For the past couple of weeks, especially since I posted a blog entry in which I zeroed in on Elizabeth not as a monarch or a symbol of empire, but as a grandmother, people have been writing me with their take on this once in a lifetime event, the burial of the world's longest-reigning monarch. And that includes no shortage of people who insist there is no way to separate Elizabeth the person from Elizabeth the symbol of rapacious colonialism. I beg to differ. I don't expect to convince. We will have to agree to disagree.
The Queen left behind four dogs. Her two world-famous corgis, Muick and Sandy, were the best known, but only half of her canine children. If I had any resistance to her as a monarch - I never had any to her as a person - it would have crumbled when I began to focus on her first as a grandmother, and then as a lover of dogs and horses. And if I ever did want to cast her in a negative light, that urge would have evaporated entirely the other day as I listened to her dog psychologist, Roger Mugford, talk about Elizabeth driving herself back and forth between Windsor Castle and Buckingham Palace with her pack of dogs in the back seat.
OK, so Hitler and Goering loved their dogs too. Not the same thing. Give me a break.
As more and more commentary on this major world (well, Euro- and Euro-American) event flows in, I am aware of an increasing number of remarks akin to that awful linguist at Carnegie Mellon who hoped the pain Elizabeth felt at the end would be excruciating. The criticism brings out my natural contrariness. And it pisses me off. These remarks make me defensive. I don't want to be in the position of defending the British monarchy. I just want grandma's death to be a peaceful one. And save the "painful death" wishes for the Hitlers of history, not for employees of Britain, Inc.
But it's not only that. When I woke up the other day and saw the cortege carrying Elizabeth's coffin had just left Balmoral and was on its say to Edinburgh, I went down for toast and tea, brought it back up and sat, hypnotized, and watched the entire journey as the cars made their way down the highway, through these unfamiliar towns with wonderful Scottish names: Braemar, Spittal of Glenshee, Blairgowrie and Rattray and finally to a place I've been to, Perth, before reaching the Scottish capital. I say hypnotizing because there was something soothing about watching the steady movement of the vehicles and the fact that nothing else was happening and you could focus on the fact that this was William and Harry's grannie traveling the length of Scotland to her final rest. And little George and Charlotte's great-grannie.
All along the road were people standing. Some were waving, some clapping. Clapping! At a casket? Who claps at a casket? And as they pulled finally into Edinburgh the crowds were maybe thirty or more thick. And people were throwing roses, to be crushed under the wheels of the vehicles.
Massive crowds can be mobs. They can be fascistically-inclined Americans who go out of their way to paint the name of their would-be président à vie's name on their faces, ignoring the fact that he heads a crime family. They are frequently little more than evidence of tribal loyalty, as with football games and political rallies. They can also be people happily gathered to mark the new year or other cause of celebration. In this case, I see them as a cross-section of people who illustrate to a T how a human being can channel and represent one's love of country.
I saw it again in the faces of the mourners passing the casket laid out in St. Giles Cathedral in Edinburgh. The contrast hits you between the formality of the guards standing and holding these long spears and keeping their heads permanently bowed - somebody's going to need some serious chiropracting after that I imagine - and the frumpy shirts and tennis shoes of some of the people filing past, looking like they are wandering aimlessly through a Home Depot. I guess that's the point. This walk is for ordinary people. And just when the old school ma'arm in me wants to scold somebody for not putting on a fresh dress shirt, I notice how many people are in tears. And how many people stop to bow their heads, or curtsey. All so terribly/wonderfully British.
To fault Elizabeth for representing an evil rapacious empire strikes me as wrong-headedness. Elizabeth was arch-conservative, to be sure, and represented images more than reality. But hers was a representation of modern Britain. She proudly showed the Prime Minister of India some homespun she had received from Gandhi, not bullet casings from the massacre at Amritsar. She apologized to the Irish for what was done to them in the name of Empire and was, in the end, warmly received by folk who seem quite able, thank you, to distinguish Elizabeth II from Elizabeth I.
