So it turns out Meghan Markle assimilated into the British Royal Family like a black wasp in white milk. But boy, who would’ve thought it would be thus? Oh right, anyone with eyes to read the tabloids, and ears to hear a previous “bombshell interview” she herself gave.
This is why I don’t get all the hype and tease for another “bombshell interview,” which is scheduled to finally air tomorrow night. Has everyone already forgotten the way Duchess Meghan emulated Princess Diana’s Panorama confessional with her own Hollywood confessional titled Harry and Meghan An African Journey?
I mean, really, how many times can she parrot the same damning things Diana revealed about members of this royal family and still play victim and evoke public interest, let alone sympathy?
What is she going to do … insinuate they are racists? Boohoo! Hey, guess what, members of the Roman Curia are Catholics. Hell, at least Diana made real news by warning that members of the royal family were murderers. And, sure enough, she ended up dead …
I’m sorry, but when I hear Meghan whining about racism in this context, she reminds me of Blacks like O.J. Simpson. You know, those who only remember they are Black when they need to play the race card in the white world they adopted – where they always fancied themselves more novelty sensation than token representation.
Meanwhile, dimwitted Prince Harry thinks American paparazzi and tabloids will treat him with kid gloves, unlike their aggressive British counterparts. Before jumping from that frying pan into this fire, however, he would’ve done well to chat with the likes of Sean Penn, Alec Baldwin, and Zac Efron – who recently jumped all the way Down Under, for Christ’s sake, just to avoid intrusive American paparazzi and tabloids.
That said, it appears Oprah has given up living her best life, trying to become her best self. Because only that explains why she would stoop to courting these royal grifters for years to play matron of ceremonies for this PR farce.
After all, it is clear that Meghan just got fed up with serving as a third-rate royal in the UK. Therefore, she prevailed upon Harry to abandon his privileged home and life of public service to play first-rate royals in the US.
But it’s plainly absurd for Meghan to feign shock and dismay at discovering that, as a member of the royal family, long-established royal protocols limited her personal freedoms. Because you’d think any first-grader playing princess would know this is the deal you make when you marry a prince.
Besides, even if she were too self-centered and lazy to read the Diana chronicles, you’d think Harry would have clued her in on all the personal constraints attached to all those public perks. Yet there is Oprah, in one of her teaser clips, nodding in sympathy as if Meghan bemoaning this fact made sense.
But, make no mistake, racism’s the thing wherein Meghan clearly thinks she’ll prevail, where Diana failed, against The Firm. And what better way to play the race card than to enlist Oprah, the Ace of media spades, to stack the deck against the palace of institutional racism, the British Royal Family.
It would be easy to dismiss this fight Meghan and Harry are clearly jonesing for as utterly misguided, clueless, and shameless. But there’s a psychopathology afoot that I am not remotely qualified to properly diagnose. What is manifest, however, is that narcissism and delusions of grandeur figure prominently.
For the record, though, I believe the queen, Prince Charles, and Prince William are genuinely good and well-intentioned people. More to the point, it is self-evident that the royal family did more to help Meghan assimilate than they did to help Diana.
On the other hand, Meghan has given us just cause to believe that most, if not all, the allegations of bullying and manipulation against her are true. And to believe that her allegations against Duchess Kate and others – about leaking stories and telling falsehoods – are little more than the reflexive projection of a master leaker to and manipulator of the media. Exhibits A and B: her African journey production and this Oprah interview. Talk about pot calling kettle black!
And by the way, how are the Marklelites who support her, despite her imperious behavior, any different from the Trumpasites who support him, despite his treasonous behavior?
Frankly, Meghan exhibits a sense of entitlement that would make Her Majesty The Queen blush. The problem is that she invariably resorts to affectation, manipulation, and prevarication to give habitation to her self-entitlements.
I harbored grave thoughts about the preternaturally mischievous Prince Philip stealing their thunder. But it looks like he’s going to live through this scandal … too. Therefore, I caution you to watch tomorrow night’s interview only to be perversely entertained, not to be reliably informed.
