#39 ANALYZING TAYLOR SWIFT: Cinderella, the Deep State, and Occam’s Razor

Kelce and Swift are IT.

I’ve written blogs on the Israeli-Hamas conflict, translating tantric poetry, photography as dharma art, the Denver Nuggets, prairie dogs, Hugh Hefner, recognizing ordinary mind, and a shamanic journey to extirpate the karma of the atomic bomb, but what by far got the most reaction was my review of Taylor Swift’s concert movie (Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour).  If you’ve been paying attention to this space, I’m obviously a Taylor Swift fan, but I really had no thought to write about her further until, maybe, her next new music recording, if then.  But my Facebook page got peppered in comments, and people came up to me, saying, “Hey, I read your Taylor Swift blog….”

I had to focus some in my review on how this has become an apex global popularity moment for Swift.  Her romance with Travis Kelce (still waiting for a dishy song on this), all-star tight end of the Kansas City Chiefs, has propelled the both of them to “IT Couple” status.  That I became awash in reaction only verified that this was one of those moments that, like it or not, overflows Taylor Swift, composer and performer, and becomes Taylor Swift the Global Media Phenomena.  This past year belongs to her in the pop culture sphere, a kind of karmic tide that starts to saturate things you’d think distinct, like the NFL, and more than the NFL, anybody talking about the NFL, including the NFL Network commentator fitting five of her song titles into sixty seconds of football analysis, and the analysis NPR did on the NFL obsession with Taylor Swift.

Well, huh.  You can just see it, a snowball picking up speed as it enlarges, absorbing more and more mass, in its reckless and inevitable plunge toward who knows what?

Obviously, it’s whatever next thing comes along to displace it.  That’s pop culture.  Maybe the most interesting thing is simply our willingness to pay attention to it.  Once upon a time we hung on everything Brittany Spears did, and Madonna before her.  Remember when Beyonce and Jay-Z were IT?

Inevitably, we become caught up in and entertained by things of literally no importance, like is Swift going to get back from her concert in Tokyo in time for the Superbowl in Vegas?  Heck, we now expect to see her cheering, up in one of the suites.  She helps affirm the whole thing.

On Sunday, I heard a discussion of her on Public Radio, seemingly a “serious” analysis, which consisted of identifying her as the teen princess Cinderella archetype, that the woman analyzing her considered unobtainable for other than white girls, as if Swift’s the eternal prom queen raised up exclusively by white privilege.  Wow.  What a lot of crap.  Swift may be solidly middle class and white, but nothing about that explains global superstardom or I’d be a global superstar (though unconvincing as a Cinderella princess).  But what irks me: did the commentator actually take the time to listen to Swift’s songs?  Right there on the same album with the hugely popular “Love Story,” her crystallization of a teen girl’s longing to be rescued by the handsome prince, is “White Horse.”  In raw, tender, and ultimately self-empowered tones, she confronts the handsome prince on his shining white horse come to save her.  “I should have known,” she sings,

That I’m not a princess, this ain’t a fairy tale
I’m not the one you’ll sweep off her feet
Lead her up the stairwell
This ain’t Hollywood, this is a small town
I was a dreamer before you went and let me down

 And she concludes:

This is a big world, that was a small town
There in my rear view mirror disappearing now….
It’s too late for you and your white horse to catch me now

That’s her at 18, facing failed love, standing on her own two feet, and taking her own adventure.  It’s been about 15 adult years since she left teen love, while her audience stayed and grew up with her.  Do we associate the ideal teen princess with a series of brutal breakups? Why aren’t we talking about her maturation through it all, her sensitivity and wit, her prodigious creative impulses (new album coming April 19^th—how does she do it?), self-empowered and living out her own vision? Instead we get this ridiculous Cinderella claptrap.

That’s so-called analysis from the Left.  But more remarkably, Swift’s reached the point of shaking up the American Right.  Literally, she got so famous, so discussed, so adored, and most importantly, so dominant in the news cycle, the Right had to do something.

