Prince Harry
There is a lot going on in the world, and, frankly, I have too much work right now, but I wanted to briefly comment about the flap about the Brit's Prince Harry dressing up like a Nazi. My eating club at Princeton had what we called a "bad taste party" every year, so when I was 20 years old ca. 1979-1980, I dressed up as the Reverend Jim Jones the week after the Jonestown Massacre, and, the next year, as a member of the U.S. boxing team the day after their plane went down. Ugh! Like much of my youth, it makes me shudder to think of in retrospect. (It also still makes me smile a little.)
All this unseemly self-revelation is simply to point out that the problem is not with 20 year old boys doing silly things to be funny or shocking (which at 20 is synonymous with funny) like dressing up like a Nazi for a party. Boys, will, in fact, be boys. Get a job!
No, the real problem is that it's 2005 and one of the great countries in the world, England, still has "royalty," which is only meaningful if you believe that this particular family is entitled to an ontological status above the "common" folk by "divine right." It's a silly institution. Americans (who were English for the most part at the time) threw off that nincompoopery 229 years ago. Yet the Brits apparently still care deeply about what Prince Harry does. Better to scrap the whole system, which is a real embarrassment to an otherwise democratic England, rather than feign embarrassment over Prince Harry (i.e., "I'm shocked, shocked that a 20 year-old rich boy acts wild at parties").
On the other hand, they're not the French.
All this unseemly self-revelation is simply to point out that the problem is not with 20 year old boys doing silly things to be funny or shocking (which at 20 is synonymous with funny) like dressing up like a Nazi for a party. Boys, will, in fact, be boys. Get a job!
No, the real problem is that it's 2005 and one of the great countries in the world, England, still has "royalty," which is only meaningful if you believe that this particular family is entitled to an ontological status above the "common" folk by "divine right." It's a silly institution. Americans (who were English for the most part at the time) threw off that nincompoopery 229 years ago. Yet the Brits apparently still care deeply about what Prince Harry does. Better to scrap the whole system, which is a real embarrassment to an otherwise democratic England, rather than feign embarrassment over Prince Harry (i.e., "I'm shocked, shocked that a 20 year-old rich boy acts wild at parties").
On the other hand, they're not the French.
posted by PDB at 9:47 AM
1 Comments:
Here, here! I have voiced this same concern in the past. When all these people were falling all over themselves about Lady Diane I asked why they cared. If you remove the silly royalty crap from the story, she was just another divorced mom out partying late at night when she died. If she was home with her kids she'd still be alive.
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