I remember a conversation with a bunch of friends many years ago in Japan. Princess Michiko was in the news and everyone was talking about her nervous breakdown. She was the first so-called commoner to marry into the Japanese imperial family and did so over the protestations of her mother-in-law, Nagako, the wife of Hirohito. It's a pissing-downriver story. Nagako didn't learn a thing from being dished as not-quite-prime-time material for the Emperor, since she was not of the Fujiwara clan, and made Michiko's life so miserable that Michiko at one point stopped speaking entirely for several months.
I voiced the opinion that Michiko was to be pitied, a view that someone else sitting around the table immediately labeled as ridiculous. Feel sorry for her? She's a child of privilege and part of the whole rotten system. She deserves what she gets for marrying the jerk.
A third person at the table thought it was indelicate to feel sorry for the royals. We should respect them as symbols of the nation and not talk about them as individuals.
The memory of this conversation came rushing back at me when I heard Meghan Markle say last night at the Oprah interview that she felt a strong connection with The Little Mermaid as soon as she learned that the Mermaid had married a prince and promptly lost her voice. The comparison with Michiko was unavoidable.
And the Oprah interview is no doubt going to be another Rashomon experience, one in which there will be a sharp competition among ways to frame the event. Royals - who cares? Or, royals are people too - show some human compassion! Or that's what Harry gets for not playing the game and marrying somebody more suitable for the job. Or no, the British Royal Family is a ship covered with barnacles; it's time to scrape them off.
I grew up in New England, where a TV set was placed on the stage of my school auditorium when I was 12 so everybody could watch Princess Elizabeth crowned queen. And in Nova Scotia, I slept in a bedroom with a photo of Queen Victoria hanging on the wall. So forming views on the British royalty was unavoidable, and like many, I went through various stages of not-quite-but-almost adoration to scoffing at the notion of royalty to falling in love with the boys William and Harry to sneering at their incredibly homely doorstop of a father to engaging in serious debate over whether the U.S. had made a terrible error in putting the head of state and the head of government in a single person and might be better off with a figurehead of a king or queen.
Mostly I'm put off by the tabloids and their need to turn the world to shit to make a buck. The British tabloids may actually be worse than the American tabloids, if that's possible, and I watched with great sympathy when Meghan dropped the two bombshells that because she felt so much an outsider in the family that she actually contemplated suicide and when she asked for help she got the response: "We've all been through it, girl, buck up."
Two important details contextualize her agony. One, if she had read what the tabloids were saying about her, Harry suggests, she might have actually gone through with the suicide and wouldn't be alive today. And two, Harry recognized that what had happened to his mother was now happening to his wife. The family was not being family, it was being institution. There was nobody inside to talk to, nobody to turn to.
Back to framing the story. Do we frame this as evidence that Harry wasn't sufficiently dutiful in not letting somebody higher up choose his wife? They almost certainly would not have chosen Meghan. Or do we frame it as a royal fairy tale love story where the prince adores his beloved so much that he's willing to hold the family up to what is no doubt going to be a huge pile of criticism and derision? And quite possibly a fracture so severe that it can never be mended? And poor Queen Lizzie - talk about annus horribilis'es!
There's more bombshell material: the suggestion - from whom Harry refused to say - that someone in the family worried aloud whether his kids might actually have skin that is unacceptably dark. Meghan gets in a great dig there - mentioning that 60% of the British Commonwealth is made up of dark-skinned people and they are squandering an opportunity to make a connection there. Loved that bit, without bothering to fact-check the claim.
Let's hear it for Oprah. Great interview. Called Harry "Harry," bringing home the consequences of withdrawing from the role of heir to the throne. And making a home in the former colonies, where people don't know the difference between "Your grace," "Your magnificence" and "Your royal dum-de-dum."
I'm not inclined to bash the royals. I've already said I prefer to see them as Harry does, as "des mouches prises dans le miel (flies caught in honey) - my term, not his," people trapped in lives not of their choosing. I doubt I could make much of a personal connection with Charles, much less Philip, or, for that matter, any of the whole lot. But having learned to see my own parents as people who played the game of life much better than I ever gave them credit for when they were alive, with the cards they were dealt, I'm not going to spend any time making moral evaluations of these folks. First of all, I know them only through the very unreliable news media, and second, I want to be remembered less for the condemnations I've made of folk over the years and more for the efforts I've made to find sympathy and compassion.
Watching the Oprah interview was great entertainment. I like beautiful women and Meghan is a beautiful woman. And I love seeing that cute little red-headed child of Charles and Diana now all grown up and acting so forcefully as a husband and father. More power to you both.
Hope you continue to be good to each other.
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