By PROFESSOR MARY BEARD -
More by this author » Last updated at 00:12am on 13th March 2008
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Much debate has been triggered on academic internet sites over Prince Harry's front-line role in Afghanistan.
This followed a blog on the Times Literary Supplement website by Cambridge Classics don Professor Mary Beard, who said the "adulation" over the Prince was "a bit hard to take". Here, she explains her position - one with which the Mail doesn't necessarily agree...
How much easier it would have been had Prince Harry become a doctor, not a soldier. True, he would have needed rather better A-levels and a rather different sense of vocation.
But it would have caused fewer problems all round if he'd decided to spend his life listening to a heart-beat at the end of a stethoscope instead of looking down the barrel of a gun.
None of us knows exactly what Harry was up to near the front line in Afghanistan.
Whatever it was, I'm prepared to believe that he was showing considerable guts.
As a desk-bound academic, it's not my place to question a soldier's bravery. All the same, saving lives might have been a much more acceptable 21st-century image for a Prince than taking them.
To be fair to the young man, it was not exactly his fault that he was transformed overnight from Nazi impersonator and late-night clubber to hero of the nation, battling the Taliban in defence of the free world.
And Harry was certainly generous and gracious enough, on his return, to share the credit and point to the heroism of the men he had left behind.
But there was something about all those semi-staged interviews, saturating our news broadcasts, that made me feel distinctly sick.
First, there was that baseball cap Harry insisted on wearing.
On the front, over the royal brow, it proudly displayed not the Union flag but the Stars and Stripes - which, if you ask me, was taking the special relationship a step too far.
Even worse was the slogan emblazoned on the back, "We do bad things to bad people".
Was it a joke? If only.
No, this is the catchphrase of that sort of simplistic, thuggish, tit-for-tat politics that got us into the murderous mess of Iraq and Afghanistan in the first place.
And it's not exactly a very Christian sentiment, either - as I hope his grandmother might have pointed out to him.
Then there was the notorious snippet of the interview in which Harry revealed that he did not much like England.
Sorry, mate, I wanted to say, but as third in line to the throne it's your job to like England.
The rest of us can be as ambivalent as we like.
Ambivalence is a luxury you don't have, Harry (though you have plenty of other luxuries to make up for it).
So you'd better just get on with it. And if it's the Press that's bothering you back home, then maybe cutting down on those late-night visits to Boujis might help a bit.
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:americaneagle:
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harry is a good young man to serve his country .If they want to redeploy him they should move him around more so the press does'nt leak the info.
