MARCH 8, 2021 – Until my wife and I watched The Crown on Netflix, British royalty was barely a blip on my radar (See 2/24/21 post). By the end of the series, however, the blip was a battleship.
Then came last night’s airing of Oprah’s interview of Harry and Meghan. My wife and I watched every minute—until the very end, when my wife dozed off, then woke up and asked, “What did I miss?” and I had to say, “Uh, something about his relationship with William,” and my wife said, “No, I caught that, so it must have been something else, so what was it?” and I had to mumble something unintelligible, because truthfully, I’d become a little distracted by an article I was reading online about . . . British royalty.
(Did you know that the Queen’s net worth (not counting the palaces, in which her interest is a life estate) at the end of 2020 was USD $461 million—down 10% from the year before? Or that the annual cost of the whole royal kit-and-caboodle is 43 pence (about USD $71.00) for the average British taxpayer?)
As a fan of The Crown if not the crown, I’m empathetic toward Harry and Meghan; Harry, because he was born a prisoner of the gilded cage, and Meghan, because she became a prisoner. Anyone who dismisses her plight because she “chose it” needs to ponder Diane Keaton’s role (Kay Adams-Corleone) in Godfather II.
Viewed together, The Crown and The Interview reveal that the Royals are the dysfunctional vestige of colonial empire. If The Crown exposes the inner psychological mess, The Interview casts light on the foundation of the British Empire—the asserted right to rule over colonies of color by “virtue” of whiteness.
If Meghan’s story is accurate, The Firm—as The Family in its institutional, bureaucratic form is called—missed its “Nixon goes to China” moment. As the first Royal-by-birth of color, “Prince Archie” could have been embraced and heralded as representative of the “Great British Commonwealth of Color.” By way of Meghan, son and soon, his sister, The Crown, The Family, The Firm—The Wholly Trinity, for God’s sake!—could have reached out to the world and proclaimed, “Here, now, finally, after centuries of servitude, denigration, and discrimination, the people of the Commonwealth are free from the fiction of divine whiteness!”
But no. In the pattern of most people fearful of change, The Royal Branders chose to hunker down in insular rooms unenlightened by imagination.
Will the Royals survive? At 43 pence per tax-paying Brit per year, the answer is . . . probably, and for a good while yet. After all, the tabloids have a vested interest in maintaining a business model that’s worked well to date. But the moral authority of The Crown, The Firm, the Family? I’d say it’s a case of “Jack ’n Jill” going up the hill to fetch a pail of wisdom (following a long, scandalous haul). Jack fell down and broke the crown, and Jill came tumbling after.
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© 2021 by Eric Nilsson
