Their Truth

At the supermarket checkout, I saw the cover of People magazine had a photo of Prince Harry and Megan Markle, with the heading “Our Truth.” (If I recall correctly, it was “Our Lives, Our Truth.” 

To speak of “our truth” is simple insanity. Truth is truth, unconditionally, one truth cannot contradict another, and you cannot declare yourself Napoleon Bonaparte as “your truth.” What Harry and Megan Markle claim is either true, and the Royal family is guilty of racism, or it is false, and the Sussexes themselves are guilty of slander. It is unjust to the innocent to leave the matter ambiguous, and say that anything said must be true. Nor can Hitler escape censure by declaring that Aryan superiority and Jewish depravity is “his truth.” People magazine is either endorsing insanity, or endorsing evil.

This same day, I witness a video clip of Don Lemon on CNN objecting to the Vatican refusal to bless gay marriage because “God would never judge us.”

Judgement is what we are here for.

Did God not judge Adam and Eve in the Garden? Is Jesus not coming again to judge the living and the dead? Why then did God create us? Just as cute pets? With no responsibilities? And if everyone gets to heaven, why did he not create us in heaven, and instead leave us to suffer here on Earth?

And why does the Bible condemn Pontius Pilate for refusing to judge Jesus? Why is Pilate the villain, and not the hero of the piece?

Why do we condemn the neighbours who reputedly let Kitty Genovese be stabbed to death in a stairwell rather than intervene? Who were they to judge?

As infuriating is the often-repeated claim that parents are supposed to show their children “unconditional love,” and never discipline.

That’s a perfect way to raise a psychopath or a narcissist. Or a helpless house pet.

Unconditional love is not love at all. It is ownership.

Megan, Harry, and Oprah

 

Everyone is talking about Megan Markle and Harry Windsor’s interview with Oprah Winfrey. I have not posted on it. It looks to me like gossip: a family matter.

Everyone is upset at Markle’s claim that some unnamed member of the royal family was concerned that her princely son’s skin might be dark. This is apparently reason, in many minds, to abolish the monarchy.

Excuse me, but are we not aware that, for centuries, it has been prohibited for the British/Canadian/Australian monarch to be Catholic? Convert, and you are instantly deposed, or tossed from the line of succession.

And this does not bother us; that we have always been fine with. Yet we find a mere unsubstantiated assertion of a remark about skin colour intolerable?

We have our values badly messed up.

Not that I think it likely that any member of the royal family really fussed over skin colour in any racial sense. South Asian parents do; African-American parents do, according to Toni Morrison. I doubt any “white” parents do. And British royals traditionally care about class, but not race. They are happy to hobnob with maharajahs; but not with Eastenders.

Am I accusing Megan Markle of lying? Yes; I think she is playing the race card shamelessly for profit. Sells interviews; sells books. Or possibly utterly misunderstanding some chance remark. 

Damn Yankees

This compilation from Buzzfeed makes a good case that Meghan Markle has indeed been unfairly treated by the British press.

It also shows how “straight” new stories can be deeply slanted fake news.

This does nothing to demonstrate, however, as so many want to have it, that the unfair treatment is based on MM’s race.

It looks to me more like anti-Americanism.

Everyone loves to be anti-American, after all. Everyone resents the top dog. Racism is far less socially acceptable.

But in the UK in particular, and in the context of the Royal Family…

To begin with, the monarchy operates on the metaphor of the nation as one big family. All Britons are symbolically the Queen’s children.

Looked at another way, in principle, all Britons are somewhere in the line of succession, by dint of being British.

So there is, I think, a natural resistance to some non-royal foreigner joining at a top level. Foreign royals come with their own credentials; British commoners seem all right in principle. But a foreign non-royal? Who the **** does she think she is? She’s jumping the queue.

This locks in naturally enough to a general impression among the Brits of Americans as, at base, an ill-bred rabble, a nation of materialistic parvenus who never did know their place. Intensified in recent years by the humiliation of seeing these scruffy ignoramuses supplant the mother country in international importance. They have, as a nation, no breeding, and no class.

The criticisms of Meghan Markle seem to reflect this: they seem to be built around the premise that she does not know how to behave, she does not understand proper royal traditions, she is acting above her station, she is money-grubbing, arriviste, and she had better bloody well not see herself as some kind of model.

The royal couple’s desire to spend more time in North America suggests some awareness on their part that this is the problem.