Consequences

Have you ever heard of the Order of the Thistle? I saw a headline this morning noting that HRH King Charles has bestowed the Order of the Thistle on his youngest sibling Prince Edward, Duke of Edinburgh (yes, he inherited the title). I knew about the Order of the Garter and the Order of St. Michael and the tradition of chivalric societies whose only purpose seems to be to honor people who please the King or Queen in some way, but the Thistle was a new one for me. The Order of the Thistle honors Scottish people and honorary Scottish people like the Duke who have performed some extraordinary service to the monarchy. I don’t know very much about Prince Edward, but I’m sure that he has performed many extraordinary services to the Crown, not least of which is that he is not Prince Andrew. 

*****

I just finished watching “Scoop,” the Netflix movie about the BBC’s infamous BBC Prince Andrew interview, an event that I think hastened the inevitable end of the Royal Family. At the time that this interview took place (2019), the Queen was still relatively hale and hearty, and the senior Duke of Edinburgh was still alive though he had pretty much retired from public life. Although the Queen and Prince Philip were living on borrowed time, it seemed that the next generation, led by Prince Charles, would be ready to step in; and the younger senior Royals seemed happy and united and ready to serve the institution well into the future. 

I’m not an expert on the Royal Family. I’m not even that close an observer. And if the UK becomes a republic, there will be lots of things to blame - COVID, the unpopularity of Charles and Camilla, the turmoil surrounding Harry and Meghan; and of course, the death of Queen Elizabeth II, without whom the monarchy seems kind of pointless. But that interview would be a contributing factor because it threw into stark relief the outrageous impunity with which people of that class commit crimes and misdemeanors, and their absolute blank cluelessness about their behavior and its impact on others. I think that it marked the turning point for many Brits who were already ambivalent about the Royal Family and its place in British life. 

“Scoop” conveys the blank cluelessness part very well. Prince Andrew and his slavishly loyal Palace factotum come away from the disastrous interview all smiles, smug and secure and satisfied that the thing went very well, very well indeed. The viewer sees Andrew on the night of the broadcast, retiring to his private quarters to watch the interview, certain that it will be a triumph for him, that it will clear his name and restore his reputation with the British public and press, and that he’ll be able to return his focus to the important things, like a blowout 60th birthday party courtesy of the British taxpayer. Only when his phone begins to blow up with news feed updates and social media notifications and messages does he realize that he didn’t acquit himself quite as well as he thought, and that no one else seems to have noticed that he has a “tendency to be a bit too honorable.” 

A key aspect of this story, emphasized in the movie, is that the interview was the result of the work of three women - a BBC booker, producer, and anchorwoman. Two of the three women (a producer played by the amazing Romola Garai and the BBC anchorwoman played by the brilliant Gillian Anderson) are understood to be establishment figures, well educated and well connected, upper middle class at least. The third woman, Sam McAlister (played by the amazing and brilliant Billie Piper) was the driving force behind the interview, and if the movie hews closely to real life, she was the only working-class person among the three. Billie Piper’s Sam is brash and confident and fearless in the workplace but Piper allows us to see her insecurity, too. We see Sam at home with her school-age son and her mother, their down-to-earth unglamorous household a marked contrast to the Palace and probably also quite different from the households of Garai’s Esme Wren and Anderson’s Stella Maitlis, whose personal lives the movie does not really examine closely. 

It took three women to really clearly see how dreadful Andrew’s conduct was and to understand how important it was to hold him to account. By positioning Sam McAlister as the story’s heroine, the movie also suggests that only a working-class woman would be truly outraged at the impunity with which royals and aristocrats and just plain rich people hurt others and get away with it. Sam McAlister, portrayed by Billie Piper as plain-spoken, flamboyantly blond and label-obsessed (her Chanel pin is like a secondary character) has had enough of Eton and Harrow and Oxford and Cambridge and royals and their hangers-on and enablers, and she’s done waiting for someone to do something about it. By doggedly pursuing the Andrew interview, she not only lands the biggest story of the year for the BBC, she also brings about a small measure of justice for Epstein’s victims. 

Of course Andrew didn’t face criminal prosecution for knowingly participating in sex trafficking because let’s not get carried away here. I wonder how many British people, even if they’re not staunch royalists, would really even want to see a member of the Royal Family in the dock. That’s a question of change vs. revolution, which is quite a bit more than I want to go into right now. But he did face consequences. He lost many of his privileges and his Civil List income. And one of his victims sued him in civil court in the United States, and received a settlement in an undisclosed but presumably substantial amount. Maybe all of this is still not enough but for a person steeped in privilege and wealth and power for his whole life, the loss of those things must have been very hard, very hard indeed. Maybe it’s enough that Andrew had to experience the “find out” part of the proceedings in a very public fashion. 

Game 82

I thought that I didn’t care if the Capitals made the playoffs or not. The season was an uneven one at best, with an 8-game losing streak toward the end; and I thought it was fine to just let this one end quietly, and then hope for better next year. Alex Ovechkin is getting so close to breaking Wayne Gretsky’s all-time scoring record, and that makes every game fun to watch even if you don’t expect many wins. 

