AP

Lisa Van Dusen

January 9, 2022

Is the tenth circle of hell — that belated appendage to Dante’s Inferno required by the emergence of so many unprecedented variations on the themes of the first nine since the advent of 21st-century technological innovation — the one where you wake up one day cursed to produce a steady clickbait feed of amplified banalities, or is it the one where you can’t escape that guy?

Of all the British royal scandals of the past three decades — Diana’s Squidgygate, Fergie’s toe-sucking imbroglio, the Charles-and-Camilla tampon tape, Andrew’s fateful expedition to an all-but-neon-signed honeytrap hub — the saga of Harry and Meghan is the only one in which the damage gavage is being fed by a publicly named source who remains in the top five royal succession slots. It’s like watching Nikola Jokić spin around and start scoring on the Denver Nuggets mid-game. At least I assume it is, since I would never actually see such a thing unfold in real time and I had to Google every word of that sentence.

The events that brought it all from that glorious, tradition-resetting wedding day of May 2018 to the recent spate of revelations from Prince Harry’s genre-defining royal trauma memoir, Spare, are, by now, well known. Anyone who’s ever had a family knows that what can begin as petty differences over holiday schedules, casual racism, privacy rights, political allegiances, intelligence corruption or institutional commitment can rapidly escalate into previously unthinkable narrative hijackings, smear campaigns and the sort tactical leveraging of long-festering resentments that makes Game of Thrones look like The Brady Bunch.

Of course, in the case of the Windsors, the stakes this time are higher than simply who said what about whom on a surveillance tape, or to what degree the lucrative isolation of one family member will impact an unseemly soap opera in one of the world’s major democracies. This isn’t just about the reliability of Oprah’s poker face, or how many bombshells are in $100 million, or “baby brain” catfights. It isn’t even about Harry’s micturition match with the Taliban or the overdue debate about documentary vs. propaganda.

You don’t have to be a US citizen to join the GOP, it’s a target already more than halfway to oblivion, and they adore recruits willing to combine gobsmacking reputational heedlessness with mercenary servitude to a larger destructive purpose.

It’s about whether I really need to be spending my Sunday afternoon actually typing “S-q-u-i-d-g-y-g-a-t-e” and spit-taking at the New York Post piece about Prince Harry’s frostbitten “South Pole” when Iran’s repurposing of recent protests as a purge-and-execution operation continues, Vladimir Putin is shelling Kramatorsk, the lunatic mainstream of the Republican Party just celebrated the anniversary of the January 6^th, 2021, mobbing of the US Capitol by coercion-capturing the speakership of the House of Representatives and Brasilia is being swarmed by better-late-than-never, copycat coup clowns? Probably not?

In The Guardian at this writing, royal watcher and unauthorized 2015 biographer of then-Prince Charles Catherine Mayer is calling the implications of Harry’s revelations “absolutely catastrophic” for the royal family. “It is possibly something that will mark the beginning of the end of the monarchy, and that is what we should discuss,” Mayer exhorted, apparently frustrated by the viral global traction of the less existentially apocalyptic snippets of Spare — including the phallic frostbite ordeal and the fraternal shoving match story immortalized as the instant classic Two Princes sketch on Jimmy Kimmel Live — versus the more impactful possibility of a PR Kamikaze obliterating a British monarchy that has endured for more than a millennium.

Which brings us to the best royal-political co-branding idea since “Duchy Organics spokesman Nigel Farage” (next week’s column). Now that he’s residing in California, Harry can join the world’s foremost commodified-self-sabotage club and repurpose all that UK republicanism-fodder for the Republicans who can teach him a thing or two about performative rebellion and shamelessly ironic rage against the machine. You don’t have to be a US citizen to join the GOP (handy WikiHow instructions), it’s a target already more than halfway to oblivion, and they adore recruits willing to combine gobsmacking reputational heedlessness with mercenary servitude to a larger destructive purpose.

Above all, Harry becoming a Republican would consolidate two of the most relentlessly cringe-inducing propaganda supply chains currently besieging our amygdalas. With all that energy aimed at degrading two status-quo power institutions on two continents, the hourly feed would make the halcyon days of Donald Trump/Boris Johnson, US/UK stereo absurdity look like FDR and Churchill.

Now that’s matchmaking.

Policy Magazine Associate Editor Lisa Van Dusen has served as a senior writer at Maclean’s, Washington columnist for the Ottawa Citizen and Sun Media, international writer for Peter Jennings at ABC News and an editor at AP National in New York and UPI in Washington.