Get Lost, Harry and Meghan

By Jim Geraghty

Thursday, May 18, 2023

 

I believe that America’s Founding Fathers were willing to shoot other human beings in the head so that they wouldn’t have to care about what members of the British royal family thought about anything. This makes me a bit of a wet blanket when it comes to discussions of Harry and Meghan. I’ll write about the passing of the Queen, but I like to think of myself as allergic to expending brain cells on anything the British royal family says or does. There are occasional exceptions; when Prince Harry says he thinks the First Amendment is “bonkers,” I want to remind him that the entire point of the Constitution is that the opinion of someone like him doesn’t matter and cannot limit what Americans can say.

 

But the general policy of not paying attention to the British royals changes a bit when the Fredo Corleone and the Yoko Ono of the clan claim they barely survived a two-hour high-speed reenactment of a Fast and the Furious chase with “highly aggressive paparazzi” in the middle of Manhattan:

 

Last night, the Duke and Duchess of Sussex and Ms. Ragland were involved in a near-catastrophic car chase at the hands of a ring of highly aggressive paparazzi.

 

This relentless pursuit, lasting over two hours, resulted in multiple near collisions involving other drivers on the road, pedestrians and two NYPD officers.

 

While being a public figure comes with a level of interest from the public, it should never come at the cost of anyone’s safety.

 

Dissemination of these images, given the way in which they were obtained, encourages a highly intrusive practice that is dangerous to all in involved [sic].

 

You’re a smart readership, so you probably already spotted one fishy aspect of that account. Manhattan and New York City are famous for bumper-to-bumper traffic from early in the morning to late into the night. On those rare occasions that there is a high-speed chase, it immediately attracts the attention of both media and police. The couple had just left Ziegfeld Ballroom, which is right in the middle of midtown Manhattan — south of Central Park, about two blocks south of Carnegie Hall, about two blocks southeast of CNN headquarters, and about a block and a half west of Trump Tower. You would have a hard time finding a spot on the planet crammed with more vehicles and people, and with more cameras and witnesses.

 

The official statement from the New York City Police Department indicated that what actually happened was much, much less dramatic — perhaps even routine. “The NYPD assisted the private security team protecting the Duke and Duchess of Sussex. There were numerous photographers that made their transport challenging. The Duke and Duchess of Sussex arrived at their destination and there were no reported collisions, summonses, injuries, or arrests in regard.”

 

Apparently, the off-the-record assessment of the NYPD is even more skeptical:

 

A duty officer at NYPD’s 18th precinct, who declined to be named, told TheWrap, “nothing happened. It’s a bogus story. Don’t believe everything you read in the newspapers.” The 18th precinct is at 306 West 54th Street, the closest to where the chase took place.

 

For what it’s worth, the photo agency Backgrid USA issued a statement that it is “taking Prince Harry’s allegations seriously and will be conducting a thorough investigation into the matter,” but contends that “one of the four SUVs from Prince Harry’s security escort was driving in a manner that could be perceived as reckless. The vehicle was seen blocking off streets, and in one video, it is shown being pulled over by the police.”

 

Part of the couple’s evening included ducking into a police precinct and then being transported by taxi. The taxi driver who transported the couple also made the night seem much less dramatic than the royal statement, when interviewed by the Washington Post:

 

Taxi driver Sukhcharn Singh, 37, who moved to the United States from India as a child, said he got the impression from the group that they had been already pursued by paparazzi before entering his car. After a few minutes, Singh said, the security guard grew concerned about the photographers and asked him to return to the police station. The guard thought they were too exposed and didn’t want their location shared more widely, Singh said.

 

He turned and headed north up Madison Avenue, driving them back to the pickup point. Singh estimated that the entire journey lasted 10 minutes.

 

“I don’t think I would call it a chase,” Singh said of his period driving the couple. “I never felt like I was in danger. It wasn’t like a car chase in a movie. They were quiet and seemed scared but it’s New York — it’s safe.”

