It’s four gen­er­a­tions late, but being late is sup­pos­ed­ly “fash­ion­able”, which means “newspeak”, the term coined in 1949 by George Orwell in his dystopi­an nov­el “1984”, is right on time in 2023. The wel­come is embod­ied in three seem­ing­ly unre­lat­ed but in fact “peas in a pod” phe­nom­e­na: Prince Harry’s “Spare”, social media ‘influ­encers’ and fash­ion advertisements.

The three of them seem to be every­where, all are a per­fect fit for a lan­guage “char­ac­ter­ized by euphemism, cir­cum­lo­cu­tion and the inver­sion of cus­tom­ary meanings”.
Newspeak, as Orwell saw it, was “designed to dimin­ish the range of thought”.
The cult of vic­tim­hood accom­plish­es it by per­ni­cious insis­tence that every­one bow and curt­sy to such 21^st cen­tu­ry invent­ed terms as:
“My truth” — rea­son­ably defined as “what­ev­er I choose to believe, even if it has no basis in fact, real­i­ty or com­mon sense.
“Lived expe­ri­ence” – an all-encom­pass­ing term for “any­thing that hap­pened to me is unique and nobody else ever suf­fered like or as much as me”.
“White (or any oth­er) priv­i­lege” – which as far as I can tell means “Your genes are your fault if they dif­fer from mine and you damned well bet­ter feel guilty about it and sym­bol­i­cal­ly, or prefer­ably actu­al­ly, self-flagellate”.
Of Harry’s such gen­u­flec­tions to the lat­est newspeak in the ghost-writ­ten “Spare”, Anna White­lock, a pro­fes­sor of his­to­ry of mod­ern monar­chy at City Uni­ver­si­ty of Lon­don, opined that “…cer­tain­ly, in rais­ing the issues of the tox­ic rela­tion­ship between the press and palace, the brief­ing of rival house­holds, the treat­ment of ‘spares’ and the inher­ent misog­y­ny and uncon­scious bias with­in the insti­tu­tion, Har­ry chal­lenges the monar­chy to reflect and reform.”
The high­lights are mine, just in case the buzz­words weren’t obvious.
I won­der what the reac­tion to her obser­va­tions would be if instead of “rais­ing the issues of…” she’d more cor­rect­ly writ­ten “the whin­ing and mewl­ing about…”.
If that seems undu­ly harsh, lend eye and ear, if you can bear it, to any of the spate of fawn­ing inter­views of the prince who fled moth­er­land, fam­i­ly ties and duty to “remove him­self from the com­pe­ti­tion for the front pages”.
In case that isn’t clear, he’s also said: “You know, silence only allows the abuser to abuse. Right? So I don’t know how stay­ing silent is ever gonna make things better.”
The insti­tu­tion into which he was born demands adher­ence, even sub­servience to tra­di­tion and for­mal­i­ty. Its infa­mous mot­to is “Nev­er explain, nev­er com­plain”. That may sound “old-fash­ioned” and seem abu­sive to the point of outrageous.
But com­pare it to the delib­er­ate bed­lam, dis­cour­tesy and ruina­tion that comes from adher­ing to the “tra­di­tions” of social media. The “val­ues” they laud and pro­mote were summed up neat­ly by the estimable jour­nal­ist and blog­ger Mort Rosen­blum who not­ed that “…a wired world makes overnight “influ­encers” of teenagers with quirky ideas and lav­ish-liv­ing mer­chan­dise ped­dlers. We need influ­encers with more seri­ous purposes.”

                                THE CLOAK OF IMAGERY

Which brings us to the fash­ion indus­try, a ubiq­ui­tous “influ­encer” in its own mul­ti-bil­lion dol­lar right. Just as social media spurs users to mea­sure its stars and tar­gets in terms of mate­r­i­al wealth and fame, the zeit­geist, to use a buzz­word, encour­aged by fash­ion adver­tis­ing is the equal­ly counter-intu­itive stan­dard of adverts that seem deter­mined to define “fash­ion­able” as sullen, dis­in­ter­est­ed, self-absorbed, resent­ful or vacuous.
Name an adver­tise­ment for cloth­ing, which is pre­sum­ably sup­posed to make you “feel good about your­self” — in the case of peo­ple like me that means com­fort­able –  in which the mod­els look any­thing but pleased with life or the world in gen­er­al, or cou­ples show any inter­est in or attrac­tion to each other.
Per­fumes and colognes are even more bemus­ing. It seems fair to pre­sume that the point of them is to increase attrac­tive­ness to the oppo­site, same or oth­er­wise sex, although the con­cept can of course run the risk of stray­ing into the’ woke’ mire.
How­ev­er, if the adverts are to be tak­en at — no pun intend­ed — face val­ue,  they ren­der the wear­er sullen, dis­in­ter­est­ed or down­right aggressive.
One for a seri­ous­ly expen­sive men’s ‘fra­grance’ has a try­ing-hard-to-look-rugged mod­el strid­ing into the desert and fren­zied­ly dig­ging a hole like a vil­lain hid­ing a body in a CSI show. I don’t even want to imag­ine what kind of sex­u­al attrac­tion that’s sup­posed con­jure up.
How odd – and fit­ting – that social media “influ­encers” and Prince Har­ry present me with a sim­i­lar conundrum.

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