Harvard Canonizes Taylor Swift

Harvard Memorial Church hosts lecture "Reading Taylor Swift As A Sacred Text"

I just saw the following announcement for a lecture that was held a couple of days ago in Harvard’s Memorial Church.

Reviewing the lyrics of some of Swift’s popular songs, I see that most are unhappy odes to boys with whom it didn’t work out. For example:

From: “Cold as You”

And you come away with a great little story
Of a mess of a dreamer with the nerve to adore you

From: “Fifteen”

Cause when you’re fifteen and somebody tells you they love you
You’re gonna believe them

From: “Dear John”

But I took your matches before fire could catch me, so don’t look now
I’m shining like fireworks over your sad empty town.

From: “All Too Well”

And you call me up again just to break me like a promise
So casually cruel in the name of being honest.

I take the time to write about this because I believe there is something profoundly sad and sinister going on here. When I studied poetry in college, we occasionally analyzed love poems, sonnets, and Shakespeare’s soliloquies, and I still remember a professor dissecting Juliet’s longing for Romeo:

Come, night, come, Romeo, come, thou day in night;

For thou wilt lie upon the wings of night,

Whiter than new snow on a raven's back.

Come, gentle night, come, loving, black-brow'd night,

Give me my Romeo; and, when he shall die,

Take him and cut him out in little stars,

And he will make the face of heaven so fine,

That all the world will be in love with night,

And pay no worship to the garish sun.

Whiter than new snow on a raven’s back — wow, what an image.

For young people, the danger of reading canonical love poetry is that it probably idealizes romantic love too much, thereby giving them unrealistic expectations. Taylor Swift’s lyrics, on the other hand, normalize an unhappy, frustrated, and bitter view of romantic love.

As strange as it may sound, I’m beginning to wonder if Taylor Swift’s producers and promotors are running a PSYOP for disenchanting young women with the project of romantic love. The purpose of this PSYOP isn’t clear.

Do the strange and shadowy overlords who pull the levers on popular culture not want boys and girls to fall in love and stay in love?

And now we have the most prestigious university in the world, with deep ties to the US government, canonizing Taylor Swift lyrics as “sacred.”

I swear, this country gets weirder by the hour.