• The Limitless Future of the Duchess of Woke

    While the self-nominated gatekeepers of the culture have been going at Meagan Markle as if she were an ice sculpture they could reduce to chips and hose into the drains, others are thinking, and I am one of them, “Wow”. Who stands up to the Windsors and lives to tell the tale? Practically no one. An old friend of mine, the foreign editor of the Mirror, and at the time, Robert Maxwell’s right-hand man, said to me “Of course they had Diana killed.” As if anyone with a brain cell wouldn’t know that.

    If you’ve hung around the royal family as I have, the pulsations of power are unmistakable, and as in Stalin’s Russia, every glance and gesture of every courtier is remarked and filed away for later. The Windsors are used to power, and no one wields it better. I would put money on MI6 killing Jeffrey Epstein, the act has all the marks of 007. They got permission from the CIA or whoever, arranged the digital tape destruction, the absence of the guards, broke the sleazeball’s neck and were on the next plane home to wherever jackals live.

    So far Meagan has slipped the noose, though the naval frigate parked one-quarter mile out from her current house would make me nervous.

    Anyway, she did and she is going to be so rich, so powerful, we will be writing about her for the next forty years. Hollywood experts think Markle will choose a more pro-social, “infotainment” production path “rais(ing) money and mak(ing) movies that are about issues that are important to her.”

    PR veteran Howard Bragman, predicted today in the Hollywood Reporter, that the couple, in bringing to the table, fame, and intrigue that is “probably unparalleled at the moment,” they could spark a bidding war among streamers or networks. “They could make hundreds of millions of dollars.”

    I have read that they could make $500 million in the first year. After which, look out Apple, Gwyneth, Oprah, and weird muscley penis guy who owns Amazon.

    Their future is limitless. Harry has a sustainable travel company in the works, called Travelyst. Meagan is doing a voice-over for Disney, and Harry is producing a series on “mental health” with Oprah. While Meagan waits for Harry to return with their exit package, Meagan is visiting some of the most radical groups out here in B.C., which, by the way, is all radical all the time.

    My sweet sweet, (highly educated and accomplished) cousin thinks they are a fabulous couple and that “they are wise to get out of that rigid/stifling environment and get on with their real lives if they really intend to do good work and actually make a difference beyond the entertainment value of royalty.” She also thinks the criticism of Meghan is horrific and that I am right to call it hatred. (I like to have my feelings affirmed.) I think a lot of people do think they are brave and wise, though none of them are employed by the media. There are, after all, countless European royals doing their own thing, with and without titles, working for money.

    Just so long as she doesn’t run for President. Because trust me, she’s thinking of it.

  • The Duchess of Woke finds a Home

    Apparently our Premier (socialist) in B.C. is all aflutter about the possible settling of the Sussexes in our jurisdiction, which, by the way, is the greenest, most rainbowy, wokest in the whole of the Commonwealth, if not the world. The two major cities have gay green Mayors and councilors and our riding (and the Sussexes) is represented by the head of the Green party federally, and the Green party provincially. I personally think it would be super-great for us because their presence will kick up the glamour factor by quite a lot and I am shallow enough to enjoy glamour. And hey, with all that focus, maybe there would arrive some rationality and greens would stop burning down the forests with their crazy ideas about how to maintain biodiversity. One can hope.

    With regard to a complaint from a reader on Facebook that I was super-mean yesterday, you should see, Sir, the musings of my English friends who would like to see her stuffed into a wood-chipper. Tomorrow would be too late.

  • What drove the Duchess out of England?

    Was MM driven out by racism? Envy? A lot of media, especially from the red tops, as they call the shrieking tabs in England, is based in envy. A youngish woman B+ actress/blogress grabs a Prince, the darling of all, spends $1 million on clothes, $5 million on renovations, has a mega-wedding costing $30 million, then proceeds to tell the country how to live, including overturning the university curriculum supplanting some of it with voices of color, promoting activist women of color on the cover of Vogue, nagging about climate change while flying private, promoting a cookbook by women who belong to a jihadi mosque. Also, she bravely associates with powerful women of colour like Serena Williams or Oprah or Amal Clooney who, I promise you, have a distinctly different view of the royal family than the average punter. Oppressor would just about cover it. This while they throw her a $500,000 baby shower.

    I vote for woke over racism. If MM hadn’t decided to insult half the population of Britain who don’t “believe” in climate change and who are dealing with fallout crime from unrestrained immigration, and who despite the failings of their culture want to keep it, she’d have had the usual vicious hazing, and then the redtops would get bored and move on.