You know, not so long ago in America, Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce would have been “America’s Couple.”  Jeez, she’s a tall, slender, exquisite blonde and he’s a buff, towering, famous football player, both white, and as far as anyone can tell, heterosexual. They go with God and fucking apple pie.  No one would have even wondered about their politics before.  They’d be Americans enjoying all American life has to offer.

America’s Couple conspiring to throw the election.

You’ve got to think that this itself constitutes what provoked the Right to attack.  Swift has in recent years been more vocally on the Left.  She got her fans signed up to vote, came out against Trump’s white supremacy, the repression of abortion rights, attacks on gay people, and so on.  She supported Biden against Trump in 2020.  She hasn’t taken a clear side in the 2024 election, but you’ve got to think it’s likely she’ll come out for Biden again.

This was not the America’s Couple, God, and Apple Pie they were looking for.

After all, this is the story they’re trying to sell rural Americans, who still care about and think in these ways.  The Right’s done nothing but try to scare them with (non-white) savages pouring over the border, big cities overrun with lawlessness and dangerous black people, the profound sinfulness of legal abortion, and so on and so on and so on.  They have no ideas whatsoever for skillful governance, but they can always find a new scapegoat.

But even more insidious, the Rightwing has come to traffic in conspiracy theories like lines of cocaine.  Those’ll keep your interior monologue going until it careens wildly off the rails into adrenalized insomnia.

Their central thesis—I’m not making this up—describes the American government as controlled by a subtle, inner strata, “the deep state,” which consist of Communists, Leftist Militants, George Soros, Venezuelans, and who the hell knows what the fuck else.  Your government hates you, it’s trying to destroy you, and I’ll protect you (that’s Trump).

You can’t even protect You.  Why else would you hide behind all this bullshit?

So the Right’s “logic” goes something like Taylor Swift is “a Pentagon asset.”  She’s assisting the Biden Administration as a planted agent to help throw the election by using her celebrity on the side of Deep State evil.  It’s already planned out who would win the Superbowl—Kelce and the Chiefs, who else?  It’s all to steal the election from its rightful owner, Donald Trump.  And it’s kind of like a grade C Hollywood suspense/action movie.

This brings us, of course, to English theologian William of Ockham (from a small village in Surrey, England, circa 1287–1347)—who’s gotten credit for an analytical tool of philosophy called (in a different spelling) “Occam’s Razor.”  He proposed that if two competing explanations arose, choose the simpler one, the one that had fewer elements.  This view mitigates against how views tend to multiply and complicate, leading one farther rather than nearer to the true explanation.  In other words, if you’re walking down the street and trip over something funny sticking out of the asphalt, you can blame it on a lot of things, potentially, including God, astrology, the class system, etc.  But maybe you just weren’t looking when you knocked into that bit sticking out of the ground?

NOTE TO PARANOIDS: Conspiracy theories exist to get you to ignore the obvious.

Like, obviously Taylor Swift isn’t an espionage agent for the Biden Administration (though, come to think of it, that’s pretty sexy, and it could only help the Biden Administration to look sexier, which it desperately needs).  If you’ll believe the Democrats have rigged the Superbowl, you’re ready for the possibility that every iconic American reference point, from Disney to Bud Lite, wavers with apocalyptic destruction…the so-called “Conservative” view of America.

Now, complicating this…of course, conspiracy theories sometimes prove to be true.  But how about this conspiracy theory?: The American populace, in one way or another, touched by the conspiracy/scapegoat game and compelled to play, can then be led down any road, no matter how fake it is or how bad it might screw them (and everyone else on this planet) in the end.

Occam meant his Razor to divide the simpler, clearer, more honest assessment from the one lost in its own agendas and imaginings.  As a matter of fact, I haven’t lost faith in simple sanity triumphing over blind, insatiable, malicious greed and hunger for power.  I can’t provide you with tangible evidence, I’m just convinced it’s true.

William of Ockham, cutting away our projections.