By Sniffles
Cancel this June's 100th-birthday party for His Royal Highness the Duke of Edinburgh. Even with our nine lives, we cats have known no other British monarch except Elizabeth II, and now she's flying solo.
Prince Philip left behind a long life for the obit writers to comb through. And they're recalling his many intemperate comments about people who, let's just politely say, didn't look like him. Was he a racist? If so, it was the classic racism practiced by an outsider against fellow outsiders. (Philip came from an itinerant line of European royals who fell on hard times. To London snobs, he was a "penniless Greek.")
And we won't bother to repeat one of Philip's most infamous observations, made to a young subject who was studying in Beijing — there's enough anti-Asian hate out there these days. But you can bet the palace hired a new Director of Royal Small Talk after that.
We'll just choose to remember Philip another way: as the dashing fortysomething prince who represented the UK at Jack Kennedy's funeral, and used his sword as a walking stick on the hilly terrain of Arlington. As the Queen Mother once said, "That was a very long time ago." We cats PURR.
UPDATE: Want to know how connected to history Philip Mountbatten was? Not only was he on the deck of the USS Missouri when the Japanese surrendered in World War II — but when scientists needed DNA to ID the bones of Czar Nicholas and the Romanov family, he graciously obliged. Wow! We cats PURR again.
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