Finally, regular readers of this blog know that it’s replete with commentaries denouncing royalty and all its pretensions, appurtenances, and entitlements. Simply put, I think royalty today is as anathema as slavery was, well, ever.
This is why it’s misguided to criticize Buckingham Palace for investigating allegations of bullying against Meghan while ignoring allegations of sexual abuse against Prince Andrew. Because the British royal family itself should be abolished.
In any event, as today’s title indicates, I preempted all she can possibly say in “Get Over Yourself, Meghan! Royalty Is as Royalty Was,” October 22, 2019. So here, in its entirety, is a preview, critique, and review of Oprah with Meghan & Harry: A Primetime Special (she gets top billing of course):
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There’s nothing more self-absorbed than an American president playing the victim. But a British princess doing so comes close.
No doubt HRH The Duchess of Sussex (née Meghan Markle) would cringe at any comparison to President Donald J. Trump. Yet she evoked just that with a cringeworthy interview she gave for Harry & Meghan: An African Journey.
It’s a TV documentary that aired in the UK on Sunday, and will air in the US on Wednesday. But the irony inherent in the hagiography it portrays, and in the victimization she betrays, seems completely lost on Meghan.
Here is a little of the (plainly scripted) interview that has far too many people now hailing her as the patron saint of victimized and misunderstood celebrities:
Not many people have asked if I’m OK. …
My British friends said to me, ‘I’m sure he is great but you should not do it because the British tabloids will destroy your life.’
I think I really tried to adopt this British sensibility of a stiff upper lip … I tried, I really tried. … I never thought this would be easy, but I thought it would be fair.
(Parade, October 20, 2019)
To be fair, I loathe everything about royalty. As it happens, I even laced “Harry Marries Meghan in Historic Swirl of British Royal Family,” May 20, 2018, with anti-royal sentiments. More to the point, though, here is how I presaged the struggles Meghan is now bemoaning:
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I have vented antipathy to royalty and all its appurtenances in many commentaries, including in “Homage to Royal Wedding,” April 28, 2011, when Will married Kate. …
But erstwhile liberated women did her no favors with their cooing all over TV in recent days, especially because they came across like Kardashian groupies previewing Kylie’s latest pop-up shop. I found them particularly oxymoronic when they began hailing Meghan as a feminist icon. … No self-respecting feminist would ever marry/buy into this old-fashioned, Cinderella-style fairy tale. …
I just hope Meghan has better coping skills than Diana. But I have grave misgivings. …
While I’m at it, let’s get this straight also: The few Hollywood A-listers (like Clooney) who showed up were there because of the royal family. Trust me, before she started dating Harry, B-lister Meghan couldn’t get an invitation to the Academy Awards. … A latter-day Grace Kelly she is not.
In other words, Meghan earned her professional and social status the old-fashioned way: she married it. How feminist is that?
In any event, here’s to the married couple. May they live happily ever after … despite the odds.
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Frankly, Meghan seems to feel entitled to more royal deference than the queen herself. But here are three observations, which put the fairness she’s trying to finagle into proper perspective:
- She whines about post-partum vulnerabilities as if she’s the first royal to give birth “under the scrutiny of the paparazzi.”
- She mocks that “stiff upper lip” as if blabbering about her personal life is the only sensible, “healthy” alternative.
- She berates the “cruel” British tabloids as if she’s entitled to more flattering coverage than The Crown Princess Diana and Fergie.
In her interview, Meghan acted like naiveté caused her to ignore the warnings her British friends gave. Except that, given the obvious Diana precedent, she came across as more willfully ignorant than hopelessly naïve.
Indeed, the only naiveté at play is Meghan apparently thinking she can use Diana’s tragic fate to emotionally blackmail the tabloids into providing “fairer” coverage. Moreover, she probably thought she could have her cake (a prince) and eat it too (the kind of global celebrity that would make any Hollywood A-lister jealous).
