Last week I woke up one morning sure that, when I turned on the TV, the news networks would be breaking from their regular Trump coverage to announce the death of Queen Elizabeth II (or "Liza," as her friends call her). I can't explain why this certainty came over me, if it was part of some left-over dream residue or a psychic malevolency on my part. Obviously, when I did turn on the TV there was no such breaking news. But given the fact that Liza did just celebrate her 90th birthday on this planet, the odds are in my favor that such a day will occur sooner rather than later.
I don't like authority figures, especially those whose authority is just assumed and not earned (or "earned" in quotation marks). In a country where we're this close to electing a self-important billionaire (or so he says...I think Donnie's facing another bankruptcy, hence the making of America great again) or the wife of a former president (so she's had experience hanging around the White House), I seem to be in the minority of folks who feel this way. All the Bernie Bros convince me of is that they'd be liking Trump if he wasn't playing the bigot card. I don't know what to think about for the fall, I almost wish we'd lost the Revolution now.
Britain, once our landlord, is still a country that we look to with what even the most Anglophile among us would regard as a simpering inferiority complex. And why not? They've got centuries of culture to our two (though said culture is way more racist and sexist when you take a closer look at it and get past the sexy accents), they often times make better music, and nobody does tuberculosis-ridden female novelists quite like the UK. But they have an archaic and borderline stupid devotion to a family of inbreds whose only claim to legitimacy is "we have been and always will be better than you."
I remember getting up super-early in the morning on the day William and Kate got married. I am anything but a royalist, but I had a bad attack of what I later learned were gallstones, and I was up anyway writhing in pain so I figured I'd check it out. To hear the way people talk about the royal family, and the two kids born since and how they'll "inherit the throne" once Liza checks out (I guess Chuck isn't in line for it anymore? I didn't get the memo on that one), I feel like shouting "constitutional monarchy" at the top of my lungs. I could be wrong, but I'm pretty sure that the Windsors are figureheads at this point. That is, they don't do anything but look pretty for the cameras and tourists. You know, Kardashians.
Maybe it's not so hard to understand why people are obsessed with them, then.
I came to loath the whole enterprise like countless American boys of my time: by reading John Lydon's autobiography Rotten. The once and future Sex Pistol unloads on the whole notion of inherited authority pretty well (my memory is hazy, but he did pen "God Save the Queen" so I feel I'm on good footing without having to refer to the memoir). What's more, about a dozen years later I stumbled across John Gardner's Grendel, which includes a paragraph that explains where royal "authority" gets off telling us mere mortals what to do (hint: it's similar to the whole "built another castle, that sank into the swamp" story from Monty Python and the Holy Grail). When it comes to the royals, there's an awful lot of wish fulfillment on the part of royal-watchers. Call it "crown envy" instead of penis envy, if you will. I don't understand it...unless, of course, I do.
You know how I mentioned the Pistols just now, and punk rock in general? That's my jam, frankly. I would love to travel back in time to around 1976 (when it was all getting started) right up to 1982 or so (Ian Curtis was dead, but punk was now "postpunk" or "New Wave" and just about to become ridiculous thanks to the New Romantics). So perhaps it's not all that weird to me how some people look to other cultures (and other timelines) to feel better about themselves. Growing up in a small town that I was convinced was devoid of culture, I looked at the world outside the confines of my town and wanted to be in that world (I was Ariel in The Little Mermaid, minus the ability to swim or the red hair). Looking at the wider world now, and how incredibly close we seem to be to some sort of apocalypse, I think maybe I was naïve back then. But I can be forgiven for it; I saw something attractive in a culture not my own and wanted to emulate it. It's not a sin (well, not until you start emulating Nazis and put people you don't like in camps, but that could never happen under any president, right?).
I thought, in my younger, more "radicalized" days, that when the Queen did throw off her mortal coil, I'd blast "The Queen Is Dead" at full volume. But the Queen is as much a flesh-and-blood human being as she is a figurehead (albeit a figurehead for a system that I still seem passionately opposed to, even though there's really no reason for me to still carry the punk-rock flag against the royals). In "The King's Speech," we even see her as a little girl, her daddy the guy who has to rally his country in the wake of Hitler's blitzkrieg. It's easy to forget that the figureheads we hate or love, at the end of the day, take a shit like the rest of us. That doesn't make our feelings any less valid, but it should regulate our behavior a little bit. So when Liza doffs her crazy hat one last time and exits stage left, I guess I'll try to take a minute to remember that she's somebody's mother/grandmother/great-grandmother. But after that moment, I still might queue up some Smiths or Sex Pistols. Because I'm human, too.
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