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Harry and Meghan Join the Woke Victimhood Circus
Last week the Duke and Duchess of Sussex, Prince Harry and his wife and American actress Meghan Markle appeared in a documentary about their humanitarian trip to Africa. During their interviews they bemoaned… their own plight.
"Every single time I hear a click, every single time I see a flash, it takes me straight back"
Prince Harry tells ITV his grief for Diana is still a "wound that festers" and being followed by the press is the "worst reminder of her life" #HarryAndMeghan https://t.co/FEy37XVASW pic.twitter.com/0qUXeoOXWz
— ITV News (@itvnews) October 17, 2019
Duchess Meghan also opens up in the documentary about dealing with negative press during her pregnancy:pic.twitter.com/lVCSfw05SZ
— Omid Scobie (@scobie) October 18, 2019
I sympathize with both; I too lost my mother in my teens and understand the physical and emotional toll of pregnancy. Sure, I don’t understand the pressures of public life, but I also don’t understand what it’s like to be fabulously wealthy with a palace and an entire household staff, so perhaps we could just call it even.
With the marriage between Markle and Harry, wokeness has spoiled the royal family. Markle was already woke, and when they married, Harry went along for the ride. It’s made royal-watching intolerable as a result.
When the documentary clips dropped, the hashtag #WeLoveYouMeghan trended and both were applauded for their “bravery.” I’m sorry… what? I cannot fathom that lack of self-awareness, to stand in Africa after doing a humanitarian mission and complain about your very, very privileged life.
Our culture has warped over the last decade or so, applauding and cheering on weakness, promoting self-pity instead of self-reliance. It’s yet another reminder that the kids aren’t alright.
Published in General
My unpopular opinion: If Lady Diana had been home tending to her children instead of traipsing around Paris with Dodi her children would have been spared a lot of pain. They might still be emotional and political fruitcakes, after all that git Charles would still be their father…
Bethany,
Let’s try to be objective and ignore the most recent evidence no matter how much it confirms what I suspect. Meghan Markel is a third rate actress whose chief talent seems to be knowing exactly when to tilt her head and smile at the camera. Although this talent is very useful for soap opera level fandom it does fall short of the requirements of a member of the royal family. Whatever we pure republican Americans think of it, the royal family is a living part of the British government. If most of their actions are only symbolic, it is the deepest symbolism for the British and very important to the national psyche.
From the beginning, my suspicion was that Meghan would rapidly be bored with the demanding fishbowl life of a royal and wish to go back to the soaps or the home shopping network. Of course, she would be protected by the false accusation of racism (she is mixed racial) if anyone suggested that she wasn’t up to being a royal in the first place. Not only don’t I feel the slightest sympathy for Meghan or Harry but I do feel that the Queen, a magnificent 20th-century figure who deserves far more recognition, is being trodden upon by these hapless ignorant children.
I don’t know what the solution is but I would expect it to only get worse.
Regards,
Jim
I know victimhood is important to liberals, but any day that starts with you waking up in a castle is probably going to be less horrible than what most of the world’s population will go through.
Popular or not, it is undeniably true.
And Diana would have been their mother. She wasn’t necessarily well put-together upstairs.
It is true, isn’t it? Surely Harry and William must, on some level, be mad at their Mom?
Which is not (at all) to say that Diana was a bad person or even a bad parent, only that hers was an odd sort of life and motherhood and theirs was a complicated loss. The extremely public aspect of their families’ lives and deaths means that her children’s own understanding(s) are mixed in with, or even supplanted by, the publicly declared and enforced meaning(s) of Diana’s life and death.
This happens at far lower levels of celebrity; people are prone to projecting narratives, whether heroic or condemnatory, onto the lives of others, and prone also to having and expressing extreme emotional reactions to their deaths. It was strange for my children to be approached by a weeping store clerk and told that their father had meant so much to her because he was always so friendly at the check-out counter. It was strange to be told that the colonel of the New Hampshire State Police—who had never met my husband— had wept when he heard about the accident.
It wasn’t bad—indeed, it was touching—but strange. (The worst was when someone would confidently tell a story about some Deep Moment with my husband that I knew could not possibly have happened…it felt like a kind of theft).
Anyway, I can only imagine how truly peculiar and disorienting it would be to have the whole of the Anglophone world insisting that they, too, were grief-stricken. And how hard to have to live with Mom-the-Big-Story muddling up Mom-the-Memory.
This is yet more evidence that the legitimate rulers of England, the Stuarts, should be restored to the throne. Down with the German interlopers!
You do know that the current Jacobite pretender is a German? Specifically, the heir to the Kingdom of Bavaria.
What is sad to me is that I think Kate Middleton and Prince William have been doing their darnedest the past eight years to model some sort of positive image for faith and family life for Western Europe, as well as creating a positive image for the royal family.
I have enjoyed watching them because the declining birth rate and traditional (mom and dad) family formation, as well as membership in an organized religion of some sort other than Muslim, has been an accelerating trend over the last thirty or forty years.
It seems as though Meghan Markel has undone all of William and Kate’s hard work. She wants the cameras focused on her and her American Democratic Party-Hollywood “social justice” issues whereas William and Kate want the camera focused on the good work they do as supporters of numerous charities and as ambassadors for the royal family and England.
