farmdoc's blog post number 197

I've previously written about how, (no) thanks to the media, Prince Charles’s public persona has long been that of a bumbling buffoon, which discounts the weight of his opinions. Charles’s father – The Prince Phillip, Duke of Edinburgh – was born in 1921, and in 1947 married Princess Elizabeth, now Queen Elizabeth II. Phillip has, according to Wikipedia, a reputation for making controversial remarks of which some have been deemed offensive. However Phillip is patron of many organisations, including The Duke of Edinburgh’s Award and Cambridge University. And since visiting Antarctica in 1956, he’s worked to raise public awareness of the relationship between humanity and the environment, by publishing and speaking widely for 50 years on this subject. Controversial and provocative? Definitely. Bumbling buffoon? No way. Last week in Slovenia, Phillip remarked to a Slovenian Professor of Tourism that ‘tourism is just national prostitution…(and)…we don’t need any more tourists. They ruin cities’. The British media called this an embarrassing gaffe. Sexual connotations aside, prostitution means offering or devoting one’s talent to an unworthy use or cause. I think Phillip’s darned right. It’s better to have tourists than nuclear waste dumps, for sure, but tourists aren’t attractive in the absolute sense, no matter how much they add to the gross national product: They distort true society, and they’re environmentally destructive. Nice one, Phil. Keep giving them what ho, mate.