The Harry and Meghan Saga Continues

Nothing is quite as pathetic as a prince of the British royal family throwing it all away in order to become a Hollywood celebrity. When you marry a third rate actress, what else can you do?

Fair enough, Harry’s great uncle, King Edward VIII threw away the crown in order to marry a Baltimore divorcee, but at least David, as he was called, did not move to Hollywood. 

But, Harry was not finished. Now he has emerged in a series of interviews with Oprah to lead a crusade against mental illness. You might think that this would be a useful contribution to human civilization. You would be wrong.

The young and naive prince, commonly considered to be a functional idiot-- as was, incidentally, his mother-- has inadvertently shown people the way to mental illness. 

After all, what has he shown the world. He has betrayed confidences. He has betrayed his family. He has denounced and bad-mouthed his father. He lied to his grandmother, the queen. It was an expert lesson in burning your bridges, assuring that you can never go home again. He was also breaking his ties to the only world he knew, to the people he grew up with, to the friends he has made over the years.

Harry accused his family of neglecting him. He accused them of smearing his wife. And he accused his father of allowing him to suffer.

I cannot think of any more destructive action. Harry is now lost and alone in the Hollywood fun house. Anyone who emulates his appalling example will compromise his mental health by breaking his ties to other people, whether friends, family or colleagues. Harry has shown himself to be someone who cannot be trusted. He is now lost. No sentient individual should cheer his exercise in self-immolation.

As it happens, according to famed British writer, Julie Burchill, Harry was doing it to avenge his mother. One might say that his mother, a woman who was to the manner born, but who seemed to want more fame and celebrity than to perform her duties as Princess of Wales, was both sinned against and sinning. 

Diana certainly washed her dirty linen in public. She flaunted her relationships and denounced her husband and his family. She contributed to a worldwide epidemic of bulimia.

No one forced her to do so. She had done sufficient therapy to have learned how to undermine mental health. As for Harry’s claim that the royal family was averse to therapy, Diana herself consulted first with Jungian therapist, Alan McGlashan. It was not notably successful, though rumor has it that Prince Charles underwent treatment with the same doctor. If you want to know what is wrong with Prince Charles, aside from his upbringing, consider that he underwent notably useless therapy. For her part Diana also consulted a cognitivist for her bulimia. Since the therapy seemed to be effective, she quit. She ended up with noted feminist therapist Suzie Orbach, and then she died.

Anyway, Burchill is well informed and sufficiently caustic to grasp the truth about Harry and Megan. Since the young couple seems to aspire to becoming the entertainment, why not be entertained.

Burchill begins by saying that the young couple tried out a “grabdication.”

I called out ‘The Grabdication’ early on, with a nod to a previous member of the British monarchy - a king-emperor rather than a prince - who gave it all up for the worldly charms of an American divorcee. On hearing of the temper tantrum she reportedly had over being denied an emerald tiara and having to make do with a mere diamond one, I supposed that Meghan Markle was keen on grabbing a few baubles, the perks of marrying a man whose grandmother has the world’s best jewellery collection. When she led her husband to the showbiz capital of the world in search of *privacy* I figured that she was the only actress ever to sleep with a prince in the hope of winning the approval of some powerful Hollywood frogs to grab back a better acting career than on her first try. But the Grabdication isn’t about fame or fortune or fancy trinkets. It’s an act of passive aggression by proxy, played out on the stage of international media, in which for reasons we can only guess at a pair of quite average people feel a compulsion to frame their love story as that of two pure souls taking on the might of the British Empire - which became a Commonwealth of mutual respect many decades ago, anyway.

Two consummate mediocrities trying out for a role in a new drama-- revolting against the British Empire.

When the stars align and two personality disorders collide, the outcome of falling in love can be anything but benign; contemplating The Wonder Of Us, we may feel that normal standards of behaviour are for ‘the little people’. Think of the ‘Heavenly Creatures’ who, believing that their families were out to get them, got the fatal blow in first, or Bonnie and Clyde. Of course Meghan and Harry haven’t committed violence - with the exception of their assaults on the English language, murdered every time they open their therapy-mired mouths. But with each new show-and-tell, they add to the longest and most lucrative temper tantrum ever, Harry’s new show (off) for Apple TV focuses on ‘mental illness and mental wellness, inspiring viewers to have an honest conversation about the challenges each of us faces’ and is called ‘The Me You Can’t See.’ Even the title is a joke; not since Madonna repeatedly shoved her pubic bush in the public’s face in the 1990s has a celebrity stalked the masses so relentlessly. What about our privacy?

