My girlfriend has been obsessed with this Taylor Swift word scramble.

The cult indoctrination is happening.

Laying in bed Tuesday night, I was flipping through my phone and needed to rest my depleted brain from the unnecessarily tendentious and legalistic dispute over the definition of “hand stuff” as it related to Rep. Lauren Boebert’s infamous date at Beetlejuice: The Musical. I briefly thought about Caligula bestowing a Senatorial position to one of his horses, then glanced over at my girlfriend, with her MacBook snugged in between her thighs, engaged in a substantive and wide-ranging word scramble to unlock the four songs from the vault on the forthcoming 1989 (Taylor’s Version) album. I know I’ve said this in a previous Taylor Swift post, but my girlfriend’s intensity and devotion to solving this overwrought puzzle has confirmed to me that Swiftie fandom is QAnon for The Bachelor/Bachelorette demographic.

Taylor Swift can’t stop doing little puzzles and quizzes—it’s like Highlights for Children for adults. Swifties go on these little goose chases where, in order to see her new music, they have to encounter three men who arrive at the foot of their beds in the middle of the night with three different scrolls that have to be deciphered. I don’t know how they can summon the urge to be alternately giddy and frantic over this supercharged spectacle; I have two hours max on a weeknight where I have any energy to do anything, and this is mostly channeled toward making parm-style sandwiches. I can’t go on an Indiana Jones adventure to figure out the name of the third song from an album she recorded seven years ago.

In the context of the Heroes Of Capitalism genre of hagiography that whips up dullards like Elon Musk into figures even more outsized than their already-quite-outsized personalities, it is quite astonishing how entrenched Taylor Swift is as a cultural monolith. American society is incredibly lucky that she became a singer and not a serial killer—she’s the closest we’ll ever come to Jigsaw. We are steps away from the Eras Tour beginning with her walking out on stage and introducing her set with: “Welcome to the Eras Tour. Before I get started, I have one riddle. There’s a bag of wheat, a fox, and a sheep. They all have to cross the river...” While the fans erupt in an inquisitive frenzy, the boyfriends in obligatory attendance will sigh in despondence, “I just wanted to hear ‘All Too Well.’”

I’m waiting for the next Batman movie to star Taylor Swift as the Riddler, and before she blows up a downtown building, she’ll say, “In order to diffuse the bomb, you’ll have to enter the entire tracklist of my upcoming album. To reveal every song, you’ll have to turn the sun down at the right place until it reveals the passcode.” As the sun reflects into one of the walls in the Batcave, it beams in a way so the shadows cast the phrase “DIRTY SKANK BITCH” with an exclamation point. I suppose the payoff will be worth it.

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