Whinnying His True Love

I care about the doings of Britain's royal family about as much as Mary-Kate Olsen cares about porterhouse steaks.

But I greatly enjoyed this old Florence King "The Misanthrope's Corner" column, which I discovered through Amy Ridenour's blog.

Writing during Princess Diana's messy divorce proceedings a year or two before her death, King explains why right-thinking people everywhere should actually be pleased with Prince Charles for chucking Di in favor of (his now bride-to-be) Camilla Parker-Bowles:

Currently, I side with Prince Charles and think he deserves a feminist award. Most men ditch their dear old Dutch for a trophy wife but he ditched the trophy wife for his dear old Dutch. No one gives him credit for preferring time-ravaged Lady Camilla Parker-Bowles to firm-fleshed Di, or realizes her ladyship's value to the state. Plebeianized England needs Queen Camilla: any woman can ride a horse but it takes a true aristocrat to look like one.

Charles is regarded as an odd duck because his hobbies of architecture and the cello fall outside the Pale du jour. Diana, on the other hand, is considered normal because her hobbies -- throwing up, hurling herself into glass cabinets, hating her husband -- conform to acceptable feminist standards of assertiveness and self-expression.

King adds that Diana really wasn't British at all:

Pay no attention to what Burke's Peerage says about Princess Diana's lineage. Any woman who goes on television and discusses her affairs, betrayals, suicide attempts, and vomiting habits, and then says "I'm a very strong person," is an American.