I was looking at a photo of the Royals the other day - the one where Philip farts, and poor Harry, behind Gramps, is left to deal with the brunt of it, as dignified as possible. Daddy, Gran and Auntie all seem unamused, but Harry loses it, while Philip has a knowing smirk on his face. That pic got me to thinking about the history of our Royals, and with my current research into the history of the English language, I came across some rather barbaric acts carried out by our fearless leaders of old. So the question I was left with was, when did they stop carrying out these acts, and to what can we attribute their terminations?
"In 1036, Ælfred Ætheling returned to England from exile in Normandy with his brother Edward the Confessor, with some show of arms. With his bodyguard," according to the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. "He intended to visit his mother, Emma, in Winchester, but he may have made this journey for reasons other than a family reunion. On the direction of Godwin (now apparently on the side of Harold Harefoot), Ælfred was captured and blinded by men loyal to Harefoot. He died soon after due to the severity of the wounds, his bodyguard similarly treated.
Acts like these were prevalent 1100 years ago. Likely, there was an extreme distrust is one's fellow man, and sadly, in one's own brother. I wonder then, why we stopped...We know that violent crime has been on a steady 200 year decline, but why doesn't Chuck have Mummy killed, or Beatrix arrange for Harry and William to have a training accident, all in aspirations to ascend to the throne? Surely, arranging such assassinations would be easier to carry out nowadays.
Today, word travels very fast. Just think of when Pope John Paul II died. Not only did we have CNN with one of its never ending 24/7 play-play coverages, but people there, had camera phones to send picture text messages, blogs, facebook, myspace, cell phones, which could send out messages instantaneously the moment the flume of white smoke snaked from the stack in St Paul's. 150 years ago, before telgrams, the message basically had to wait for horseback, or an emissary by sea to relay the message.
Even more recently, I think of the uprisings in Iran last year, and how, not surprisingly, CNN got caught with their pants down. Christiana Amanpour had been in Tehran covering the elections, decided the story was over since the fix was in, and left that weekend. Then the protests started. No CNN. How did the message get out? Youtube, Twitter, and facebook - social network. Now, forever the spinners, CNN has capitalised on social networking media so much, that they use the term more often than the word 'the'. Still, it is very difficult now with media and social networking - a dynamic duo - to get ANYTHING done under the shadow of free information. Of course, I speak not of backward repressing despots in countries with no technology, but even in the DPRK, there is technology creep.
With the advent of social media, it's virtually impossible to keep anything secret; if that's a bad thing, then maybe we should consider how easy it was to have somebody's eyes gouged out with a hot poker, and chalked up to "falling down this stairs onto a pile of dirty forks."
