Be Strong

Dear Princess Kate Middleton:

Let me open this missive by saying I don’t actually give much of a rat’s arse about the social and class structure to which you now belong, and I give even less of a rat’s arse about the family you married in to. I mean, it’s not your husband’s fault that my great-grandparents had to leave their homes, their language, and their culture behind and move across the ocean or face starvation, persecution, imprisonment, segregation, enforced poverty, and the theft of their native lands and religious beliefs. I don’t hold that against your husband or his family *personally*. And frankly, the whole colonialism argument is wearing a bit thin, in my opinion. I do hold it against the institution to which all y’all belong, which is no fault, again, of your husband’s. He couldn’t help being born into it. Neither could his parents or grandparents, etc..

In fact, I suppose one could argue that your husband and his family are as much a product of their accidental heritage as my family is, and that our positions in the world could easily be reversed. I mean, that’d be a complete lie, because there’s no way anyone with title and peerage would have lowered themselves to rut with anyone from my family (who, by and large, were swarthy, hard-working farmers who probably enjoyed a little too much Uisea Beatha from time to time). But, things being what they are, you and your family are where you are and I and my family are where we are.

Listen, Kate. May I call you Kate? My grandmother’s name was Kate. Did you know that? It was her parents were kicked out of their country by the British lords stationed there to take over their land. Just, you know, for some perspective. I mean, her husband’s grandparents’ lands were also taken from them when the famine came and food rotted in granaries on the docks. On the other side, my grandfather’s great-grandparents came over because they couldn’t afford to pay the landlord *and* eat. But that’s all in the past, and there’s no sense, my grandmother Kate would say, in nodding our heads to the ghosts in the room, because they just won’t go away if you do that.

Hey, listen, it’s really nice that you and your husband are visiting children in other countries whose families can’t afford to feed them. That charitable work all y’all do is…well, it’s downright inspiring is what it is. You get to wander around the world with your husband and his family and see all sorts of people who can’t feed themselves because they are living in poverty, living in war, living in drought, living through famine. Your mother-in-law was pretty famous for appearing to give a crap about these sorts of things, and that’s really nice. No really, I mean that.

Anyway, normally I wouldn’t bother writing to you or anything, but I just wanted to say that I think you should be able to go around nude whenever and wherever you please, and it oughtn’t be something shameful or sensational. We all come into the world naked. We all look the same under our clothes, by and large. So I think it’s pretty completely not fair that your vacation or whatever in Malaysia or whatever might be threatened because those people are, like, crazy about things like revealing clothing. Although I suppose you could try to argue that being in the altogether is absolutely nothing like wearing revealing clothing.

Probably, you might want to consider yourself lucky, even though your grandmother-in-law is probably holding the bridge of her nose and muttering that she was never naked in her entire life, save that one time in Scotland when a wild romp through the heather tore her finely tailored suit from her body, back in her military days. But the most that came out of that was a Harlequin Romance story involving people called Duncan and Wee Angus. In some countries, like North America, you might be called a slut for doing things like not wear clothing in what you thought was the privacy of your own home, and then it would be okay for anyone to rape you, if they felt the need. Actually, I’m pretty sure that doesn’t happen, so forget I even said it.

But that’s another thing. I mean, your husband’s family has their knickers in a bunch because there are people in the world who make a living taking photographs of famous people doing, like, everything. And through the Wonders of Science they can probably take photographs of your superfluous third nipple from SPACE. Which is actually pretty cool, if you think about it. The space thing, not your third nipple.

I just wanted to write to tell you that *I* think you should go naked more often. My grandmother Kate used to say that if they can’t take seeing you in the altogether, they shouldn’t be looking in the first place. She was a very wise woman, you know.

Yours sincerely,

cenobyte