Long live the king

I'm sure there are some Americans who don't like the British Royal Family, and far more who couldn't care less one way or the other, but most Americans I know are pretty gaga over this undemocratic institution. Queen Elizabeth's popularity took a brief dip when she fumbled that flag-lowering decision when Princess Diana was killed, but it's back up now to where it was most of the time: she was viewed favorably by more than eight in ten Americans. And her son's visit to the U.S. recently shows that a surprising amount of that affection has been passed on to him.

I could be wrong about this, obviously.  I'm not coming from a neutral place. I grew up partly in Nova Scotia and slept in a bedroom with Queen Victoria's portrait hanging on the wall.  And even in Connecticut, when Elizabeth married Philip, our school shut down classes, and we all went to the auditorium where a TV set was placed on the stage for us to watch the wedding live. And I don't remember anybody finding that out of order because she was not our queen.

The next thing about the Windsors I remember was when Prince Charles was born.  His birth was the feature story in our Weekly Reader when I was in the fourth grade, and that event too was taken as a matter of course.

It was only many years later, after I had developed a socialist consciousness, that I began making snarky remarks about the royals. I took it a step further, not so much making fun of their elite status as feeling sorry that they had no say in how their birth had sealed their fate and made them give up any hope of having a private life or eating a normal meal in a restaurant.  I still hold that view, even more firmly now that I have lived so many years in Japan and got to watch the women of the imperial family have nervous breakdowns.  There is something inherently wrong about giving somebody status and wealth they didn't ask for just so you could have a bunch of living dolls to play with.

I just listened to Prince Charles deliver a speech before the German Bundestag.  And before that, last week, I listened to him address the U.S. Congress.  Brilliant address!  Just brilliant.  And I thrilled at his reminder of the importance of NATO and of helping Ukraine get out from under the Russian invasion; I loved watching Trump sitting behind him applauding away and pretending Charles was not making a fool of him.

There is something we could do right away to lessen the chances of a repeat of this ugly Trump phenomenon.  We could separate the role of head-of-state from head-of-government, the way most modern nations do it. Much as I want to feel sorry for King Charles and other members of the British royal family, I understand that they provide a place for Brits to locate their love of country.  Whether you do this by establishing a constitutional monarchy, as in Holland or Norway or Britain and give up expecting politicians to behave in their personal lives, or do something similar to what Germany does by having a president and a prime minister, both elected, the country's name gets to keep its dignity unsullied and out of politics entirely - more or less.

Maybe it's not Charles that's bringing all this credit and prestige to the British crown these days; maybe it's his speech writer.  He still deserves the credit, in my book, for knowing how to pick his speech writers.  And admit it: once upon a time he came across like a goofball, but these days he's showing a lot of class.

They don't all have it - class.  Prince Andrew (correction: ex-Prince Andrew) blew it by playing around with Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell.  But most of them do.

Before you need to show some class, you can be adorable - Check out Prince Louis, William and Kate's youngest, and grandson of Charles (now there's some serious future shock!). Makes even the most dyed-in-the-wool advocate of abolishing the monarchy think twice.

Charles the First lost his head; Charles the Second might have done likewise if he had had more success bringing governance of the English church back to the Bishop of Rome, and if he had not had the great misfortune of being king during the Plague (1665) and the Great Fire (1666).  But Charles III - at least so far - seems to have turned all that bad luck around.

God save the King, I say.

Flossing the nose and ears

A sure sign that the American Empire is on the way out is the rise of China's political and economic power.  We are losing the convenience of having the United States run the world. The dollar ain't what she used to be.  And President Asshole has taken the country to war and now we are having trouble filling our gas tanks.  But what is bugging me the most at the present time is the evidence that China has caught up with Japan's ("please use the toilet finely") way of using English without worrying about accuracy or style.

Case in point:  I have been planning for about forty years to buy an electric toothbrush.  At  my last trip to the dentist to have my teeth cleaned they found and filled a cavity.  A cavity!  I'm 86 years old!  How the hell can I have cavities?  I brush and floss after every meal and twice before bedtime!

