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.