One of my complaints about the whole woke victimhood enterprise is that it is conducted almost entirely by Americans and Western Europeans who, by any measure against historical and world standards, live in material standards that are virtually royal.
This woke complaining that one group of people has access to more artisanal bakeries or has larger houses or newer cars or whatever than another group is whining by some very privileged people.
As disappointed as I am that people living lives of privilege claim victimhood, to hear actual royalty make such a claim is nuts.
I totally agree. I can’t imagine they are happy about it. One of the other things that was telling from this interview was that Harry basically acknowledged a rift between him and his brother.
If both couples persist in their ways, I suspect Britain will get an object lesson in which set of values have the most impact in the long run – and it ain’t the ‘wokeness’.
Meghan has brought to the Royals a Hollywood level understanding of today’s political culture. And that culture is built on victimhood. You may be a rich jet setting prince and princess, but unless you can demonstrate your inherent victim status, you have no moral authority.
Meghan brought Harry his credentials. Without her he is just a Richie Rich prince. Now they have to nurture their image, and in today’s environment, that means establish their victim status. So they can be ‘one of us’. You know, like Fauxcahantas, Hillary, and the rest. All discriminated against, victimized, and woke.
I’ve no problem with the Bavarians; my beef was always more so with Gotha than Coburg…
Bethany & Marci,
I agree that William & Kate gave them an excellent model that they didn’t have the good sense to just follow. Still what upsets me more is the insult to the Queen. History not being taught allows young fools to forget the incredible sacrifice and perseverance that an earlier generation held to so that this generation can enjoy the blessings of liberty.
Perhaps Harry & Meghan should realize that worrying about the negative press is a rather poor excuse. They should be happy to live in a world in which that is all they need to worry about.
Regards,
Jim
Absolutely EJHill. Her job as a parent was to be with her children and not be whooping it up with Dodi or anyone else at that point in their lives. But then if parents were putting their children first they probably wouldn’t be getting divorced in most instances and they certainly wouldn’t be out dating.
Coburg and Gotha were ruled by the same family for hundreds of years: the Wettins. And they did not rule England until a junior line was elevated to the throne in Edward VII.
Before their marriage Prince Harry was probably the most beloved and popular royal in the world and within his own family. On their wedding day there was a startling contrast between the lone family member sitting on the bride’s side, her mother, and the large number of Windsors on the groom’s side. That singular fact alone spelled future trouble ahead, not to mention the additional warning sign that her troubled relationship with her father was so bad that he wasn’t even there to walk her down the aisle. She has her work cut out for her as she endeavors to separate him from his family to the extent that he looks mainly to her for emotional support. That marriage can only succeed if she stops fighting his family for all his attention and surrenders to being one of them, but her family background does not prepare her for being part of a loving family. Their problems are human ones and have little to do with being royal or wealthy. Prince Harry is between a rock and a hard place right now.
Ari,
Shouldn’t you inform Macron of the “French claim”.
It is as clear as the summer sun.
Regards,
Jim
C’est vrai, mon vieux.
This is the problem. Goldwaterwoman, you may well be right, but that just shows how dreadful the public is.
Marci is definitely right, except I’m a bit more hopeful about the long-term results. The Duke and Duchess of Cambridge are everything that a prince and princess should be. As far as I know, Prince William has always been a model of propriety, virtue, and serious manhood. His younger brother has been an embarrassment, even before his improvident choice of bride. One wonders, frankly, whether affirmative action played a part in Prince Harry’s choice.
Thankfully, the virtue of Prince William and his lovely bride has produced three children, all in front of the wretched Prince Harry in the line of succession.
Prince William is boring, apparently, at least to the public. He is a responsible, loving husband and father. He served in the military, honorably and apparently without scandal. Obviously, things could break down in the future, but thus far, Prince William has behaved properly, and deserves respect and admiration for it.
A certain part of the public seems to prefer the Kardashian style of royalty.
My hope is that, in the long run, the public will honor the better man. In fact, we can even hope that, in the long run, the younger brother will come to emulate the older.
I disagree that Harry has always been an embarrassment. He served honorably in Afghanistan and has been visible with royal duties. Yes, he was most definitely a major playboy, but the family was able to reign him in. I seriously doubt affirmative action had anything to do with his choice of a wife — more likely than not would be a serious case of lust– she is beautiful and was in a hit tv show when he met her.
I was thinking something along those lines too. :-) Meghan is beautiful. Poor Prince Harry didn’t stand a chance. :-)
I wonder what might happen if the Insufferable Meghan was simply ignored by the Tabloid Press for a while, and every insufferable remark went unnoticed. If all the press wrote was the facts of where they went and nothing more. Would their behavior become more attention-seeking and weird? Sometimes the Tabloid Press creates its own monsters.
I have always admired William and Kate and their family. They are true Royals and deserve praise.
If they didn’t have them, they would manufacture them. The press won’t be stepping back.
I think it’s fine for them to talk about the hard times they’re going through, but you would definitely think they’d have more humility and perspective after going on a humanitarian mission….