Here are some wise words from Trevor Phillips from an article in yesterday's Times entitled "We can't just magic away prejudice and poverty"
"Thank you Spotify for cancelling the Duchess of Sussex's podcast Archetypes. Ditto Netflix for sparing us her animated series Pearl, whatever that was about. I know I didn't have to listen or watch them, and I'm well aware of where the off button is. But the corporate change of heart matters. The reported $100 million showered on the Sussexes' vapourings are just a token of the vast stream of cash and attention directed towards motivational fairy tales, a craven surrender to magical thinking that punishes the poor and disadvantaged by selling them a dream that can never be delivered. It's high time that money went to talented creatives who actually have something to say. There were many things wrong with the podcast itself. The sheer amateurishness of the stories of talented women such as Serena Williams and Mariah Carey beneath the tidal wave of Meghan's ego, the duchess moaning about exile to a $14 million dollar beach side mansion, while patronising Carey whose family had their car set alight and their dog poisoned for being the wrong colour for their neighbourhood. But the real crime here was the corporate funding of a dangerous fiction that now governs too many areas of public life, including politics: the flat out lie that you can be anything that you want to be. All you have to do is want it enough. The corollary to this drivel is profoundly reactionary; no intelligent progressive has ever believed this. Remedies to inequality and injustice do not lie purely in the hands of individuals. No one was ever denied the right to live in Montecito just because they lacked the determination to become a princess. Parents of small children are familiar with a version of the idea, because we play along with it in every panto season when Tinker Bell dies we are asked to clap our hands and believe that fairies exist - because if they do, they will live and lo and behold Tinker Bell lives! "
That is an opening text that forms part of an article that goes on to expand on other matters.
Whenever I read a Trevor Phillips article he always seems to speak a lot of sense to me. I can't say whether his assessment of Meghan's podcasts are fair or not, because I've never listened to them, if I listen to a podcast my choice would be something like "and the rest is history" mainly because I'd prefer to learn something I didn't know rather than give time to a content that critics deem to be waffle.
Turning to his assessment about make believe, my thoughts are that is very much the thrust of corporate America, in which they excel at we, Britain are woeful in comparison, I remember taking my children to Chessington World of Adventure, entering the castle of chocolate only to be told "sorry we've run out of chocolate" that is peculiarly British imo, maybe we are a bit more invested in life as it really is! Possibly one of the aspects Meghan found unappealing about living here. I'm casting my mind back to the first time I took my kids to Disneyland, a microcosm of a world that feeds into most children's fantasy where everything is wonderful, cosy, sanitised and hunky dory until you step out side the Magic Kingdom and face a harsh reality, which I imagine is even harsher nowadays with the number of displaced people living on the streets.
