Harry & Meghan’s upper lips — very un-stiff!
The groundlings at Stately Blaska Manor are catching up with the exquisitely produced series The Crown on Netflix. The series portrays Elizabeth II as colder than frozen nitrogen. In Season #3, young Prince Charles returns to the palace from his investiture as Prince of Wales and his subsequent tour of that vassal state. He expects praise for having immersed himself into the culture, to the point of learning Gaelic.
Instead, the Queen scolds Number One Son for inserting a clause expressing his own feelings of separateness into his government-ghosted acceptance speech. Charles counters that he is a human being who has his own thoughts and desires — foreshadowing tragic Princess Diana.
“I got news for you,” ER II tells the young Charles. “Nobody cares what you think.”
It would have been boffo if Oprah (a one-word brand herself) concluded her interview by saying the same to the Duke and Duchess of Sussex! Go rescue a chicken! But Harry and Meghan’s woes, imagined or not — are a kind of left-right cultural Rohrsach test.
We are either Oprah peddling more victimhood in all the wrong places or Piers Morgan not believing a word or caring a whit.
Are even the rich and royal victims?
You can attribute Elizabeth’s sangfroid to the Greatest Generations’s abhorrence of all things touchy feely.
“The Windsors will never be known for an openness of manner or spirit.” Tongue firmly cheeked, Gerard Baker continues: “They seem to have combined in their personalities the relaxed informality of their German heritage and the sunny warmth of their adopted English homeland.”
The German Hanovers — the real progenitors of this royal crew — were notoriously tough on their sons. George I hated George II and so on. George III’s boys were wastrels. Victoria blamed “Bertie” (Edward VII) for her husband’s premature demise. George V predicted his Prince of Wales would “ruin himself,” which he most certainly did — marrying “for love” not duty.
America needs British royalty
So why do Americans follow the British monarchy? Reason #1 is we have none of our own. We lack that sense of permanence. This gang can trace its tree back to William I, the part Viking and adopted Frenchman who was the last to conquer the British Isles, that being in 1066. Prime ministers — like Presidents — come and go.
Peggy Noonan lauds “the high purpose of monarchy,” how it “lends mystique and authority to the ideas of stability and continuance. … [Elizabeth II] has been for the world a constant — in this world, a constant is a valuable thing.”
“If princesses suddenly ceased to exist, I’m quite sure that my [4-year-old] daughter would reinvent them.” — Essayist in the NY Times.
Monarchies are balance wheels that prevent engines from shaking themselves to death. The overthrow of so many monarchies a century ago did not improve their successor states. Stalin was magnitudes more hideous than Czar Nicholas II. Kaiser Bill perpetrated no Holocaust. The Habsburgs (oppressors of my ancestors) were amazingly inclusive — had to be, with their potpourri of nations. Friends of the Jews, patrons of the arts.
Schadenfreude is another reason. It is why Greatest Generation mothers watched As the World Turns. It’s why the Kardashians today. Write about the Kennedys and sell books. The Windsors have their share of shooting stars and young corpses. We seem to require glamor streaked with tragedy in a cast of characters more screwed up than ourselves. The Sussexes can blame the tabloids but they are cup and saucer.
Blaska’s Bottom Line: Harry and Meghan are writing a whole new season of The Crown.
What will be the denouement?
10 responses to “Queen for our day, victims for our times”
This too shall pass – Best the Royals can do is to carry on
Meaghan and Harry made themselves heard only to make it clear that they really wanted to carry on as well but given no choice but to exit.
Being owned by their country is a higher calling at a cost. –
The Queen may actually outlive Charles. I have heard that she continues to defy death because she knows Charles will make a terrible King. I wouldn’t doubt it.
She also was right to cut Harry and Meghan off. They are disrespectful ungrateful whingers.
If a man did to a woman what Meghan has apparently done to Harry — attack his family, cut him off from them, pressure him into leaving his home country, disavowed his heritage, and using children as a weapon, all while being a narcissistic serial liar and race-card-playing exaggerator — there would be outcries and calls for investigation into potential domestic abuse.
Of course Harry has always been one to fight and lash out for no good reason but Meghan seems to have left wrecked relationships with her own and Harry’s families on both sides of the Atlantic as well as playing the racial Olympic games and whinging on Oprah for serious cash.
She makes Wallis Simpson look like Mother Teresa.
“She makes Wallis Simpson look like Mother Teresa.”
Amen. Though Wallis didn’t have access to narcissistic media. There was no Oprah, Facebook, or cable news.
Meghan was the only princess to get it totally bass akwards,
She kissed a prince and turned him into a toad.
Gossiping on national television.
What could go wrong?
I used to like Oprah’s show in the 80s and part of the 90s, but she changed somewhere along the way and apparently decided it was in her best interest to go the victimhood route. Shame. She could have used her platform to help unite us.
There is genuine suffering on this planet, people whose oppressed stories go unheard & tortured faces to unseen. We don’t see them because narcissists and pretend victims are too busy taking up all the space. Tragic, really.
Maygun is a spoiled brat and publicity-seeking puke with no redeeming value. The ghosts of Roy and Will Rogers tell us more. Why worship the drool of Maygun? Tanchelm and Peter the Hermit are more deserving of our reflection. OMG, what a lesson about caste and class. Is Maygun guilty of cultural appropriation of the British Crown?
Oprah also delivered starlet wannabes to Harvey Weensteen knowing full well why.
Exactly, which makes her (and Hollywood’s) sanctimony even that much more repugnant.
Because serfdom was such a good thing?