    Nooooo. She has a “platform”. She wants to do good, highlight her favorite ideas and people. Show us just how terrible we are, how much better we could live, how much we have to learn. From her. Does anyone wish her luck? I wish she would just go away. That’s not going to happen, so I expect the shaming and viciousness to continue.

    An extensive survey of American political opinion published last year by a nonprofit called More in Common found that a large majority of every group, including black Americans, thought “political correctness” was a problem. The only exception was a group identified as “progressive activists”—just 8 percent of the population. They are, to man, woman or hysterical teen, well-educated, well-heeled and they live in a bubble of self-affirmation like MM. Those 8% are MM’s natural audience. They are her only audience. The rest of us are just thoroughly annoyed.

    Why are we annoyed? We blame the conflict in our public life on wokeness like MM. According to the Atlantic, “other polls found that white progressives were readier to blame racism for the problems of minority groups than black Americans were. The new progressivism was a limited, mainly elite phenomenon.”

    The future of the Duchess of Woke looks filled with conflict and hate. But, as Gwyneth showed, you can make a lot more money when people hate you/love you/hate you.

  • Team Sussex or Cambridge?

    A friend and I have been in a year-long discussion about the cable tv actress who has been elevated to Duchess-hood by marrying Harry Windsor. Megan Markle, from a broken, mixed-race family barely this side of trailer trash is notable for wanting to heal the world while wearing millions of pounds worth of couture. She is backed by the mixed-race aristocrats of the entertainment industry, and is correctly thought of as being the missing link/image that will carry the Royal Family and the largely black Commonwealth into the future. Thatsa lot of weight on one slim, toned, and decidedly pretty back.

    She is backed by the mixed-race aristocrats of the entertainment industry, and is correctly thought of as being the missing link/image that will carry the Royal Family and the largely black Commonwealth into the future. Thatsa lot of weight on one slim, toned, and decidedly pretty back.

    A weight she seems capable of carrying. Dubbed Tungsten by Prince Charles, her compassionate yet delighted yet modest smile seems permanently fixed, without a hint of strain. She is emotionally labile, like Diana, but in contrast, her knowledge of herself appears to be deep; it also seems to have been absorbed from Gray’s Anatomy. Don’t mock, why else is that show the longest running evening soap on tv? Because it shows people (women) how to feel, and how to talk about their feelings. She seems to have won the first skirmish against the vicious largely queeny gay crowd that makes Buck House run on time. I find that impressive. Less impressive however is her insistence that there be more people of color teaching at universities (in fact the proportion of people of color teaching and the population of people of color in Britain is almost directly equivalent) and that they will raise their child gender-neutral, which is fine, I guess but worryingly batty. And that we peons should stop consuming so much, recycle and scale down our traveling. Ignore the fact that I spent $750,000 on clothing, my Hollywood friends gave me a $500,000 baby shower and we burned up many millions on travel last year.

    My friend, English by descent, with a former Prime Minister in her background has a sharper interest in Sussex’s ascent and behavior. Her back is up. She suspects Sussex is a fraud interested only in self-glorification. And that this is not the point of the British monarchy. The point of the royals is to represent British culture and democracy. Not to prance around in $50,000 dresses smiling like you are a combination of Mother Teresa and Princess Diana and Julia Roberts in a Dior commercial.

    I spent seven years as an occasional royal reporter in London. It was the price of admission for a woman at Time Inc., at the time, and for a while, it was pretty interesting. I met some of them, had lunch with a lady-in-waiting or two, went to the balls and Ascot and Cartier Polo and so eternally on, and I assure you there is nothing Hollywood about the family or its court. While every generation fields its Megan, its Margaret, or its Wallace Simpson, mostly the Windsors look like horses, dress like country-folk, and are never ever brainiacs. They are the most serviceable people alive. They survive by representing not the flashy, but the ordinary, the hurting, the weak. Their days are scheduled within an inch of their lives way past the time most of us have retired, and less than 10% of those occasions are opportunities to dress up. They survive through practicing discipline and restraint and humility that at least, appears genuine. Over the decades I’ve watched them, the glamour-puss is eventually relegated to the status of family embarrassment.

    Catherine, in sharp contrast to Megan and despite her considerable beauty conforms to this virtuous path. She will certainly end her life as admired as the current Queen. It would behoove Miss Megan to sit at her feet. It is after all, her assigned role.