 

As many people immediately observed, that area, like most of New York City, is covered with traffic cameras, red-light cameras, security cameras, and all the cell-phone cameras of all of the pedestrians on the sidewalk. If the events had transpired the way the couple’s official statement described, we would all be watching video of it this morning.

 

Apparently, Harry and Meghan’s new strategy to remain relevant is to just make stuff up.

 

There’s always been something a little unhinged about Markle’s relentless pursuit of fame — I refer you to my colleague Madeline Kearns for a more in-depth discussion on this topic — and she and her husband can’t be all that bright if they thought they could make up a story like this and no one would notice the lack of corroborating evidence. Or maybe they’ve become so solipsistic that they no longer perceive the events around them clearly, and the routine headaches of dealing with paparazzi in the middle of New York City become, in their minds, a life-and-death pursuit with disturbing echoes of the events leading up to the death of Harry’s mother.

 

I don’t begrudge those who choose to follow the endless soap opera of the British royal family as entertainment, no more than I begrudge those who are entertained by the endless soap operas of other divas like Kim Kardashian, Taylor Swift, or Kyrie Irving. (You laugh about that last one, but it’s the same storyline: A new relationship, everyone is happy, friction develops, someone feels disrespected, tensions get worse, there’s a messy breakup, a nasty series of accusations and counteraccusations, a period of separation, and then the cycle restarts itself.)

 

But if, as it seems, Harry and Meghan chose to offer a wild and implausible exaggeration to the public in a bid for sympathy and attention, I am reminded of Abe Greenwald’s observation about lies in public life in this era:

 

Everyone lies now. Sorry, but it’s true. Trump ushered in, or hastened, an age of bipartisan, institutional, cross-cultural fabrication. And we’re talking whoppers here. Public-health officials lied about the necessity of school closures and the efficacy of masks (two opposite mask lies at different times). The bureaucratic and media elite lied about the likely origins of Covid 19. The press lied about the “peaceful” nature of BLM riots. Twitter lied about its policies. The entire medical and psychological establishment lies about the differences between male and female.

 

It’s not just the establishment that lies. In response to these “official” lies, anti-establishment types tell lies of their own. They lie about the safety of vaccines. They lie about Russian and Ukrainian deaths in Putin’s war. They lie about January 6 being an inside job.

 

And we can’t forget Joe Biden, who lies when he whispers and lies when he shouts. The president lies about everything from his policy record to his relationship with his son to his academic credentials. Biden has told three different lies about being arrested. In one, it was for civil-rights activism. In another, it was for trying to see Nelson Mandela. In yet another, it was for sneaking into a women’s dorm.

 

Lying isn’t special. It’s the default mode of public debate in the 21st century. If Trump does it more than anyone else — and he does — it shows how well-suited he is to his time and place.

 

My only quibble with Greenwald’s assessment is that the Trump era was preceded by, “If you like your plan, you can keep your plan,” “We don’t have a domestic spying program” “ISIS is the jayvee team,” the “red line” represented by the use of chemical weapons in Syria, etc.

 

The consequence is that the more time and energy we spend thinking about and discussing fake problems that are the subject of lies, the less time we spend thinking about and discussing and trying to solve real problems. And as I am probably too fond of reminding people, the world has real problems. The NYPD, for example, has a full plate of real crimes to deal with that don’t involve a vague feeling of menace generated by someone who wants to take a picture of a celebrity. There are a lot of people in New York City who have intense feelings of menace and who don’t have four sport-utility vehicles’ worth of personal security guards.

 

If, God forbid, one day the Chinese artificial-intelligence KillBot drones go rogue and bomb Hawaii, I wonder how many people will say, “Huh, I guess we spent too much time thinking about the feelings of celebrities.”

 

Back when Queen Elizabeth II passed away, I wrote:

 

When you’re born and live every day with enormous public attention, you don’t need to speak or act in ways that attract more public attention. The queen didn’t feel the need to chase headlines, to share her every thought on every subject, or to provoke or deliberately court controversy. In some ways, she embodied the opposite of controversy, aiming to consistently reassure instead of maximizing the friction of discord.