Anyway, now that I'm accustomed to spending money like it's going out of style after the thousands of dollars Taku and I have spent recovering from my broken hip, I went online and googled "Water-Pik" and went straight to the most expensive model. Why not?  It's only seventy dollars.

The package finally comes.  Direct from 301, No. 2, Hualangjia Industrial Park, No. 28 Tongfuyu Area, Kukeng Community, Guanlang Street, Longhua District, Shenzhen Yuxinyuan Electronic Technology Co., Ltd.

It comes in a box labeled "Tragebare Munddusche", which is (not quite correct) German for "Portable Mouth Douche" (or "shower," which is less funny, but equally mysterious for something that sprays water inside your mouth) - and the first e (after the g) in tragbar isn't supposed to be there.  The side of the box indicates that the product is for a "mündliche Situation" (an oral situation) (sic).

There is mention of a warranty, but no warranty form was included with the product.  Sloppy, sloppy.

Also nowhere does it tell you how to charge the damn thing.  But that's not their fault.  They included a USB port and according to my younger-generation husband, "USB plugs have pretty much replaced regular plugs these days - plug it into your computer."  Done.  Now to wait six hours for the damn thing to charge.

Meanwhile I'm reading the user manual in English, German, French, Spanish and Italian. Interesting stuff.  For example, in Italian, Warning #6 reads "Non dirigere il getto sotto la lingua, nelle orecchie, nel naso o altre parti sensibili."  In English, that is "Do not inject water into the bottom of tongues, ears, noses, or other sensitive body parts."

Now I'll freely admit I ought to be ashamed of myself poking fun at non-English-speaking people's use of my native tongue, especially after decades of encouraging English-learners to eschew any inclination to apologize for non-native things that come out of their mouth while they are still learners.  Errors go with learning. But it's not just the lack of English "Sprachgefühl" (feeling for the language) that's giving me the giggles; it's the thought that they think people need to be told not to stick this water-pik into their ears.

Theme park in Shenzhen, China

It's not as if Shenzhen couldn't find native speakers of English when they need them.  It's the third largest city in China, after Beijing and Shanghai, with a population of thirteen million people, and it's not far from Hong Kong. It's that the mouth douche manufacturer has taken the attitude that the boss's nephew needed a job so they left the English translation of the manual to him.  Makes me think of my friend Norm's saying, "close enough for government work!"

A very trivial issue, this.  But I couldn't get past the water-pik in the ears image and just had to comment.

The red light has turned green.  Time to water-floss the teefs and see how well this thing works.  In addition to steering clear of the nose and ears, I'm starting on "child" setting.  Not sure how much pressure my gums can take.

Some passing thoughts of a May-baby

"Never apologize, never explain."  I heard somebody say that once and took it on as not a half-bad maxim for going through life.  For a while.  Eventually I decided it was not the best rule to live by and there were times when flexibility made a lot more sense than following rigid principles. Nuanced thinking beats ideological commitment.  

I turn 86 in a few weeks. That means I am now closer to 90 years of age than I am to the already-really-old age of 80, and I find that a seriously sobering thought. And I am aware that the corrolary to "never apologize, never explain" also needs to go: that is, "live life without regrets."  Much as I would like to think I played my cards to the best of my ability as I faced one challenge after another, as I look back now I find myself overwhelmed by the realization that if I could live life over again I would do a whole lot of things differently.

Right off the top, if I had known I was going to live twenty-four years of my life in Japan, I would have studied Japanese far more seriously right from the start.  I would have practiced my Czerny finger exercises on the piano, I would have learned to play soccer and spent a whole lot more time getting physical exercise.

I had a friend - her name was Gretchen - who said to me once, when I asked her if she had any regrets in life, "No.  There's nothing I would do over again because I like who I am today and if I had lived life differently I wouldn't be that person."  Then she added, "Of course, I would have spent less time doing some of those things."

