From Henry Vlll to Osama bin Laden: In the Oprah school of history everybody’s a victim
Dear Gods, can noone rid us of this terrible woman?
“A new history by Suzannah Lipscomb, a doctoral student at Balliol College, Oxford, and research curator at Hampton Court Palace, suggests that 1536 turned Henry VIII from a gifted, handsome and companionable king into the fat, wife-killing tyrant of popular imagination. In 12 months Henry suffered a riding accident, an alleged cuckolding, the death of his beloved illegitimate son and a rebellion. As he turned 45, then regarded as the beginning of old age, these separate traumas accumulated into a midlife crisis from which he never recovered.
“Looking at the events of Henry’s life, I had never noticed that so many of them coalesced in a single year. There was a considerable difference in the King before and after,” she said. “No one had written this before.””
Maybe because it’s a load of crap?
A traumatic year, a midlife crisis…
It all does sound terribly, depressingly familiar, doesn’t it?
By the way, when I misquoted another king in my first sentence, I wasn’t talking about getting rid of la Lipscomb. I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t like to run into her at any party but she’s probably quite harmless.
This is just one of those cases where a bored journo hears about some silly bit of business and decides it will make a nice filler article. You know the deal:
‘MAN WHO MURDERED TWO OF HIS WIVES CLAIMS HE IS THE VICTIM!’
A victim of the whips and scorns of time, no less.
Still, long after the Lipscomb woman will have returned to well-deserved obscurity, the rest of us will still have to suffer the slings and arrows of our outrageous blame game culture.
To paraphrase a certain prince, ‘Thus cop-outs do make cowards of us all.’
Hamlet, at least, was tormented by an honest to God Freudian ghost. We, on the other hand, are beset by the spirit of Oprah Winfrey – and there seems to be no getting away from that kind of shit.
It is ridiculously easy to imagine how, in a not too distant future, on the couch where Tom Cruise jumped, we will see the big O fawning on a very familiar, white-robed figure, who is stroking his recently trimmed, now mostly white beard and who, looking straight into the camera with big, soulful eyes, will blame everything on a riding incident, or the death of his pet bunny, or something…
All of which will be rewarded with a standing ovation by the public, a tearful hug from Oprah and a fading shot of Osama’s upcoming book, ‘Tora Bora: The road to inner peace and self-fulfilment’.
(Okay, here’s the whole of that monologue I took such liberties with…)
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