10 March 2021
I was not surprised to hear that Piers Morgan was getting the boot after his comments disparaging Meghan Markle on ITV’s morning show. I have often felt that if television and print media needed one boot right now, it is to boot out Mr Rupert Murdoch, to banish this evil person from the face of the very earth and dungeons from where the news gets generated in such a consistent degenerate fashion! Then we need that reboot!
It is often felt that culture and civilisation values undergo shifts from time to time, where such changes occur in incremental internalised reforms, much like virus drifts, the society is able to reform itself without undergoing a bloody revolution which is more like a major ‘shift’ or mutation itself. The challenge for Western society is how to manage the liberal outlines that it identifies itself with, in terms of humanism, dialogue of native histories and ethnic identities including racial ones without being pejorative or condescending, even as it dilutes its core which is anchored on the belief of ‘White Man’s Burden’. The political conservative movements and the people who gather under its banner are in that sense, entitled majoritarian misogynists, folk who would just about grudgingly acknowledge 8 March as International Women’s Day and leave it at that, folks who would be happy behind the symbolism of Selma but back a slew of rules that would restrict the chances of a person of colour from the exercise of their franchise/suffrage, which we now popularly call ‘vote’.
It is actually not political correctness as these conservatives think that society is indulging in, rather it is that incremental bending of the arch of ‘justice’ in how society functions, stretching one step at a time toward liberalism and egalitarianism, without fracture, that causes us to first address the language, the tone, the innuendo and the theory, contesting at an intellectual level the battle that is being fought to thwart revolution and process toward resolution. When the term ‘nigger’ or ‘Negro’ is called now as ‘n’ word, when it is censored and censured, it is a small step toward acknowledging perhaps the greatest sin of human kind, even worse than that visited the tribes that made the exodus from the Kingdom of Egypt of Biblical account. I do not know, if readers of President Obama’s masterclass took the enormity behind the title of his work, and not ease up to the subtlety with which it is being conveyed, because, like all converted classes of humans, as the inimitable and irrepressible politically incorrect at times, Sir Vidia Naipaul, would put it, are likely to be subconsciously more loyal in professing the deeper themes and meanings of their adoptive faith and cultures, than those that are naturally to the ‘manor born’. Obama was connecting to, through his ‘A Promised Land’ to ‘The Fire Next Time’ by James Baldwin. The African American theme of the first fifty years of the previous century was Noah, how they hoped after the deluge, the world would heal, after humanity was threatened by two world wars, it would end up more inclusive and egalitarian. So the warning of ‘fire’ which was the next cataclysm that God warned Noah would visit Life on Earth. To prevent that catastrophe, Obama warns us, that we must be led to our promised land like Israelites were led by Moses?
What ever happened within the Royalty, we must be clear, Meghan Markle was not faced with a knee on her neck. We must also be clear that it is not at all far fetched that Archie’s skin pigmentation was a matter of concern to the Windsors. Yet, if Oprah was the medium for Meghan to get back in her own way at the people who humiliated her and the British Tabloids that repeatedly tried to malign her, it was her African American ancestry that was backing her and her royal husband Harry. If African Britons were not incensed with the remarks of Piers Morgan, he would still be charming audiences with his racist conservative defence of all that ails our world and we would be smiling at him while gulping our cuppa of morning relief! ( Incidentally I always wondered how no Nanny told her White Folk that coffee or tea darkens the skin, like how they do in India to scare off girls from these beverages!) Yet, I cannot help not acknowledging that the palace intrigues against Meghan came because she was perceived as a target with no wherewithal to strike back. She was not the future likely consort of the likely future monarch of England, she was not even from UK, and simply her disadvantaged position of being the ‘Choti Bahu’ as the lesser daughter in law to the Family would have made her face these troubles. What definitely aided the cause of her tormentors is of course her mixed race inheritance. From being the ‘meat’ for the picking, she just became the ‘easy meat’ for it.
May be that is why the Queen refuses to fade away, knowing as an insider how rotten the timber is, eaten from within by intrigue and self seeking retainers, while outwardly intact? My personal bet is that Lady Parker Bowles, the lady who was a maid in court, who fancied the Crown Prince and who was the second person in Lady Diana’s description of her marriage as ‘Marriage of three’ who crowded the Spencer out, is the one who took a fancy to so tormenting Meghan, for she is the one who took on the independent spirited Diana and destroyed her earlier, when she was not officially anybody, and now doubly empowered as companion and spouse to Prince Charles. Ultimately much of this situation relates to how families fail at acknowledging the basic problem of personality fault lines, how birth order ruins dynasties, preventing them from picking better. Like how Akbar could not pick ‘Khurram’ over ‘Sheiku Baba’, Queen Elizabeth half a millennia later cannot chose Williams over Charles. It set into motion a series of levers, that saw the last Moghul in Exile in Burma, but more correctly Moghuls as puppets on the throne, before long. Of course, with the Queen already she is a mere Constitutional Head for the UK and for a diminishing CommonWealth. The stakes are not so high after all. And it would seem too easy for us to lay the blame on women for this mess, wouldn’t it?
So if the British Royalty got canceled after this, it would really not matter. I am quite sure that the British Westminster system could run with a elected President like her former Colony India does. Ultimately either the core relents and concedes to the gathering momentum of liberal and egalitarian values that converge upon it from the periphery, or the core revolts and ends up destroying the whole, unrelenting and feeding itself on myths of supremacy and ‘divine’ entitlement! What mature societies do, is to avoid rupture, by easing out slowly yet surely that core which is now a relic of a past that has gone well past its sell by date, however successful as a model it may have been once! Mature societies get to lead themselves out, creating for themselves ‘A Promised Land’…
indiarubberman.com 