Tuesday, August 20, 2019

The Duke and Duchess of Woke and Their Courtier

Sooner or later, even royalty has to deal with reality. 
Poor Elton John. He’s ‘deeply distressed’. What’s happened to the filthy-rich national treasure? Well, some people were mean about his posh, rich mates using his private jet to fly to his swanky pad in the South of France. Can you believe the indignities celebrities have to endure? Us plebs with our once-a-year jaunts on Ryanair could never understand the awfulness of being mocked for swanning about on an airplane swilling with champagne. 
This is the news that Elton John, the Queen Mum of pop, has been made upset by the little people’s criticisms of Prince Harry and Meghan Markle for using a private jet to get to France. Elton, being made of money, paid for the jet. They’re staying in his house in the South of France, and you can imagine what that’s like. People have called Harry and Meghan massive, ridiculous hypocrites because just a couple of weeks ago they were lecturing the masses from the pulpit of Vogue magazine about the need to cut carbon and save the planet and yet now they’re farting out more CO2 than most of us do in a year by jetting back and forth across the south of Europe. Elton, like an obsequious courtier protecting his princes from the barbs of the dumb masses, says these criticisms are ‘distorted’, ‘malicious’, ‘relentless’ and ‘untrue’...
Perhaps the most telling part of Elton’s obtuse, self-awareness-free intervention into the Harry and Meghan discussion was his insistence that their private-jet journeys aren’t in fact eco-unfriendly because Elton himself offset the carbon spouted by the flights by ‘making the appropriate contribution to Carbon Footprint’. Which is presumably some tree-planting outfit that absolves the rich of their guilt by throwing a few seeds in the ground every time they fly, much like the wealthy used to buy Indulgences from the Catholic Church to wash away their sins.
Heck, read the whole thing and relish the term "eco-snob".