The Moment of Truth
Tonight I am watching the Netflix series The Crown, a series I have watched off and on for most of this year. I am not sure what attracts me to watching the story of the Windsor clan over the course of the Twentieth Century, but it does interest me for some reason. I think that I have taken up the series again at this point because of the controversy over the depiction of Prince Charles. Vanity Fair suggests that the royal biographers are aghast at the distortion of Charles in the fourth season of the series. He has been painted as a thug when it comes to his treatment of Diana. This is somewhat consistent with the common sense that Diana was a victim in her turbulent marriage to Charles when those biographers feel that Charles was more the victim than the antagonist in the relationship. I have yet to start the fourth season, so I will reserve judgement other than to say that in season two and three I find Charles to be a very sympathetic character. It would be hard to find him anything but sympathetic with his being at the tail of the Windsor whip being cracked by QEII, played with great conviction by Olivia Coleman. The transition of the Queen from the comely Claire Foy to Coleman, the rather dour Oscar-winning actress who played the eccentric and bunny-loving Queen Anne in The Favourite, may have been the portend of the writers’ intentions to transform Charles from a wimp to a lout. But while the Prince Charles issue has brought me back to the series, it is the depiction of Prince Philip, the Duke of Edinburgh that really intrigues me for some reason.
I have previously written about Prince Philip on the occasion of his retirement from public life at the age of 96. He is now in the run-up year of his 100th birthday in 2021, only being seen occasionally with the Queen on one of his estates like Sandringham. I find the complexity of a man of great ambition and machismo being made subservient to the duties of his chosen life of service, a service that many would find less than necessary in a modern world, a mystery and certainly an interesting character. The episode I particularly enjoyed is set in the summer of 1969, a summer I spent in Rome, riding around town on my Ducati 50cc motorcycle, straining that little high-performance single-cylinder engine with my already broadening girth. I must have been a real sight on that little bike, but I was oblivious to the mismatch, concerned only with the joy of zipping around town doing on-the-spot repairs as needed without any requirement of a formal license at all and a Corpo Diplomatico (CD) card to get me out of any tickets or jams.
That summer was notable for several reasons as we all remember. Yes, the Boeing 747 was launched and TWA sent its maiden flight from New York to Rome where some of us local American students got to tour the plane and have our picture taken on top of the jetway stairs. The Pontiac Firebird TransAm, the all-American muscle car cousin of the Chevrolet Camaro, was introduced (I didn’t own one until 1975, but I did own one). Honda introduced the CB750 motorcycle into the European market in 1969 and it looked massive to us bike jockeys (it looks so puny today). There was the Manson Family’s killing of the Tate-LaBianca crowd and the Chappaquiddick incident. But the really memorable moments came in the summer at Woodstock and in the Sea of Tranquility on the Moon. I will cover Woodstock some other time, but the moon landing is something I very clearly recall.
Because there were only two nationally-operated channels on Italian TV in 1969, my family didn’t bother owning a TV. This was not a cultural choice, but simply a logistical one where we didn’t feel compelled to have one. In fact, the only “program” that seemed of interest to us at all was what was called Carosello, which was an accumulation of advertisements shown in one continuous segment for 30 minutes. That was not reason enough to own a TV and we put our AV budget into a nice big Grundig stereo cabinet set-up. What that meant was that I went over to my friend Tom’s house (his father was the President of Getty Italiana and he got a lovely modern villa in an era when no one in Rome lived in a house) to watch the moon landing on TV. This comes to mind because in the episode on The Crown, Prince Philip is smitten by the daring do of the moon landing, which he stares at just as intently as I remember doing on that fuzzy TV screen image, and insists on meeting the three Apollo 11 astronauts alone in Buckingham Palace during their worldwide victory tour. In the episode Philip realizes that these young men are just men and not the Gods he thought them to be. Well, I have my own story about these men that call that notion into question.
In 2009, while running the US subsidiary of a large Israeli public company, Kim and I vacationed in Israel after a business trip I had to make there. We spent a week touring the country from north to south (its a small country) with a tour guide of considerable historical knowledge. During that week we were shown countless historical venues where Christ did this or that (the Jewish guide recognized that we were Christians and while he gave us a generally non-sectarian education of the country, he did seem to favor Christian events and locales). It seemed that every spot could only be specified as Christ having stood here or two hundred yards over there. It was hard to ignore the comments after a while and I commented about the lack of specificity after only 2,000 years. That led to one of the more interesting stories I had ever heard.
It seems the tour guide had taken Neil Armstrong, the once young man that didn’t impress Prince Philip so much and had grown into a devout born-again Christian older man. It seems Armstrong noticed the same lack of specificity that I had about Christ’s stage marks. He asked the guide for one spot where there was absolute certainty that Christ had stood. The guide reflected and told him that the steps of Temple Mount would be such a place, but that it was in the Muslim quarter thanks to a magnanimous gesture by Moshe Dayan. The guide took Armstrong there and waited in the car (he was not allowed in as an Israeli) as he watched Armstrong find his way down onto the steps of Temple Mount. There he knelt in solemn prayer for fifteen minutes. When he returned to the car he told the guide that those fifteen minutes were the most meaningful moment of his life. We each define our lives the way we choose to and our personal moments of truth are not necessarily as obvious to others as they are to us. I guess a few moments of peace on the steps of Temple Mount in the West Bank were, for a fervent follower of Jesus Christ trying to stand for a moment in the Messiah’s shoes, a greater moment of truth and a higher point than the Sea of Tranquility 238,900 miles away.