Living Long

AMAZINGLY, THE QUEEN wore the crown when Winston Churchill, who was born in 1875, was prime minister, and still wore it when the new prime minister, Liz Truss, who was born one hundred and one years later in 1975, assumed the prime ministry two days before her majesty's death. Extended, comprehensive, enduring regality. Several yeras ago Elizabeth II surpassed Queen Victoria as the longest serving monarch in British history. As is always the case when the famous and powerful pass away, the eulogies were a bit exagerrated. I recaal that when the funeral for former president Richard Nixon was held in 1994, the eulogizers gushed with praise for the disgraced ex president. A friend of mine voiced aggravation that none of them so much as mentioned Nixon's "darker" impusles and moments, but only his achievements. "When are they going to come clean"? asked he. My reponse, which which I am still content, was: "There'll be plenty of time for that later, for the entire future. A person's funeral is not the proper time to enumerate the vices of the deceased." And I believe that. The problem doesn't actually exist regardin Queen Elizabeth; if she had any vices or shortcomings, which surely she did, I am unaware of them. The new PM, Madam Truss, called the late queen "the rock upon which the United Kingdom stood firm." So far, so good. Then she went on to describe her majesty as having presided over a period of British history during which the kingdom "grew and prospered". With that, those who prefer truth must beg to differ. Quite the opposite, actually. During the reign of Elizabeth, from 1952 to 2022, Brittania did quite the opposite; it shrank and spent decades mired in economic stagnation, through no fault, needless to say, of her royal highness. During the nineteen seventies, Great Britian endured such financial collapse that the whole financial system was threatened with complete collapse, but, somehow, through a bit of book keeping, endured. At about the same time, bushels of pound notes were spent paying for a trip the queen took, to her Canadian possession. Arguably, her dignified, proud presence in British public life inspired her subjects to endure and persevere. It has been hundreds of years since the ruling monarch of England has had any real power. The monarchy, alas, has long since been reduced to symbolic status, in keeping with modernity. Arguably, the institution is an anachronism, a relic of a past which bears no longer any true relevance to the present or the future, and an expensive one at that. I recall in 1976, Elizabeth decided to atend the summer olympica in Canada, Canada remaining then and to this day as one of the last vestiges of British imperialism. She sailed across the pond in a yacht which displaced enough water to cause a rise in sea level, which was in itself attended by a flotilla of various sea craft; a brazen demonstration of British naval power, which the empire maintains to this day. Millions of pounds of expense for a single person, albeit a most important one. Progressive sorts pointed this out, and it was controversial. Royalty, like religion, provides people emotional stability, comfort, and inspiration. And although I could understand the complaints, failure to understand the subjective value of royalty is to run the risk of not being empathetic to human nature. We are, after all, frail little creatures, needing any cofort and stability we can get. That, the lady gave us, in abundance.