On the Passing of the Queen

 

One isn't obligated to comment on the passing of every single meaningful personage, but in this case, I feel it should not go unremarked that while I didn't know her, I appreciate that her astonishing 70 year reign will feel like the passing of an era to so many among the 2 billion souls of the Commonwealth and elsewhere. 

Even hearing "God Save the King" seems jarring--and it seems like the royal formerly known as Prince Charles has accepted King Charles III because if he's gone by "Charles" for this long, how can you throw "George" or whatever on with one's coronation? It would be absurd.

I think the word that has echoed in remembrances that strikes me as awkward is "stability", If anything, Queen Elizabeth II represented a Great Generation face of the post-WW2 era of trying to move on. She wasn't responsible for colonialism, but represented the family that wrought the scars of empire on whole nations and was not, herself, the person who would ameliorate them. She maintained the face of the royal family and the duty to service of the state but did not essay to remake it.

Stability is a word that often means keeping up appearances. Maintaining a status quo.  Monarchs are not apt to be revolutionaries, and for my part, while I don't despise her for the sins of her ancestors, it only goes to show I am very white and my Irish ancestors left for the US a long while ago. I'm sure my distant cousins living through the Troubles would have felt differently and more personally about it. History has a bad habit of not judging people for what they failed to do when they weren't particularly expected to do it. 

As an American, I was able to view the Queen more as a character in a royal soap opera played out over the front pages of tabloids. I suppose that sounds seamy and I am not sure that isn't what the royals had coming. Randy Andy (who his mum covered for, and while love and duty are meaningful, so was his culpability), Charlie the Tampon, the dirty way they did Diana, Camilla the Homewrecking Vampire, Prince Phillip as a creature not unlike Fawlty Towers' "Major".  And Elizabeth, the resilient monarch, just keeping the whole rotting thing together. 

I toast, not the new King or the memory we have of his mother, but Archie and Lilibet, her great-grands via Prince Harry and Meghan Markle.  We in the US are supposedly shed of kings and queens (despite the coronation some want to push on a decrepit real estate magnate/game show host) and the idea of using human beings as a symbol just feels off to me. Maybe there needs to be a post-royal future--that what the family represents or is supposed to is just too batshit and stressful and they should just be healthy and work on themselves.  And the UK, etc. also moves on. Beyond an age of the romanticizing of personages based on their birthright, and on to something more meritocratic.  

These babies just got titles, but don't need them. I would like to believe we can move past such titles, as well.