by WorldTribune Staff, April 14, 2021
Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh, passed away on April 9 at age 99.
Across the pond, the death of the politically incorrect prince occurred “just when America needs him the most,” a columnist noted.
Philip “was an iconoclast who cheerfully smashed the revered verities of progressive modernity,” Gerard Baker noted in a April 12 op-ed for the Wall Street Journal.
“The people that once boldly threw off the tyranny of a distant monarch now seem to be meekly submitting to the diktats of a regnant class and ideology that tolerate less independence of thought and action than King George III did,” Baker wrote.
Philip’s death “presents a timely paradox for the modern United States. Forgive me for saying so to this staunchly republican nation, but what America desperately needs these days is a Prince Philip,” Baker wrote.
America needs a Prince Philip, Baker wrote, because he was “completely unafraid to say the unsayable. … He had an unerring capacity to ask awkward questions, speak inconvenient truths and challenge polite orthodoxies.”
Baker continued: “When we are obligated to toe an increasingly stultifying conventional line, the queen’s consort was the human antidote to the virus of verbal oppression that has us in a death grip. You’d search a very long time to find a less woke individual than the Duke of Edinburgh.”
On being shown an indescribable work of primitive Ethiopian art, Philip remarked: “It looks like the kind of thing my daughter would bring back from her school art lessons.”
When someone who had explained that the parliament of some foreign country he was visiting had only 200 members, Philip responded: “That’s about the right number. We have 650 and most of them are a complete bloody waste of time.”
His one-word response upon his first visit to Beijing, in 1985, was — “Ghastly”.
Baker noted: “If the fragile little adolescent minds that now control most of our media and cultural institutions are ‘triggered’ by an ugly word, God knows what they would make of an outspoken’ duke’s taxonomy. But he understood well something we have lost — that being offended is part of life.
“Fortunately for him, as the monarch’s husband, there was no canceling Philip.
“At least not in the modern sense. As a proper European aristocrat, he knew there are worse things that can happen to you than having to listen to something you don’t want to hear.”
During the height of the Cold War, Philip once said: “I would very much like to go to Russia, although the bastards murdered half my family.”
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