Honoring the death and the memory of Elizabeth Regina need not shut down any discussion over whether the institution of the monarchy serves the purpose it is supposed to serve. You can still be a small-r republican, not in the American sense where Roget's Thesaurus would have to list it under lemming, but in the sense of wanting to see the UK become a republic instead of a monarchy - and find something beautiful in the emotions causing many to weep at the sight of the passing casket. And throw flowers under the wheels of cars. I do. And not just me. Look at the Australians. A majority of them wanted to go republican, but when push came to shove and there was a referendum, they chose to stay a constitutional monarchy. And this will-we won't-we will no doubt go on all over the commonwealth, and much will depend on whether it's headed by a type with Elizabeth's qualities, or Prince Andrew's.
And all the other non-Brits doing it. I mentioned Paul Fey above. Here's another example, my favorite cantor, Azi Schwartz. He knows she's a stand-in for the UK of the present-day, not the days of the Balfour Declaration.
It's up to the Brits whether the UK will split apart, whether Elizabeth's steadying hand was what was holding it together. Part of me wants the UK to go on, with their splendid skill at pomp and circumstance, maybe taking out the references to empire, the way we go on in America, bumbling our way two steps forward toward democracy, one step (and sometimes two) back. And part of me will feel the joy many in Scotland will feel if they decide to free themselves of the provincial (largely English) mindset which brought about Brexit, rejoin Europe, and participate in their bumbling journey toward a more enlightened future.
I am curious to see how much Elizabeth's choice to die in Scotland (and to call Balmoral her favorite place to be) may influence the decision to keep England and Scotland together through another referendum. The plan to channel patriotic feelings into a human body is a successful political move and not just in Europe. And for all the talk of Scottish independence, the huge number of people lining the hundred miles of highway from Balmoral to Edinburgh and the many applauding, rose-throwing folks in the Scottish capital, shows you it's by no means a done deal.
The nagging unanswered questions are all about this phenomenon of hero worship. One is how it is that after tossing the notion of the divine right of kings, you didn't need the guillotine, necessarily. There was a ready compromise in hollowing out the power of the royals but keeping the pretty uniforms. Another is how come the Brits kept the military and the church so closely allied with royal prestige. And still another is how you got the very matronly-looking Princess Anne into military drag. Colonel Anne? Now that's funny.
Pure theater. Disney, move over, and watch a bunch of experts do it.
* * *
In 1960 I went abroad for the first time. I was only twenty years old and it was a heady feeling to find myself in Munich, where I could order a beer in any bar or restaurant and they would serve me without a second look. After a bumpy start, in which I was thrown off a streetcar because I couldn't tell the conductor where I wanted to go, I took to that city like a duck to water. Then a couple years later I found myself first in Frankfurt, then in Berlin, this time with the U.S. Army, and the North German half of me kicked in, in a way it did not when I lived in Bavaria.
In unabashed youthful enthusiasm, I started making plans to emigrate to Berlin. I went back to the U.S. to get a teaching degree which would help me get a job in Germany. Then I took what I thought was a brief side step to Japan for some teaching experience before launching the plan to become German. Half a century on now, I have twenty-four years of life experience in Japan, a Japanese husband, and Germany is my place of historical memory, a history that never happened.
What happened instead, though, once I'd been in Japan long enough to acquire the equivalent of a green card and once I'd discovered a wonderful little house in a beautiful little town down the coast about an hour and a half from Tokyo called Oiso, was that I began thinking maybe I'd go all the way and acquire Japanese citizenship. And I might have carried through on that idea, if the man who would someday become my husband had not had such a strong desire to live in California. We sit at the dinner table these days and batter each other with a lot of "what if" questions like whether it would have been better if we'd both stayed in Japan.
One of the reasons we come up with a yes-answer involve my closest friends in Japan. They're my age. They emigrated to Japan in the 1960s and raised their kids there, sending them to Japanese schools, which means they are both native speakers of Japanese. One is married to an American, one to a Brit, and they - let's call them "nissei (second generation) Americans" have generated a "sansei" (third) generation. With one exception, the sansei are moving in the direction of returning to the countries of their parents, the US and the UK.
Meanwhile, in another corner of the world, I'm in close touch with other good friends of mine, also Americans. They settled in Yorkshire some years ago and raised their kids there. Both kids, no surprise, have taken British citizenship and sworn allegiance to the Queen. Their parents have hung on to their American identity - and both kids have hung on to their American accents.
