An apology for tide of Harry, Meghan stories
Iwould like to reassure everybody that, no, you don’t have any obligation to care about the forthcoming marriage of HRH Prince Henry of Wales and Ms. Meghan Markle ( which is how Kensington Palace described her in its official announcement of the nuptials). Even if you are a believer in the monarchy you do not have to care, or to like the way that the wedding will obtrude upon precious newspaper acreage.
Take me, for example: I don’t have much use for sudokus or horoscopes. When I lay hands on a printed paper or magazine, I somehow just breeze past them without making endless bellyaching noises. Perhaps, from time to time, I will pay those useless items silent, momentary thanks for helping to pay for the obscure, boring stuff I do enjoy — as stories and columns about our royal family undoubtedly do.
( At Maclean’s magazine, my previous port of call as a writer, the life cycles of the various royals always seemed to be pretty much the essence of the business model. The Harry-Meghan collectible special issues — plural, I’m sure — are being planned over at dear One Mount Pleasant even as I write this.)
Unfortunately, Canadians of republican sentiment seem to have trouble overlooking the large doll ops of royal- watching served alongside ordinary newspaper nutrition at a time such as this. For various psychological reasons — I am being careful not to say “pathological” — monarchy has a fingernails-on-chalkboard effect on some people. Any increase in the continuous background din really sets them off.
Well, if you oppose something, seeing an entire rack of magazines in a bookstore succumb to it — seeing a literal wall go Harry and Meghan Mad, with the sudden intensity of a forest changing colour in the autumn — is bound to set you off. The monarchy is an atavistic institution, by design. It is undemocratic in form, although it is self-evidently compatible with any amount or variety of operating liberal democracy. (It is only totalitarianism that monarchy doesn’t mix well with.) The monarchy connects us with the past, and it necessarily reminds us of the most negative features of that past.
Monarchy is hierarchical, in a way monarchists consider to be innocent, but some people cannot contemplate a hierarchy of any kind without wanting to smash it. I totally get it: I have an incendiary streak too. I just notice that republics like the one to the south seem to develop harmful, rather putrid, political dynasties and elaborate titular hierarchies in the vacuum which ought to have been occupied by harmless royal folk.
Americans understand this better than we do, if unconsciously: having a royal family is fun. Fun, that is, for its own sake. Prince Harry is likely to remain a constitutional nullity — to become, most likely, the half- remembered uncle of a King, a figure who sprouts up periodically at important soccer and rugby matches.
He does, mind you, have his own particular celebrity halo. His military service and inspired patronage of the Invictus Games have served to drown the memory of certain youthful playboy- type indiscretions. If it were not for the royal family’s publicity apparatus, which has a way of co- opting the press ( consult the “royals = money” equation described above), Meghan Markle’s family might be the side of the marriage that had awkward questions about spousal suitability.
Anyway, royalty exercises exactly the same sort of attraction that sports do, with, perhaps, a difference in the gender makeup of the audience. Like sports — to name another pastime that takes up a lot of space in the newspaper — royalwatching is a way of anchoring one’s life in history, as well as providing a universal pretext for small talk. If you appreciate fashion as a phenomenon, you would have to actively work at ignoring our royal family. Like professional athletes, members of the royal family often find themselves setting the social pace, sometimes in quite meaningful ways, whether they intend to or not.
Take the minor example I put in the lead paragraph of this column. “Ms.” is a pretty established linguistic particle in the year 2017, but historians of the future might well make note of the official use that was made of it today. In particular, they might spot the convenient way it allowed the Palace to evade the question of whether to give a divorced actress a “Miss” or a “Mrs.”
“Miss” was traditionally kosher for performers, even married ones, when using a maiden or an assumed name they were known by professionally. Ms. Markle, before or after her divorce, could always have been introduced as “Miss Meghan Markle” at a ball or a concert. But to print such a name in a Court Circular would have been another kettle of fish. The possibility of a Queen’s grandson marrying an actress at all goes hand- inhand with the invention of “Ms.”: it would have been unthinkable for a prince to wed “Mrs. Engelson” at a time when such language would still have been necessary. Just ask Edward VIII.