Prince Harry and Meghan Markle talked about the royal family when fellow Montecito resident Oprah Winfrey interviewed them last year for a CBS special.
The relevancy of Montecito’s resident duke and duchess appears to be diminishing at the same rate as wokism.
If their recent visit to London for the queen’s platinum jubilee proved anything, it is that the British royal family is more popular than ever and has moved on mightily despite the efforts of Prince Harry and Meghan Markle to soil the royals’ image by laying the family’s dirty laundry on an Oprah Winfrey special for all to hear.
The duke’s new nickname might as well be “Second Row Harry,” based on the seating arrangement for a thanksgiving service inside St. Paul’s Cathedral, at which, upon arrival, the duke and duchess were booed by spectators.
It would prove to be the first and last event during the four-day extravaganza Harry and Megs would attend. Thereafter, perhaps mortified by the public’s disapproval of their presence, they snubbed a Guildhall reception (leaving party goers without a royal, as promised) and abruptly returned home to Montecito before the jubilee climaxed with a pageant. Hardly mattered, anyway, since they were not invited to wave from the balcony of Buckingham Palace along with the queen and her family. (And maybe that’s why they departed when they did.)
There are also reports that Prince Harry was rebuffed after asking permission for his own photographer to snap pics of Queen Elizabeth II greeting her nick-namesake grandchild, Lilibet, at a private gathering. And this may also explain why — to preclude photo ops — the duke and duchess were choreographed away from senior royals.
“I heard Netflix wanted these pictures of them with the royals because they would have sold them,” royal biographer Angela Levin told British talk show “GB News.” “It would have been very valuable to them.”
One wonders if Harry is beginning to feel like the character Tom Hanks portrayed in the 2000 movie “Cast Away.” Judging by the glum expression he wore upon arrival at Santa Barbara Airport, the cold shoulders he encountered at his old stomping ground may be taking a toll on his psyche. Or perhaps he misses the pomp and circumstance he once found imprisoning. (Where’s Wilson when you need him?)
And then there is the problem of reconciling a green stance with the desire for personal comfort. Only last year, Harry ranted that climate change is one of “the two most pressing issues” in the world today.
But just like other sham greenies Al Gore and Prince Albert of Monaco, the duke leaves a huge carbon footprint as he travels the world by private jet, lecturing people on why they should not drive their car to work but take a bus instead — a pretenseless posture of “Don’t practice what you preach.”
On this last trip to London and back, total 24 hours, the Bombardier Global 6000 jet on which he and his family flew emitted 112,800 pounds of carbon dioxide.
By the way, that’s a lot for one trip for a family of four.
Are we the only ones to note such hypocrisy? Well, with her own private jet, Oprah, another pretend or part-time greenie, is unlikely to raise that question with Harry and Megs.
The duke’s unnerving experience at the platinum jubilee comes on the heels of Netflix canceling the duchess’s animated series, “Pearl,” before it even launched.
It is thought by royal insiders that Harry’s memoir, for which Penguin Random House has not yet announced a release date, may be the final nail in a coffin that seals shut any chance of reconciliation or resurrection to a royal existence.
(Message to Harry: Cancel the book deal; you don’t need this.)
On another front, our anti-social media war correspondent reports the latest buzz on the Internet: The “Megxiteers” are blazing their belief that the photo posted of one year-old Lilibet is fake. “Lilibet is not of Meghan’s body” is their latest mantra.
Chief of “The Sugars” (and Sussex Squad apologist) Omid Scobie responds with cease-and-desist orders and a YouTube takedown. Lawyers have now entered the fray.
While Mr. Scobie contends that Britain’s monarchy is “dull” without Harry and Megs, rival “Megxiteers” claim that the duke and duchess “had recording devices on them at the church” and that “the Queen had them watched like a hawk.”
If our experience in the Principality of Monaco is anything to go by, there is nothing more cutthroat than a royal court.
UN-WOKED
The next plot over belongs to (pronoun of choice) Woke Wokester, with this gravestone epitaph: “Here lies Woke, reawakened as a joke, missed only by hopelessly deluded folk.”
Bear in mind, we understand that wokeness had an honorable beginning. Few know (least of all, wokesters) that it stems from a 1938 folk song by Huddie Ledbetter, popularly known as Lead Belly, about nine black teenagers accused of raping two white women with this lyric: “Be a little careful when they go along through here — best stay woke, keep their eyes open” to racial prejudice and discrimination.
Our generation grew up with open eyes to racial prejudice and discrimination. President Harry S Truman began the crusade to reform an inequitable system, and President Lyndon Baines Johnson pushed it through and took all the credit. The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. dreamt his dream, and we, as a nation, are all better off for it.
And that is why we do not believe in identity politics. Growing up in the 1950s and 1960s, we — most of us, anyway — looked at all humans with respect, regardless of color. (And for some of us that extends to a 49-day-old fetus inside the womb, the irony …)
But guess what?
Woke-ness got corrupted into a movement that broadened its definition — a movement hijacked by critical race theory and the call for reparations along with a focus on sexism and an overlap with #metoo, leading to, as filmmaker Don Letts said, “a world so woke you can’t make a joke.”
Ultimately, it was a power play, as Mitch Kokai wrote last month in American Thinker: “They just want to rule over the rest of us. They’ve been trying to make it illegal to hurt their feelings. Yet they can offend us all the time. They insist we’re such terrible people that they refuse to even dialog with us. Yet they claim we are ones who are intolerant.”
Ricky Gervais, the British comedian and actor, astutely said in 2021, “I want to live long enough to see the younger generation not be woke enough for the next generation. It’s going to happen.”
In fact, it is already happening.
Like a black hole, woke is imploding, a victim of the cancel culture it helped create. And now even mainstream media calls it out for what it’s truly about: grievance and division; political correctness gone awry. Or put another way: Most will laugh, a few will cry, we’re delighted to toast witless woke-ness goodbye.
Cheers!
BANNING IS THE NEW CENSORSHIP
Remember the good old days when you’d get 86’d from a saloon for dancing naked on the bar at midnight or engaging in a drunken brawl?
Times have changed.
For many months now, this columnist has been banned from a Coast Village Road bar-and-grill, not for dancing naked or any kind of rowdy misbehavior — but for expressing in these pages his opinion about their ambience and food.
Their ban matters not to us as we stopped patronizing their establishment long ago and miss it not one iota.
But the banning of a journalist because of a bad review?
A more rational approach would be to put ego aside and learn from what others say; endeavor to improve where necessary.
We reached out for comment but heard nothing back.
We shall, of course, wear this as a badge of courage as we continue to demonstrate that the pen is mightier than the martini.
Robert Eringer is a longtime Montecito author with vast experience in investigative journalism. He welcomes questions or comments at reringer@gmail.com.
