Why Royal Scandals Are About To Get Awesome (Hint: America)
After enjoying a few years of well-earned peace and quiet, we now can't seem to get away from news stories about the British Royal Family -- about their babies, their health scares, their pets dying, their own deaths, and, of course, the wedding between Prince Harry and Meghan Markle that's going down later this week. But while this boon might be great for grandmothers everywhere, it's been a little boring for people who thrive on scandal (i.e. the rest of us). It seems that this new generation of royals are everything good: respectable, clean-cut, media-savvy, close-knit, and utterly inscrutable. It's awful.
This is all about to change, however. That's because the U-S-A! U-S-A! is coming, and what we don't know about high society, tasteful decorum, and royal protocol is enough to fill several royal advisers with the type of creeping existential dread rarely seen outside of an Ingmar Bergman movie.
Case in point, Markle's father was just revealed to have faked paparazzi shots of himself getting measured for his wedding suit, power walking on a hillside, looking up information about his daughter and future son-in-law on Wikipedia (this should've been the first clue that something was amiss), and reading a book on British history in his local Starbucks. After the controversy broke, he apologized and claimed that he did it to rehabilitate his image after he was caught by actual-real paparazzi buying a late-night six-pack from a convenience store whilst looking slightly disheveled -- despite the fact that "slightly disheveled" is pretty much the official uniform of buying a late-night six-pack.
In a final act of contrition, he then pulled out of the wedding (and walking his daughter down the aisle) after expressing concerns that his presence as a disgraced book-reader and clothes-wearer would draw attention away from the world's most famous family and their wealth of celebrity friends ... at which point Meghan's half-sister embarked on a media tour to claim that the photos were all her idea, and afterwards recording a video telling Meghan not to try to "censor" her.
If this is a taste of things to come, royal scandals are about to get so awesome. We've already noted that the Royal Family conducts itself like a bad soap opera, complete with infighting, weird sex scandals, and conspiracy theories -- except now it's the 27th season and they're running of plotlines, and so this is them bringing in a couple of wild card characters to spice things up. The biggest royal scandal ever, we should mention, was in 1936, when King Edward VIII declared his intention to marry Wallis Simpson, a divorced American socialite, a choice of partner which caused a nationwide rush to fainting couches and kicked off a constitutional crisis that ended in Edward abdicating the throne.
Whether we like it or not, and sometimes without even trying, we make things more exciting for everyone. And now that there's going to be a permanent American presence in the Royal Household, our corrupting influence knows no bounds. Is Kate Middleton going to 'gram nights out with the Kardashians? Will Prince Philip start wearing a MAGA hat? Is the queen going to build a gun range at Buckingham Palace and spend her nights arguing on the internet about how assault rifles don't exist? The possibilities are endless, terrifying, and hilarious, and we can't goddamn wait.
Adam Wears is on Twitter and Facebook! He also has a newsletter about depressing history, but that's only for the coolest kids. He'd also like to thank Kelly Stone for inspiring this article.
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