Burchill is quite right to call out the Sussexes for making themselves a public spectacle. She explains that Harry and Meghan have formed a cult of two:

And the first thing cult members do is turn on their families. It was amusing when Meghan cut ties with her awful lot for being snitches. But what Prince Harry is doing to his family is in another league altogether. As I said, Britons have felt embarrassed on behalf of their queen due to the behaviour of her family. But this is the first time many of us have felt bemused and, to an extent, horrified by the way she is being treated by one of the parasites who pass as her loved ones.

So we are witnessing, if we are unwise enough to watch the shows, people who suffer from unspeakable privilege, pretending to be victims:

It is not reactionary to prefer privileged people who know they are privileged and as their part of the bargain refrain from complaining over equally privileged people who deny it and claim fellowship with the wretched of the earth. The old Windsor motto ‘Never explain, never complain’ has become ‘Explain and complain all the way to the bank with your hundred million dollar deal from Netflix.’

Both Harry and Meghan are obviously lying. Buchill counts the ways:

While ‘recollections may vary’ there is not a lot of ‘systemic racism’ in my country, but there is a man who once dressed up as a Nazi for fun and who called a fellow soldier ‘Paki’. As a fervent disciple of therapy, one hopes that Prince Harry is familiar with the word ‘projection’ - the practice of taking emotions or traits one dislikes about oneself and attributing them to others. There was no ‘secret wedding’ three days before the big one which cost the British taxpayer around £30 million. Did baby Archie’s first words really include ‘Grandma Diana’, ‘drive safe’ and ‘stay hydrated’? What came next - ‘Free Palestine’?

All things considered, people had felt some measure of sympathy for Harry. The prince managed to squander it all in his Oprah interviews. They were, as Burchill describes them, just what the therapist would have ordered. As good a reason as any to be skeptical about therapy culture and its claims on the nation’s psyche. And she notes that this emotional solipsism is quite contrary to British tradition:

But all the goodwill the nation felt towards the prince was used up by the time the Queen buried her husband in April. After that Oprah interview the month before in which the royal family were condemned for both racism and for making Meghan so unwelcome that she considered suicide, we presumed that Harry had ‘got it all out now’. The English traditionally think of dwelling on one’s emotions as being quite like vomiting - unpleasant, but probably the best thing once in a while, so that one can quickly move on. As he walked solemnly behind the coffin of his grandfather - born in exile on a kitchen table and a refugee at the age of 18 months, with no open arms of Oprah waiting to welcome him to a strange land, giving up his career, his religion and his name in order to devote his life to walking two steps behind his wife without complaint in the name of duty - we all hoped that the nasty fuss might be laid to rest. But Harry was just getting started. Last week on ‘The Me You Can’t See’ the prince used his platform to accuse The Firm of ‘total neglect’ ‘bullying me into silence’ and being bequeathed ‘genetic pain’ by his father. We can only imagine what’s waiting for us after the warm-up.

How will things work out for Harry in America, now that he has begun by denouncing the first amendment? One presumes that he was trying to clue us all in on precisely how stupid he really is:

Will the Americans tire of Harry? With breathtaking insensitivity considering that the USA fought a war against colonisation by the British monarchy in order to become a free nation, he has already criticised the First Amendment - the right to free speech. The irony of a man masquerading as an enlightened citizen in order to plead for the divine right of kings - and princes - not to be criticised will not have passed unnoticed in his new home. And surely the sight of the world’s most privileged people spilling their guts as the series progresses will strike any sensible person as little more than sly self-interest; these days, the new aristocracy of show business say ‘Yes, I live a life millions envy - but look at my pain’ and get to keep their cred in their gated communities. If Marie Antoinette was around today, she could claim she had bulimia - ‘Let me eat cake’ - and she’d keep her head in a milieu where any mention of mental health gets a gold in the Victim Olympics.

Speaking for her fellow countrymen and women, Burchill explains that the British will never forgive Harry for what he has done to the Queen. One notes that Burchill is not exactly a royalist:

Harry may well face disapproval in his new homeland soon; here in Britain, he will never be forgiven for what he’s done. Because he’s done it to the Queen; the 95-year-old woman who sat by herself at her husband’s funeral in order to observe the same social distancing her subjects have practised for the past year, walking on alone, opening Parliament as usual because democracy is a serious thing. Even life-long republicans like me respect her. For a man who speaks ceaselessly of the evils of bullying, this nation wonders how long a grown man can use the death of his mother as an excuse for lashing out at his grandma.

As for the other winner, emerging unscathed, her head held high, commanding respect from the British nation, she is, of course, Kate Middleton, the Duchess of Cambridge.