But then the season got down to game 82, and a very last-ditch chance for the last wildcard playoff spot. Last night’s game was do or almost-certainly die against the Flyers. Had they lost to the Flyers, there were still a few complicated “if Detroit and Pittsburgh lose” scenarios that might have opened the door to the last playoff spot, but the best thing was for them to win in any way - regulation, overtime, or shootout. And they did, against a team that was also down to the wire and also fighting to get into the playoffs. 

*****

Does anyone else agree that John Tortorella was absolutely born to coach the Philadelphia Flyers? I can’t imagine that guy doing anything other than coaching a Philadelphia sports team. Maybe he can take over the 76ers or the Eagles, too. 

*****

I’m not going to say that the game was fun to watch because it absolutely was not, especially the last period. It was stressful. It was a wracking of nerves that a person my age should not subject herself to. But all’s well that ends well. We get four more games now. The online haters are already predicting that the Rangers will sweep us in four and maybe they will. But maybe they won’t. Anything can happen in the playoffs, as the 2023 Boston Bruins can tell you. Let’s go Caps. 

Low speed

I’m WFH today even though it’s Thursday because I don’t feel well and if I was a normal and reasonable person I’d be in bed or at least on the couch napping and watching Netflix or something but instead I’m at my desk because I feel duty-bound not to take a whole sick day. I have a lot of work to do. 

MSNBC is on as background noise. I turn it off every so often but then I hear weird noises from the attic or the walls or the refrigerator, which sounds like it’s committing axe murder every time it drops a load of ice, and so then I turn it back on so that I don’t freak out at all the weird noises. Whatever is causing those weird noises is still going on, to be sure; but if I can’t hear it, then I don’t worry about it. 

OJ Simpson’s face was the first thing I saw when I turned the TV back on and I wondered for a moment if he’d confessed to the murders of Nicole Brown and Ron Goldman, or if he’d been arrested again for some unrelated offense. I was actually shocked when I saw the chyron. He was 76 - not that old but not so young that his death should come as a shock. But it did come as a shock. 

A few years ago, the subject of the OJ Simpson trial came up in our house. I think it was because my husband was watching the "American Crime Story" dramatization. I told my kids, who were probably 17 and 14 at the time, that it was just not possible for me to convey exactly how big a deal the OJ arrest and trial were in 1994 and 1995; how completely that story dominated the cultural conversation. “Imagine,” I said, “if Tom Brady or LeBron James or Aaron Judge was suspected of murder, and then they tried to escape into Canada or Mexico with a posse of police cars chasing them. That’s how big a deal it was.” I think they got it, but it’s also one of those things that you had to experience first-hand. It’s a Gen X thing. These kids wouldn’t understand. 

And that’s all I have to say about OJ except that I hope that the Goldman and Brown families have found some measure of comfort and solace. I hope that OJ reconciled with God before he died. I hope that all the dead rest in peace. 

All She Lost

My life is pretty good. It’s pretty good objectively, and it’s also really good compared to the lives of many many many - most - people in the world. Five seconds’ exposure to news coverage or even social media is enough to confirm this. 

But I don’t take my good fortune for granted. Quite the opposite, in fact. I’m very well aware that a natural disaster or a terrorist attack (real or engineered) or a financial collapse (real or engineered) could upend my whole life. We could go from relative security and comfort to abject poverty in the blink of an eye. We could end up refugees. Anyone could. Sometimes when I’m feeling cynical or pessimistic (even more so than usual, that is), I think about how little power most of us have, and how few of the people who do have real power actually care about the rest of us. 

*****

A few weeks ago, I heard an NPR (I forget which program) interview with Dalal Mawad, author of All She Lost, a book about women’s experiences following the 2020 explosion in the port of Beirut. I was ashamed to realize that I barely remembered this explosion, which killed hundreds and caused a ripple effect of political and economic consequences that devastated an already-falling-apart country. 2020 was a hard year for everyone, but this was a pretty major and memorable event that I should have recalled immediately. There's no excuse for that kind of solipsism. I’m the worst sometimes. 

Anyway, I bought the book that day. It’s a series of stories based on the author’s first-person interviews with women who lost children, husbands, parents, siblings, friends, homes - who lost everything in the explosion - and who are now four years later still trying to figure out how to go on. It’s a very simple and beautiful book, but not easy to read. The book is short and the individual women’s chapters are short, but it still took me over a week to get through. 

One of the central themes that Mawad returns to over and over is the consequences of a failed state, which Lebanon essentially is now. What happens, she asks (and answers) when there are no functioning institutions; no real government to enact new laws or to enforce existing ones. One of the main functions of a good government is to protect the weak from the rampages of the strong. What happens when the weak and the strong are left to fight it out among themselves? 

Mawad knows what happens. So do I. Given the opportunity, the strong will always crush the weak - always and everywhere, without exception, without fail, 100 percent of the time. 

