Culver City played host on Sunday to royal tourists, the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge. Gawkers gathered to gaze at the celebrity couple. To those with a more pragmatic outlook, however, traffic was diverted and security was enhanced.
The British monarchy is and has for years been little more than a reality TV series. True, it’s merely a symbolic and largely ceremonial function that the institution serves, but it is also a specter of undemocratic values and imperialist aggression that harkens back to an age of brutality and conquest that we in this century (ought to) find repugnant.
The divine right of kings was neither divine nor right. And those kings wielded absolute power simply by virtue (an ironic word choice) of their birth. Meanwhile, those poor souls with the misfortune of having been born without royal parentage lived (and still live) with hardship and deprivation.
There are other hollow and toothless figureheads also representative of ignobility that we justifiably do not celebrate. Consider the grand wizard (or whatever) of the Ku Klux Klan, for instance. The Klan has about as much sway in contemporary American culture as the queen exercises in Parliament (am I really comparing the queen with the KKK?).
Why does our modern society allow the painful reminder of a bygone era to remain not only extant but practically visible from outer space? History? The Confederate battle flag is historical, one supposes, but being an incendiary and visceral totem of a (not-to-distant) past transgression, its display at public buildings is rightfully disdained and outlawed.
In America, the Royals are a perennially lousy Midwestern baseball team, monarchs are beautiful orange-colored butterflies and the only thing smacking of regality worth its salt was an Oscar-winning movie about a stuttering statesman brilliantly portrayed by Colin Firth.
And yet, the reader may notice that we’ve devoted not a small amount of space to cover the duke and duchess. Feel free to draw your own conclusions. Tally-ho.