'God Save thar Graaay-shuss Queen'

Phil Burpee

Phil Burpee, Columnist, Pincher Creek Voice

Yes, indeed - 'long live thar noble Queen'. My goodness - how time flies when you're having fun. Can it be sixty years? Seems like just yesterday that fresh-faced girl was stepping off the plane from a jolly good outing at Treetops in Kenya, called home by the tragic death of her father George VI, our King, and an early victim of a rather over-indulgent fondness for nicotiana tabacum, aka Virginia Golden Leaf tobacco, to the tune of about two or three packs a day. George is now, of course, fondly remembered as the protagonist in the film The King's Speech, which celebrates his overcoming a debilitating stutter in order to become the inspirational radio voice of the King and Emperor of the British Empire during the dark days of the Second World War. "....Britons never, never, never shall be slaves."....etc.

Our Queen's mum, Elizabeth the Queen Mum, that doughty and somewhat gin-soaked old dear, was famously quoted thusly when asked, during the German bombardment of London, whether she would send her children out of the city to the countryside for safety's sake: - "The children are with me, and I am with the King, and the King is with his subjects in the time of their greatest peril." Quite a different take on things from that of another George - 'Dubya' - who hopped onto Air Force One straight out of a Kindergarten class in Florida and disappeared for an embarrassing length of time immediately following the attacks on the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001. That George, whose Daddy had secured him a nice, cushy job in the Air National Guard during the Vietnam War, thus avoiding anything even faintly akin to combat, was to re-emerge in a scrappy and belligerent mood to lead the forces of the Free World against the amassing hordes of the Evildoers. And herein lies one of the great paradoxes of our head of state, the hereditary Monarch, Queen Elizabeth II. As were her parents, she is both ridiculous and weirdly admirable, all in one breath. What are we to make of her?

Coronation of Elizabeth, 1953

Our system of government is known as a constitutional monarchy. We have a Parliament comprising a lower (elected) and upper (appointed) house, the lower being the Commons (the Rabble), and the upper being the Senate (the Cud-chewers). The Speaker of the House sits upon the Throne up at the front of the Commons, the active legislative chamber, to keep an eye on things and to make sure nobody fires spitballs or unduly lobs excessively lurid obscenities across the aisle. He or she represents the Monarch, overseeing the proceedings of government. If things get really bad, the Speaker can call in the Governor General, who also represents the Monarch, but does so for the entire country (picture your teacher in grade six calling in the Principal). Theoretically, if things got totally out of hand, the Queen herself could be summoned to attend the chamber and pick up her mace, that jewel-encrusted battle-club, and thusly brandish it about the wretched skulls of the Members (picture your Principal calling in the Superintendent)...... "SILENCE, YOU WORMS!" - even as the Gentleman of the Black Rod loomed menacingly at the door preventing any attempted escape.

For the Queen is our Head of State. She embodies the State. She is the Great Mother. She is the Boss - the Boss of Bosses. She refers to government in the possessive form - 'My government, and my Prime Minister' - and the Opposition self-refers as 'Her Majesty's Loyal Opposition". In England she is the head of the Anglican Church, her antecedent Henry VIII having extravagantly boosted the Pope, along with his Roman Tribe, and assumed his place, intrinsically binding Church and State. Soberingly, she is also the Commander in Chief of our Armed Forces. Every man, woman, child, soldier, cop, dog and tree in this vast land is ultimately under legal obeisance to our Sovereign and her Crown - an eighty-five year old grandmother with a penchant for gaily-coloured pill-box hats and a huge, bedraggled, swarming extended Royal Family of chinless ninnies, vapid reprobates, priapic Viscounts, latter-day remittance-men, horsey-looking Ladies, bastard claimants of bastard claimants, fox-hunting buffoons, and a generally horrible, sorry mob of braying, yachting, holidaying, whining, grinning, drooling, snivelling, mooching, useless, burden-on-society, poop-in-the-pants dolts. But such are the vagaries of blind allegiance to genes. Investing the Supreme Power of the State in the serendipitous first arrival of one particular sperm amongst a wriggling steeplechase of 200 million or so was always bound to be a haphazard business. Witness our King-in-waiting - the oddity known as Charles - dear oh, dear - if ever there was an argument for republicanism.................

