Swift Debasement

by Robert Gear (October 2025)

One of the lesser joys of getting older is the discovery that one is not remotely familiar with many of the celebrities on offer. If one does recognize the name of a ‘sleb,’ then one has little idea what they are celebrated for, or come to that, what ‘gender’ they might profess.

Unfamiliar names pop up with the effervescence of bubbles in a soup of cultural relativism. Should we spend the time left to us learning of their much publicized foibles (while not necessarily disparaging their achievements in their chosen fields)?

At supermarket checkouts we glimpse the racks adorned with magazines devoted to the interesting lifestyles of people of often questionable morals. It’s all we can do to can keep our virtue-signaling inside.

The reaction of the illiterati to the recent news of the engagement of Taylor Swift (a name to which most consumers have been exposed) to one Travis Kelce, a sports personality (of whom I imagine somewhat fewer consumers have heard) is a case in point. Few events in recent history have made such frivolous heartrending tugs at our TikToks and the like.

The CBS White House reporter’s response to the news epitomizes the circus of silliness we have come to expect from such propagandists:

“Oh, My God! This is so exciting! The ring is ginormous!”

If you guffawed and rolled your eyes you were not alone; it does provoke a frisson of pleasure mixed with astonishment to witness such silliness.

There exists, of course, other recent achievements and events worthy of acclamation in the history books written and yet-to-be written. For example, the Netflix streamings arranged to showcase the Duchess of Sussex’s celebrity must certainly rate highly in the pantheon of frivolity.

The news of the Swift-Kelce engagement merits the poetic genius of a modern day Willam McGonagall, the nineteenth century prodigy often referred to as ‘Scotland’s worst poet.’

In case the reader is not familiar with McGonagall’s ‘style’ here are the opening lines of his most well-known poem, an account of the Tay Bridge disaster of 1879:

Beautiful Railway Bridge of the Silv’ry Tay!
Alas! I am very sorry to say
That ninety lives have been taken away
On the last Sabbath day of 1879,
Which will be remember’d for a very long time.

McGonagall hoped for the patronage of Queen Victoria and wrote many flattering lines in pursuit of that end:

Sound drums and trumpets, far and near!
And Let all Queen Victoria’s subjects loudly cheer!
And show by their actions that they revere,
Because she’s served them faithfully fifty long year!

Here’s another:

Beautiful Empress, of India, and England’s Gracious Queen,
I send you a Shakespearian Address written by me.
And I think if your Majesty reads it, right pleased you will be.
And my heart it will leap with joy, if it is patronized by Thee.

There is plenty more in this vein; but you get the idea. Indeed a certain charm is to be found in the character and poetasting of a man who was so apparently unaware of just how close to parody his poetic attempts were. But no charm can be extracted from the near parodic output of CBS (or any other legacy media) tomfoolery.

We could sorely use such a poet nowadays. How else can we commemorate important modern events such as those mentioned above?

The following lines took me less than two minutes to compose, and I’m sure many readers could improve upon their value:

All hail young Taylor who sings enchantingly
And will to young sportsman Kelce engagéd be
Our hearts do swoon for such weird stupidity
Which are fluttered and bored through media tools
Who take most people to be utter fools.

And for British readers:

A web of lies and nonsense our betters weave
Our wit is one thing they try to thieve
And the result is that we often grieve
Once we were dupes of their strange appetite
But now a civil insurrection is in sight

You can certainly improve on such lines if the muse takes you. But the aforesaid announcement and the reaction it provoked among the youth and the media groomers (both legacy and some new) must lead us to ask, whether we are indeed on the same planet we used to inhabit; or are we dreaming of a bizarro world thought up by the AI controllers. This is not Hannah Arendt’s ‘banality of evil;’ it is rather the ‘evil of banality.’

Perhaps the CBS White House reporter was onto something, “Oh my God! This is so exciting!”

The prophetic import of these words might bring to mind Princess Elizabeth’s quoting of Psalm 118 when told of her ascendancy to reigning monarch consequent on the death of her older sister, Mary (slightly amended).

This is the Media’s doing, and it is marvelous in our eyes.

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Robert Gear is a Contributing Editor to New English Review who now lives in the American Southwest. He is a retired English teacher and has co-authored with his wife several texts in the field of ESL. He is the author of If In a Wasted Land, a politically incorrect dystopian satire.

Follow NER on Twitter @NERIconoclast