Upon Further Consideration

I really dislike the Atlantic, and especially C.F.’s writing. She is either the apotheosis or the architect or the leading light or whatever of a type of article that I find both loathsome and pointless. Part background history, part listing of other scandals and part snark sprayed unevenly over the participants while simultaneously without any coherent moral, these essays are long, rambling and always seem about to produce some sort of revelation or insight without ever actually doing so. While I know of no particular instance in which C.F.’s take on this sort of thing has been plagiaristic, she certainly has produced plenty of errors that then need to be fixed — and the people who also work in this vein are occasionally absolutely — and literally — fantastical (R.S.B.’s piece in the Varsity Blues line of this kind of refuse being the best recent example).

The latest one about Meghan Markle was just like all the others, but it included this paragraph:

“The couple’s case against the Crown was that the Royal Family had not protected them from the tabloids, had stopped paying Harry—had “cut me off,” he said, in the particular expression of shocked trust-funders the world over whenever Daddy decides: enough!—and had not provided any help when Meghan found herself so unhappy that she was having suicidal thoughts. The parents were also shocked by apparent concerns about how dark their future babies would be—a revolting development, but hardly a surprising one.”

My understanding about the mental health assistance request was not that the family _failed_ to _provide help_. It was that the family _stopped her from accessing_ help.

Wedged between psychological, financial and racial abuse, it’s not entirely clear to me why this particular feature bothered me the most about C.F. But it was.

It’s all bad, tho. If you isolate someone from any ability to make money, and then cut them off, that is financial abuse.

If you encourage others to attack someone publicly, that’s psychological abuse (online, we call it brigading — but the family has been doing this to its insufficiently obsequious members for a really long time).

If you make that kind of remark about the color of someone’s skin, it’s racist; it is racially based abuse.

But if you stop someone accessing needed health care, when the condition in question could be fatal, I feel like that’s a different level. That’s not something that kills you by inches over days and years.

That C.F. can produce a paragraph like this, and that C.F. can argue that when you marry a person, you marry their family [of origin], forces me to conclude that what I thought was a personal dislike actually is something else entirely.

I had an allergic reaction to an encounter with evil.

When someone sends you links to articles at The Atlantic, don’t click on them.

If you subscribe to The Atlantic, I’m sorry. It’s hard to cut ties. You have your reasons, and you know them best.