I woke up with an ear-worm this morning of a song from the Weimar Republic days.  Don't know why it should show up out of nowhere; it just did.  It's one of my favorite pieces of music.  It begins, "Das gibt's nur einmal (It only happens once),  [English lyrics; Seven language version]  and is a pitch for enjoying things while you can, while they still are there to enjoy.  It has the wonderful line in it, "...denn jeder Frühling hat nur einen Mai (because every springtime has only one month of May)."

One of the best things I ever did was to take my junior year of college in Germany.  I went to Munich, one of the world's best cities, I'm convinced, and got, at the age of twenty, my first taste of the big city, the theaters, the opera and concert halls, museums, all manner of types of people, endless intellectual challenges. At the university I got to take a course in the history of the Third Reich taught by Germans who had lived through it and could give perspective I could not have gotten in my own country.  One thing that has stuck with me was that it gave me a lens through which to understand the dangers of MAGA authoritarianism.  It helped me see our manipulator-in-chief, Donald Trump, as an "out-of-the-frying-pan-into-the fire" solution to the failure of American capitalism and its toxic Ayn Rand-like worship of individual rights at the expense of communal welfare.

Americans, I am convinced, routinely fail to prioritize equity. We have built a national cultural structure in which some of us have been able to become super rich while so many others of us get left behind. We (a critical mass of us) have persuaded ourselves that working collectively for the common welfare is socialist - and we have made that a bad word.  Isn't wealth the sign of God's favor?  Aren't rich people smarter than poor people?  Trump and his opportunistic enablers are the outcome of this folly.

I know that even hinting at a comparison between Trump and Hitler is a good way to make a fool of yourself - Hitler's Germany lacked the institutional strength that America is beginning to show at long last. But the parallels - the scapegoating, trolling, ghosting, blatant lying - are there and they are sobering to consider even in their paler versions.

*     *     *

On Christmas Eve I fell getting out of the car in front of my house and broke my hip.  More precisely, I broke the femur in my left leg. I have mentioned elsewhere that they sent an ambulance (and two fire engines, of course) to haul me off to the hospital where on Christmas Day they put a rod through the marrow in the bone from hip to knee, setting me off on the journey of learning to walk again.  And the challenge of learning how not to burn my supremely dutiful husband out from exhaustion.  He's already totally transformed the house by putting in a chair lift and grab bars everywhere and he hounds me to follow the exercise plan the physical therapists have set out for me. There's a bit of friction there.  He, unlike me, still lives in the future and wants me to repair sooner rather than later. I'm content to go into rest mode and let the body take the time it needs. I am now working on getting up and down the stairs (strong leg up first going up, weak leg down first going down) and am already getting quite efficient at frying eggs and making toast without assistance.  It only took me a week to figure out that I could avoid spilling the tea if I brought the cup, the milk and the teapot to the table separately instead of carrying the full cup on the tray on the walker across the kitchen.

To return to that song, "Das gibt's nur einmal (It only happens once),  for a minute...  It has an illustrious history.  Originally from the 1931 German film Der Kongreß tanzt  - Congress Dances - the song became wildly popular and was translated into many languages.  It  was outlawed by the Nazis and became a form of resistance to the Third Reich.  I love the fact that I was born in May - the merry merry month of May, April showers bring May flowers and all that. And all the folks - I'm thinking of Thich Nhat Hanh, the "master of mindfulness" and Eckhart Tolle's The Power of Now.  All sorts of people have stressed the wisdom of seizing the present moment.  Every springtime has only one month of May!  Don't blow it.  Enjoy it to the fullest.

My leg still pains me; it will be some time before that pain is no more.  Donald Trump's enablers pain me; it will be some time before the pain is no more. But the month of May is almost here, and that's cause for rejoicing.

Both/and - not either/or.  I spoke earlier of living by nuanced flexibility rather than by rigid principles. Flooded as I am these days with memories of the past and sadness over loved ones who have passed on before me, I am working pretty much full time trying to both live every present moment to the fullest and at the same time allowing myself to surrender to the nostalgia of treasured memories.

So this is what it's like to be old!?  Not all that bad.