But now it is the Diamond Jubilee of the reign of Elizabeth. I was three when she assumed the throne, and still remember the occasional kerfuffle when she might pop over to the colony to whiz by the plebs in a big, black car, variously flanked by scarlet-tuniced Mounties, stopping occasionally for a 'walkabout' to receive some wilted posies from an excited little miss, as Prince Philip wandered off to admire some new pig barn, trying to look engaged as he was offered a detailed description of the efficiencies of the new proto-type shit-slurry pond. Let us not forget, however, the estimable underpinnings of this enigmatic woman. In her youth she was brought up to be forthright and self-reliant. She trained as a heavy-duty mechanic and could break down the power-train of a Land Rover or a big Leland lorry in a jiffy. She learned to ride horses as soon as she could walk and, in her day, could likely have dusted half the cowboys in Alberta. She still holds weekly council with the Prime Minister of Great Britain, and has seen twelve British and eleven Canadian Prime Ministers come and go. It is perhaps no great fault of her own that she had foisted upon her a minor functionary of the Greek Royal House in the person of the regrettable Philip, who proceeded from strength to strength as a purveyor of racist gaffes and mindless musings and, other than extruding some royal essence from his loins, seems to have accomplished little other than traipsing along two strides behind HRH, taking delight in driving his fancy horse-carriages around the expansive lawns of Windsor Castle, and maybe blasting the odd partridge on the moors of Balmoral.

Last summer we experienced the dreadful and embarrassing spectacle of Will and Kate 'goshing' their way through Alberta. Pert little English buns were dutifully packed into designer Wranglers, and toothsome Stampede photo-ops proliferated like unwanted pop-ups. They are fawned over not because of any particular aspect of their character or any intrinsic contribution to the wellbeing of humanity. They are celebrities entirely owing to their happening to be Royals. And they are deeply wired in to the foundational mechanisms of our constitution and our system of government. For the very integrity of our national apparatus of both governance and jurisprudence is bizarrely invested in the anticipated success of their sexual congress. Not only must they flutter, as it were, the bloodied sheet from out their nuptial bedroom window, but woe betide them if they do not produce yet another mewling Windsor brat at the appointed time. There is no other purpose for their union. "Hey Will! - breed or go home, Dude!"

So, maybe it's time to start thinking about putting an end to this punky charade. What is of value perhaps is the sequestering of the head of state above the grimy trials of actual government, with all its whoring and graft and lies and flimflammery and abrogations and fork-tongued abominations. In the United States we all too often see the sad spectacle of the President of the Republic, who is both the head of government and the head of state, the living embodiment of the nation, being brought low by either circumstance or incompetence, or both. In a parliamentary democracy, the Prime Minister is the de facto leader of the country, but he or she is always buffered from the personification of the State by the presence, in our case, of the Sovereign, or, as in the case of India and others, and much preferably, by the appointed or elected President, who functions much as our Governor General does, but has no actual power, notwithstanding certain anachronistic but hollow constitutional attachments to said office. Here, the State remains aloof and constant above the roilings of the mob. Not a bad thing.

Queen Elizabeth II is surely the last of her kind. She has survived the inanities and pudding-headedness of her vacuous and distracted husband these sixty-plus years. She has survived the sad, terminal spiral of her sister Margaret into booze, pills and depression. She has survived the rebellion, and subsequent martyrdom, of that big-eyed, leggy party-girl forever embedded in the glam magazines as Princess Di. She has survived the mind-numbingly awful Camilla, who gave rise to Charles' infamous tampon reveries. And she has, most sombrely, even survived the appalling ludicrousness of her own role - that of the hereditary Queen, monarch of all the teeming masses beneath her. All this she has done with a certain stolid panache - steaming through modern history like a grand battle-cruiser-cum-luxury-liner. She has sought to embody the State with solemnity and steadfastness. She is, for this, indeed owed a respectful awe.

So I say - Well done, Your Majesty. Jolly, jolly good. Hip hip hooray. Dei Gratia Regina, and all that. Forty-one guns - BOOM BOOM BOOM, etc. etc. etc. Thanks awfully, awfully much for the memories and all the portraits on our money. But please, please, please spare us the grim fate of having to deal with your progeny. Fire them all. Fire yourself. Post this job for a commoner - somebody WE can fire when the going gets weird. Pour yourself a gin - pull up a cozy spot by the fire - send the Duke out to fetch a jug of yak's milk - call in the Corgis - unplug the phone - close your eyes and hum your favourite ditty as you nod off to a well-deserved slumber: -

"........Send me victooo-rious, hap-py and glooo-rious, long to-oo re-eign ooo-ver them.

Go-od saaave thaaa Queeeeen.”

Time to hang up the royal spurs

Phil Burpee

February 11, 2012