work of checking our envy and resentment when we sense it surging up within us? None of us will likely ever play in the Super Bowl or win a Grammy. But we do have it in our power to do something even more important: to choose whether or not to be guided in our behavior toward others by envy and resentment. The fate of humanity—at least in Milton’s eyes—rests on this choice.