But sadly, she’s also exploiting (perhaps unwittingly) the emotional wounds Harry is still nursing from his mother’s death. Because both would have you believe the paparazzi caused it; whereas an exhaustive investigation concluded that her intoxicated, drugged-up driver caused Diana’s death.
‘Unfortunately, my wife has become one of the latest victims of a British tabloid press that wages campaigns against individuals with no thought to the consequences — a ruthless campaign that has escalated over the past year, throughout her pregnancy and while raising our newborn son,’ Harry wrote in an unprecedented statement.
‘I lost my mother and now I watch my wife falling victim to the same powerful forces. … My deepest fear is history repeating itself,’ he wrote.
(CBS News, October 19, 2019)
Is it any wonder Prince William is “worried” about his brother…?
Mind you, this Harry and Meghan documentary is supposed to highlight their efforts to alleviate poverty in Africa. But they’re using it to highlight their struggles to navigate royalty in Britain. You’d be hard-pressed to think of anything more Trumpian than that.
This is why the prevailing takeaway from Meghan’s interview can be summed up with two universally recognized idioms:
- You’ve made your bed [by marrying into “The Firm”], now lie in it [and adopt that stiff upper lip].
- Live by the sword [by using the tabloids to promote your brand], you die by the sword [the same tabloids that build you up will take you down].
Notwithstanding all the above, I am convinced that the precedent now at play is not the one Charles and Diana set but the one Edward and Wallis did. Because, like the latter, Harry and Meghan seem hell-bent on making it untenable for them to faithfully execute their royal duties.
In fact, in their TV documentary, he even confirmed the long-rumored break up of the “fab four,” namely between them and William and Kate. But their public whining amounts to a creeping abdication of their royal roles. As such, they are leaving Her Majesty no choice but to send them into exile – not in Paris but in Hollywood.
Of course, this might be a consummation devoutly to be wished. Indeed, Meghan can be forgiven for thinking that living as a British royal in America is far preferable to living as one in Britain.
Feigned ignorance masquerading as naiveté misled her to expect British tabloids to treat her fairer. I fear the same is misleading her in this case. Nothing suggests this quite like her saying we don’t have such “ruthless tabloids” in America. Because The National Enquirer, Star, TMZ, and Us Weekly are among many that would beg to differ.
As I indicated above, the American tabloids never bothered her before she married Harry because, as Kathy Griffin might say, she was on the D-list (i.e., celebrities who have to manufacture what little tabloid coverage they get).
In any event, it never takes long for people to see exiled royals as little more than spongers overstaying their welcome. Edward and Wallis found this out soon enough – to their everlasting regret.
Apropos of this, analogizing Harry’s love at all costs for Meghan with the love Edward had for Wallis is unavoidable. Because everything Harry said about escaping the (British) tabloids and protecting his family seems to be telegraphing his intent to forsake his royal duties. I just hope he fares better living as little more than Meghan’s trophy husband than Edward did living as little more than Wallis’s.
I have nothing but contempt for Diana’s former butler, the venal, gossipy, attention-seeking Paul Burrell. But he said it best on yesterday’s edition of Good Morning Britain:
William and Kate are on a different trajectory – they’re headed to the boardroom… Whereas Harry and Meghan are headed for the factory floor.
We know how the former will fit in. Doubts abound about how the latter will, especially given Meghan’s unsated royal aspirations.
Finally, reports are that the “Queen Mum” never forgave Wallis for precipitating the abdication. Not least because she was convinced that royal scandal led inexorably to her husband’s (Queen Elizabeth II’s father) early death. Likewise, no matter how William fares, I suspect Kate will never forgive Meghan for precipitating this eerily similar royal scandal.
[Note: Prince Edward’s wife Sophie, The Countess of Wessex, is turning out to be the royal family’s most endearing and enduring in-law. With the likes of Diana, Fergie, Kate, and Meghan, this fact is remarkable and heartening, especially given Sophie’s unsung modesty – her undeniable beauty notwithstanding.]
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