Christian Adams (Evening Standard) offers an intelligent take on Oprah’s interview with Meghan and Harry, and its potential impact on “the Firm,” which he suggests isn’t so firm after those revelations.
While I touched on the Royal Kerfuffle yesterday. I knew there’d be more response.
But I wasn’t expecting this morning’s cascade, so here we go again, and I suppose this could be one gigantic Juxtaposition of the Day.
Does it matter? Guy Venables suggests there are more important things going on in the world, and, of course, he’s right.
But even the famously self-centered American press that rarely looks outside its own borders and interests has been covering Myanmar, and a cynic (certainly not me, of course) might suggest that we’re noticing mostly because we made Aung San Suu Kyi into some equivalent of a princess back when she won the Nobel Peace Prize.
Whether she lived up to all the adulation once she was freed and put into power being a part of the story that hasn’t necessarily been put into focus.
Perhaps Oprah should interview a few Rohingyas.
Brian Slyngstad dips back into history to remind us that, as titular heads of the Empire, the royals have a lot to answer to, including the theft of the Elgin marbles and any number of other expensive knick-knacks.
Though they weren’t the first imperialists to steal the Kohinoor Diamond, but only — they insist — the last.
But they don’t seem all that relevant anymore, and my experience among the Irish, even among passionate nationalists, is that they don’t waste much time blaming the royals themselves.
They still don’t care much for the first Elizabeth, mind you, but the current crop is more of a tourist attraction than an imperialist power, and they’re more apt to be mocked than hated. (In fact, I featured one such song here recently.)
And, speaking of Irish reaction, Martyn Turner (Irish Times) makes a point about this look at things swept under the royal carpet, which he suggests should diminish the adulation.
I like his pun, though I doubt it will truly lead to a Rexit.
He also, in small print, references “The Crown,” which I haven’t been watching, but which, as he notes, is not a shining portrait of wonderful people either.
Still, the amount of attention that series, and this interview, have drawn, and the back-and-forth on social media, suggests that, Myanmar not withstanding, people care about the British royal family.
The social media take being that some people hate Meghan and some people hate the royals and some people announce that they don’t care and aren’t paying any attention to it at all, which seems belied by their announcing it to the world.
Brian Gable (Globe and Mail) echoes a charge I’ve seen quite a bit of, both in social media and from professional commentators, but which I didn’t hear in the interview: If they want privacy, why are they speaking to the press?
I’ve also seen accusations that, because Meghan is (was?) an actress, she’s obviously lying and this is all fake.
However, I didn’t hear either Harry or Meghan say they wanted privacy, and the enterprises they’re launching will require advertising and promotion, so they won’t become hermits.
What they said they wanted was fairness and to set the record straight, something that they apparently couldn’t get from within the Firm.
I was surprised, by the way, not just by Meghan learning on the way to meet her potential grandmother-in-law that she would have to curtsey, but by the fact that she got a quick lesson from Fergie, Prince Andrew’s ex-wife, who, despite being pummeled in the tabs and kicked to the curb, is apparently still friends with Harry.
And speaking of Randy Andy, here is, in fact, a three-part
Juxtaposition of the Day
As a Yank, Granlund has to be more explicit in making his point, while the two Brits can expect their readership to know what they’re talking about.
The fact that they both featured Andrew eating pizza sent me to the Googles, where I quickly discovered that he has, indeed, been interviewed about his partying with Jeffrey Epstein.
There are any number of former college students who could testify that it is, in fact, possible to have both pizza and sex within a twenty-four hour period.
Nobody believed Andrew anyway. He’s lucky to be a member of the Firm.
Anyway, this whole thing certainly isn’t as important as the suppression of democracy in Myanmar, or, as Pat Bagley (SL Trib) illustrates, the suppression of democracy in the United States.
Howsoever, it’s possible to pay attention to more than one thing at a time, and it’s also possible to work towards a serious goal while simultaneously noticing something trivial going on.
And there is something worthwhile to be learned in all this, which leads us to our
Juxtaposition of the Day #2
We’re still battling over whether children’s stories have any effect on children’s attitudes, to which I would repeat the tweet featured yesterday:
Maybe you believe that there is no impact when the only minorities in children’s books are black half-naked savages with blubber lips and Asians with slanty eyes, pigtails and chopsticks, or that watching a skunk repeatedly force his affections on a reluctant cat doesn’t give them any messages about the word “No.”
But it’s still pretty hard to be around little girls for very long, or even to walk past the toy aisles in a store, without noticing that they get a pretty constant stream of messages about princesses.
In fact, Disney proclaims the young women in their movies to be “princesses” even if they’re not.
The fantasy in Siers’ and Stahler’s cartoons being that little girls will have absorbed anything from an interview that likely aired after they were in bed.
Though some loving parent might have read them this 1980 best seller:
“Having a monarchy next door is a little like having a neighbour who’s really into clowns and has daubed their house with clown murals, displays clown dolls in each window and has an insatiable desire to hear about and discuss clown-related news stories. More specifically, for the Irish, it’s like having a neighbour who’s really into clowns and, also, your grandfather was murdered by a clown.” – Patrick Freyne in /The Irish Times/.