“Why is happiness not important?”

My wife asked me that recently after we watched the movie “Maestro,” which ends rather somberly with a very difficult death after charting a pretty difficult romance. She asked her question after we’d watched a run of movies that all had sad, violent or tragic themes in order to make themselves seem more important.

“Why aren’t the happy movies, the happy stories, just as important? Or more so? Why don’t they get the Academy Award nominations?” she persisted.

A colleague of mine, John Moore, wrote a story recently about how three musicals that debuted recently all disguised the fact that they were musicals in their promotional campaigns, because they didn’t want to scare people off.

What is so off-putting about actors breaking out in song, I ask?

Which brings us, as all things at this moment bring us, to Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce and the Super Bowl.

I understand that there is now social media talk that Swift and Kelce’s relationship is really a psy-ops campaign, engineered by the Deep State, for some malign purpose I’m not sure I fully understand.

“What’s happening with Taylor Swift is not organic and natural. It’s an op,” according to an account called End Wokeness on X, the site formerly know as Twitter.

Some disgruntled guys are complaining that Taylor is distracting too much from the purity of football. Other pundits are suggesting that the hype around Swift and Kelce is an orchestrated plot to drum up subliminal support for President Joe Biden.

Vivek Ramaswamy, former presidential candidate, suggested on X that the Super Bowl outcome will be rigged for Kansas City to favor “an artificially culturally propped-up couple” who he said will reveal “a major presidential endorsement this fall.”

Huh?

My guess is, we are living in such negative, weird, dark, dysfunctional times in our country right now that some of us can’t even recognize an honest-to-God American fairy tale, filled with enchantment and happiness, nor do we quite know what to do with it.

Brian Donovan, a professor at the University of Kansas who teaches a seminar called The Sociology of Taylor Swift, hit the nail on the head in a recent Wall Street Journal profile of Kelce. “I think there’s a public fascination, because it seems like a pure unalloyed moment of joy in the wider context of global wars, deepening political polarization, dysfunction in Congress, an ongoing health crisis. There’s a lot of bad news out there, and this is a common story that everybody knows about and can talk about. I don’t think we’ve had that in American culture for a long time.”

And the thing is, our country was built on exactly such fairy tales. We are the country that gave the planet Disney World and Micky Mouse, “The Wizard of Oz,” Elvis, the lightbulb, and the iPhone. Then along comes Travis and Taylor whose worst crime, really, is that they are recharging the American Dream.

The people who seem least affected by all the shade throwing are Swift and Kelce themselves. They’re just too damn happy to be bothered.

And Taylor’s lived through multibouts of this stuff already in her young career.

Her response to complaints that she’s somehow bad for the NFL?

“I’m just there to support Travis,” Swift told Time. “I have no awareness of if I’m being shown too much and pissing off a few dads, Brads, and Chads.”

Shake it off, in other words.

How about Travis, how does he handle the hate? A coach once growled this at Kelce in college, according to that wonderful WSJ piece: “I need fountains. I don’t need f—ing drains. Travis, you’re f—ing draaaining me!”

The advice “changed his life,” says one of Kelce’s closest friends. “Yes, Kelce thought — you’re either a giver of the basic wellsprings of life or a thirsty taker. He vowed to be the former. In a world of gutters, be a geyser.”

Sheesh, I’d say half of America is hunting for fountains right now.

No wonder we respond to this coupling with such enthusiasm. It’s like football’s biggest fountain is frolicking with music’s biggest fountain, creating a magnificent double fountain that sprays rainbows into outer-frickin space.

“I think the values that we stand for, who we are as people,” Kelce answered in a recent Super Bowl press conference when asked why the public is so fascinated by the super pair. “We love to shine light on others, shine light around the people that help support us, and on top of that, I feel like we both have just a love for life.”

No matter what we snarkily say on social media to each other, secretly I’m thinking we all want to continue to bask in the reflected blaze of Travis and Taylor. We kind of want this fairy tale to go permanent. And this Sunday, I’m betting, more of us than ever will join in the communal spectacle of this supercharged Super Bowl because of them. Cuz deep in places that we don’t talk about much these days, we all still love being Americans.  

Exhibit A: Americans’ interest in the Super Bowl is up 169% over last year, while interest in the game’s commercials have jumped 903% over February 2023, according to recent reports.

One official told CBS that all the added interest in Taylor Swift could translate into the highest viewership ever for Sunday’s game in Las Vegas.

CBS reported the Chiefs’ upset of the Ravens a couple weeks ago was the most-watched in AFC Championship game in its history, averaging just under 55.5 million viewers.

Viewership for all NFL games jumped 7% this season, Nielsen reported, driven by viewership among 12- to 17-year-old girls, which rose 8.1%, thanks to Swift’s interest in the games.

So we may not admit much out loud how important happiness and romance are to all of us, but we sure do long for an authentic taste of it, even us cynical journalists.

The ever-generous Kelce, for example, gave that WSJ reporter who did the profile a ride in his Rolls-Royce around Kansas City when they were doing the interview last fall. Gawking at the ceiling, the writer asked, “Are those stars?”

Yes, Kelce said.

“You stare in disbelief,” J.R. Moehringer writes. ”Embedded in a leather firmament are scores, no, hundreds—many hundreds—of twinkling lights, a fiber-optic galaxy meant to resemble the larger galaxy in which we’re all floating. For the sake of verisimilitude, the Rolls even produces a shooting star now and then. ‘There was one, just a second ago,’ Kelce says. ‘Make a wish. Dreams come true.’”