As fire rages in Los Angeles, Meghan Markle postpones her new lifestyle programme for Netflix, which was supposed to come out this week. It’s called With Love, Meghan. It is the function of royalty to play the archetype — naive, goddess, witch — and I wonder if, with the postponement, the denial of the super-rich class about its impact on the world is ebbing, because it should.
Super rich culture is a palace of denial. I mean the very rich, and sometimes philanthropic, who have much more political power than they should, and of which Donald Trump is the ultimate expression. And why not live in a palace of denial? The wealthy have a world all their own, and it surrounds us, like the magical world of Harry Potter, but less magical.
Sometimes it looks very much like an airport lounge — consider the Peninsula Hotel in London, which even has a bit of Concorde hanging from the ceiling. “Dazzling,” said Forbes magazine, the in-house magazine of the super-rich. Frightening, I say back: who designs a restful public room that looks like an aeroplane crash site? The very credulous, is the answer: this class is so innocent of its impact on our world, I almost feel pity for it. Almost.
More often, it looks like a garden. This is Meghan’s preference: the trailer for With Love, Meghan is filled with tiny flowers and salad leaves. She carries a basket as she wanders through a garden not her own: she borrowed it, being protective of her own, real garden, and there’s an irony for you. At one point, preposterously, she dresses as a beekeeper. At least I think it was Meghan. It could have been a minion, or stunt Meghan. “I’ve always loved taking something pretty ordinary and elevating it,” she says. But a world that is a garden is ordinary, or at least it should be. It used to be: now it is reinvented as a status symbol, and luxury good.
This is cottage core, the over-reaching aesthetic of the modern rich, and it is all denial: a modern form of Marie Antoinette syndrome, when a queen of a tottering France pretended she was a shepherdess. Even so, as the planet burns — quite literally in Los Angeles, the source of all awful aesthetic trends — it comforts people to look back with nostalgia on the once ordinary, now precious. Perhaps they will soon all run the kind of bucolic mixed farm found on the pages of Enid Blyton’s novels? Would you read Children of Cherry Tree Farm starring Oprah Winfrey and Miley Cyrus?
The Cotswolds is going that way: I went to a dazzling farm shop evoking the magical garden Meghan and her cohort love, and found it entirely surrounded by — pause for drumroll! — Range Rovers. This is madness. At least Meghan realised that to open her borrowed garden this week — “Everyone’s invited,” said the trailer, with the caveat “to create wonder” in case people literally stampeded in to admire the beehives — might not chime well with the City of Ashes down the coast. Also, it is fiction. Safe houses are not built with straw or sticks, as the three little pigs knew, but with bricks.
If the super-rich’s fantasy of our world is invented, so is their place in it: the philanthropy, the means by which they make peace with themselves. If you want to be good, you should pay your taxes and not amass a glut of personal wealth. Unequal societies are unstable, and their democracies wither: what faith can you have in politicians who preside over such vast gaps in wealth?
I have never found Meghan Markle any more, or less, culpable than any other California actress for human idiocy — looking to actors for leadership is like looking to cats for leadership, after all — but her coming to Los Angeles was seen by one actress as “disaster tourism”.
Remember when Angelina Jolie pledged to end rape in war, as William Hague looked on fondly? Jolie’s profile rose, but rape in war, amazingly, is still with us. Still, it’s part of the principle of prosperity theology on which the super-rich emotionally depend: if you are rich, you are good, and you have a lesson for the world. They won’t learn it, but we must.
