I really don’t like even thinking about the Royal family, let alone writing about them, but the news of Jeremy Clarkson’s latest pitiful attempt to remain relevant in his dotage provoked me into outlining some thoughts.
To reiterate: other than vehemently opposing the very principle of hereditary privilege, I spend no time at all thinking about the Royals. But there are plenty of other strange sorts who not only spent an inordinate amount of time thinking about them, admiring them, talking about them on and offline, buying merch with their image on them and crying at parades where they hope to have one of them perhaps acknowledge their existence for a cursory moment. As creepy as some of these people can be, I try to see them as similar to other obsessives of, say, video games, or pillar boxes. Everyone needs a passion, live and let live and all that.
However, in recent years this obsession seems to have inherited the more unpleasant aspects of tribalism more akin to the worst elements of football hooliganism. It’s not enough to merely proclaim your infinite allegiance to the late Queen and her heir, but spit bile and frothing hatred at those who would impugn the imagined integrity of the Crown. No, I’m not referring to Prince Andrew and his consorting with known sex traffickers, but Meghan Markle.
Try mentioning her name in certain circles and you’ll get a torrent of vitriol. Why? It’s your prerogative to devote yourself to the honour of the Royals, sure, but why spend any time or effort cursing a woman who doesn’t seem to have committed crimes against said Royals. What’s the point?
Rather than painting myself as someone who considers the cult of celebrity beneath them, I’ll admit I will sometimes venture opinions on people other might write off as ‘celebrities’. I have been affected deeply by the deaths of musicians whose music touched me on a deep emotional level. I have opinions on the Depp-Heard trial, because Johnny Depp’s movies and style have influenced me for many years. You might call this bias, but what I mean is that in other celebrity spats, my opinion is not usually sought and I don’t care to offer it unless asked for. It doesn’t interest me at all. So why do so many who have not been personally affected by Meghan Markle have opinions that go well beyond healthy, and stray into seething hatred?
Sometimes asking that question leads to a lot of similarities with the “Why did you vote for Brexit?” question. You hear vague response after vague response, thinking to yourself “that’s not a good reason to hate someone/leave the EU though is it”, until eventually it dawns on you what the genuine reason is, which won’t be mentioned by the respondee for obvious reasons. An immutable characteristic of said person, perhaps.
Of course, this won’t apply to everyone. Many will not be obviously bigoted, and will actually struggle to articulate a genuine reason to feel so strongly opposed to someone’s very existence. In which case we have to look at what is making them so furious at a person who has apparently done nothing to personally slight them. Of course some of them are mainlining their rage through social media, but this is generally cranks with no critical thinking capacity. The information the majority will use (including the dubious internet ‘influencers’) comes from a more reputable source, and I use “reputable” in its broadest possible sense: tabloid newspapers.
The same tabloid newspapers that print headline after headline about how Meghan Markle is trashing the Royal Family’s name (while the actual Royal who just paid off a sex trafficking victim he claimed he’d never met with taxpayer money is forgotten about) effectively hounded Harry’s mother to death.
Just imagine that your mother (or father) had been killed in a car accident that was directly caused by being pursued by aggressive tabloid photographers. Would you ever want to deal with those newspapers again? Or give them any respect when they continued to use you as subjects for their mostly made-up garbage? What if they then turned on your mixed-race wife for clearly racist reasons? The way that some people talk about what they’d do if anyone harmed anyone close to them, you’d think these people wouldn’t simply turn the other cheek, but go down after blowing up Fleet Street. Yet all these things affected Harry, and he is still subject to public derision, with little sympathy and no pushback against the behaviour of Rothermere and Rupert Murdoch’s gang of ruthless goons. I thought even Royalists cared for Diana, and shed tears for their poor sons?
I guess my final thought would be: what’s the endgame here?
I mean, Meghan and Harry have already been chased out of the country. Is that not sufficient for these obsessive tabloid hacks who despise people they’ve never met, for reasons they can’t be honest about? Yet still they publish bile, whipping up the unthinking cattle to a frenzy. So what else do they want?
Are we really looking at newspaper empires only being satisfied with the eventual suicide of a young woman?
What hath blog wrought? 