I’m not a huge fan of royalty in general or the Royals in particular and so the recent Royal Wedding would have been a distinct pain in the keester had I actually paid any attention to it. I managed to avoid it only with great diligence, but now the flap with President Obama and the Queen Mother has pulled me into the nonsensical quagmire that is the worldwide fetishism about people descended from kings and the like.
I would traditionally just continue my policy of ignoring our infantile obsession about such silliness, except now the Royal snub of my President has left me fully outraged and prepared to demand an apology from whatever figurehead fancy pants is in charge of issuing official mea culpas on behalf of the Royal Family.
In case anybody missed it, President Obama apparently mildly flubbed a bit of state visit protocol when he toasted Queen Betty just as the band was launching into a respectful rendition of “God Save The Queen.” I’ll concede it was bad form, but add that I regard it as much more problematic how Her Highness responded to the moment. President Obama made a simple mistake with no intention of disrespecting the most important purely figural and symbolic relic in the world.
In other words, it was an accident. In the moment that this heinous offense occurred, Queen Betty made a calculated, conscious decision to leave my President awkwardly hanging out there, rather than say, politely whispering to him that the toast should follow the conclusion of the song. Any kind of a gentle little gesture or, gasp, even a word or two, would have taken the edge off the goofy event and not provided the wing nuts on the starboard side with one more ridiculous clip to play on an endless loop.
Nope, the frosty old crone apparently decided that our President needed a lesson in Royal manners and opted to deliver same with all the world watching. For a group that has such a preoccupation with clinging to centuries-old ritual, you would think the Brits would be aware that empires have clashed over slights of a similar nature. Which is not to say that I am advocating preemptive attack on Great Britain, merely noting that the chilly, impromptu message from Betty to Barack is not the kind of thing we expect from close allies.
In the interest of journalistic integrity, I should admit to more than a bit of anti-British bias, which I assume came from having the surname O’Connell and hanging around in taverns in the 1970s where such sentiment was widespread and particularly useful if you wanted to be included when somebody bought the bar the next round of drinks. As I aged and things quieted down a bit in Northern Ireland over the past 20 years I eased off on that stance as well, but there’s still a visceral uneasiness with all things related to the Monarchy.
And I don’t like it any better when the royal highness is some oil-soaked schlub in the Middle East with seven Rolls Royces in his garage and a vast unwashed and restless populace that apparently would like to try its hand at democracy.
God has presumably been saving various kings and queens for a couple of thousand years, which would seem to me to be long enough.
- T.S. O’Connell