*****

Last week, I celebrated the failure of Ted Leonsis, whom I once rather liked but whom I now consider to be nothing more than a greedy billionaire sports owner just like the rest of them, to move my beloved Capitals from Capital One Arena in Washington DC (hence the “Washington” in Washington Capitals, Ted) to a yet-to-be-constructed multi-billion dollar retail and entertainment complex in Alexandria, VA, a place that looks close enough to DC when you’re looking at a map but that is really  kind of a nightmare to get to from Silver Spring, even if you’re taking Metro (Note: I love Metro, but I hate changing trains. If it’s not on the Red Line, it’s dead to me.) There are of course lots of Capitals fans in Virginia but it seems that most of them, except for their stupid Trumpity Trumpster of a governor, also didn’t want the team to move. Northern Virginia is already insanely congested and it certainly isn’t in any need of economic development projects. Leonsis, who had explicitly promised never to move the Capitals or the Wizards out of Washington, just wanted a new arena and like most billionaires in this country, he wanted other people to pay for what he wanted. For weeks, local media shared Leonsis talking points about how public financing of a project that will yield massive private profit is really good for everyone. This is the standard argument every time some greedy billionaire sports owner (that phrase is redundant) wants a local or state government to pay for a new arena from which he and his team will reap all of the profits. I haven’t run across a single convincing variation of this utter nonsense, and there are many variations. 

Anyway, because he’s accustomed to getting what he wants, Leonsis was blithely confident and sure that everything would go according to his plan. But it didn’t, to my great satisfaction. Of course, he ended up getting lots of money from the District of Columbia, which has more than enough other places to spend tax dollars, to stay put, and I think that he was playing both sides against one another. But I also think that the absolute refusal of Democrats in the Virginia House of Delegates to allow a vote on the bill to fund the Alexandria boondoggle was real and not a show, and I applaud those Delegates. 

The news about the Capitals’ decision to remain in DC was reported the day after the freighter Dali collided with the Baltimore Francis Scott Key Bridge, which seconds later collapsed into the Patapsco River. The ship had managed to signal mayday soon enough that MDOT was able to close the bridge to traffic, but six people - construction workers - still died. 

What does an explosion in Lebanon have to do with a bridge in Baltimore? What does a warehouse full of ammonium nitrate have to do with the future home of the Washington Capitals? I don’t know, except that the more I think about it, the more these things seem related. In a functioning state controlled by an of-the-people, by-the-people, and (most importantly) for-the-people government, a billionaire shouldn’t get to hold a state and a city hostage to his demands for money and tax breaks so that he can build a new arena or refurbish an existing one, both projects that he can well afford to pay for out of his own coffers. In that same functioning state, bridges shouldn’t tumble into the water. 

*****

My son had a few days off at Easter, which was lovely. I took a few days off as well, and I drove to his school on Thursday to pick him up. His college is in Arlington, VA, not far from home. But again, the map is deceptive when you live in the DMV. If you’re not from here, you’d think that our house to Marymount University would be a 20 minute trip. It’s not remotely like that in real life. The drive there always takes an hour, though it’s usually a pretty easy and pleasant hour. I don’t love the Beltway but I can handle it - I’ve been driving it for years. Then you take the Cabin John Parkway to the Clara Barton Parkway (I can never tell the difference between the two but they’re very picturesque) and then the Chain Bridge to Glebe Road in Arlington. 

The Chain Bridge is really not a scary bridge at all, but it’s old and it spans the Potomac near the rapids at Great Falls, which is not a place where you’d want your car to plunge into the water. I was holding my breath as I drove across that bridge. But it was fine. I got to Arlington in one piece, and then took an alternate route home because the George Washington Parkway is still under construction and it’s a road of terror. 

And that’s enough about the condition of roads and bridges in the DMV. This isn’t a traffic report. IYKYK. 

*****

As I mentioned last week, pretty much everyone in Maryland is still shaken following the Key Bridge collapse. Baltimoreans are especially shaken, particularly the ones who drove back and forth across that bridge (which was kind of a terrifying bridge to begin with) every day and know that but for the grace of God, their cars could have been on that bridge that night. I was definitely thinking about the Key Bridge as I white-knuckled my way across the Potomac last Thursday. But that’s not all I was thinking about. I was thinking about who’s in charge; who do we trust to make sure that bridges remain intact and above rather than in the bodies of water they span? What’s stored in all of those warehouses in nearby ports and industrial parks? Who’s making sure that they’re not filled with toxic chemicals or unexploded grenades or cages full of snakes that Samuel L. Jackson will eventually have to fight, one by one? What happens if a large employer decides that they’re going to pick up stakes and go to another state or another country where labor is cheap and regulations are few and far between? Who’s going to stop them? Who is looking after the proverbial little guy?

We are far from a failed state. I know this. But it’s no longer reasonable to think that we could never be one. 

*****

The sad thing about All She Lost, the thing I keep thinking about now that I’m finished with the book, is that four years later, most of these women seem to have nearly given up hope. The ones who do seem a tiny bit hopeful are the ones who have moved away from Lebanon. The author herself took her daughter and moved to Paris, leaving her husband behind to try to rebuild his family’s business. All of the women, whether they stayed or went abroad, seem to agree that a normal, reasonably happy, reasonably safe life is no longer possible in Lebanon. They’re not talking about rebuilding or transforming their country. They don’t have the energy to fight anymore. They haven’t moved on because how can you move on?