Dual citizenship is allowed between the US and the UK but not between the US and Japan. I can't be sure how much this fact figured into the decisions of these two families - quite a lot, I imagine - but if we could, my husband and I would probably both have Japanese passports, the mark of official national identity. Since that's not possible, he visits Japan on his U.S. passport and has been heard to say, "I'm glad my father never knew that I renounced my Japanese citizenship. It would have broken his heart." It also breaks my husband's heart - or at least gives him pain.
The recent evidence of how easily it could be for America to shut down its grand experiment in bringing about an enlightened democracy is striking close to home for me. Watching up close these days the significance of the decision the Brits made lone ago to channel their citizens' natural inclination toward patriotism into a monarch has focused my attention and made me realize it's not an abstract academic question for students of political philosophy, but more a set of immediate questions. Like why am I, as an American, feeling a sense of loss? Why am I, as an anti-monarchist, finding myself hoping Charles can keep Britain all in one piece? Where do these feelings come from? In acknowledging my sense of connection with Germany and Japan and the U.S., I have to admit I also hope that no harm will come to Canada and the UK, as well.
But I'm straying away from my original point, which is that we're seeing in this time of mourning for Elizabeth the positive consequences of the British decision to put the dignity of the nation into a single human being. But only because they hit the jackpot with Elizabeth. They gambled. They didn't know in advance what they would be getting. They just lucked out. They got a person whom dog and horse lovers can admire, whom grannie-lovers can feel an instant affection for, a person who can show wisdom - remember her "grief is the price we pay for love" statement - and wit - after somebody broke into her chamber at Buckingham Palace, she kept mimicking her maid for days:‘Bloody ’ell, ma’am, what’s ’e doin’ in ’ere?’”
Ironically, the biggest proof of the success of the plan to equate the queen with the nation is in all the people who brush past the outpouring of grief to point out the evils of the empire, blaming her for being queen of a slave-trader nation, when Britain, to be fair, was way out ahead of other nations, including the U.S., in abolishing slavery. And I'm not talking just about that stunningly ungracious twit at Carnegie Mellon who publicly expressed the hope that Elizabeth's last days would be spent in excruciating pain. I'm also talking about Bill Maher, who casually called her an "old bag." Even Trevor Noah, while making the valid point that nobody needs to respect her if they don't want to, laid the sins of the past empire right in her lap: "You can't expect the oppressed to mourn the oppressor." A convenient scapegoat. The much overrated Bill Maher wouldn't have the guts - or the justification, given what it has evolved into - to call Britain a shit-country. But he can still get his jollies calling Elizabeth and old bag.
It's probably significant that if I were to take UK citizenship I would now have to swear allegiance to Charles and all his heirs, but if I were to take Japanese citizenship, I would not have to swear allegiance to the Emperor. There are monarchies, and then there are monarchies. And I am fascinated by this evidence of how much more the British monarchy represents the state. How successful the Brits have been in inculcating among the Queen's subjects an almost total merging of person and state. I say this as I sit before a screen watching the somber respect being paid to her, even in death - maybe especially in death - and trying to unscramble my own feelings about the British monarchy. Me, an American citizen with clearly (small r - not-American political party) republican sympathies. Why am I feeling a sense of loss? Why do I choose to focus on the death of a grandmother, and not on the death of a head of a state with a history of rapacious and haughty behavior? How manipulated can I get?
Biden, at one point, chose to call Elizabeth an "incredibly gracious and decent woman" - which is kind of like complimenting somebody for being "incredibly elegant and of average height", but never mind my nitpicking. The point is, in mourning the death of a monarch, he's making the effort to call her gracious and decent. Not the embodiment of an arrogant people roaming the planet to enslave its people and extract its riches.
This is a system we're all very much caught up in. Some will go on mistaking the concrete symbol for the abstract real. I don't expect my Indian/Irish/Caribbean/Small-r-republican friends all to take my appeal for nuanced thinking seriously. Some will, many won't. And the ones who won't have as much right to curse the symbols as I have to mourn the loss of a dog-loving grannie.
I'm now repeating myself. Sorry about that. But I felt it was worth repeating.
photo credit of another outsider to the system mourning the queen's passing, attributed to Toby Melville/Reuters
1 comment:
I recommend listening to what Russell Brand has to say on this topic. He's beautifully articulate, his "uvva" for "other" and his habit of using a glottal stop to pronounce his final t's notwithstanding. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uS1ywMKFxno
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