This weekend people who are called "subjects," living in the United Kingdom, will be glued to their screens, or lining the streets of London, while, no doubt, still glued to their iPhone screens, all gaga over the coronation/investiture/"You've Got Royal Blood" show making King Charles, officially, king of the UK and all of the realm of the Empire of Great Britain.
Barry Blitt's New Yorker cover captures the essence of the moment perfectly: A dwarf king, the product of generations of in breeding, all dressed up in a great uniform--and the uniform's the thing when it comes to British aristocracy--sits childlike in the big throne which once, 300 years ago perhaps, actually held a man or woman of consequence.
But Charles, like the rest of the British royalty is a majestic mediocrity in search of attention which is simply not deserved. If he shows any competence at all, this is celebrated as unappreciated prowess hidden from the public. In her New Yorker article about the king, Rebecca Mead relates the story of the head of a non profit devoted to preservation of big cats, who told the king the value of big cats is they are at the top of the food chain, so if tigers and lions are thriving then all the flora and fauna beneath them are doing well; it's a bell-weather of a healthy ecosystem to see big cats thriving. A few weeks later the king repeated all this on a trip to South Africa. "It told me that, when he is touched by something, it registers, and that he has a remarkable capacity to apply it."
Well, isn't that remarkable! Give the man something he is interested in and he can repeat it! And of course, the king of the jungle, top of the food chain. One would think that might register with any king.
The Brits have, in fact, produced some splendid men and women and seminal thinkers, like Isaac Newton and Charles Darwin, and some pretty nifty writers, like Charles Dickens, D.H. Lawrence, Jane Austen and John LeCarre and some intensely interesting thinkers like George Bernard Shaw, Bertrand Russell and Christopher Hitchens. Not to mention, some pretty amazing technology like radar, the CAT scanner and the MRI and, sadly, the nuclear bomb, and some discoveries like Watson and Crick's double helix model of DNA. And this does not even begin to include the Beatles, the Rolling Stones and Andrew Lloyd Weber and Jesus Christ Superstar.
All that from a smallish island with a history of ruthless selfishness, imperial arrogance and downright genocide, but somehow, that nation came out on the right side of history during the planet's most gargantuan and important apocalypse, which we now call World War Two, and despite all their meanness and criminality, that constitutional monarchy managed to engender a system called "liberal democracy" in which a loyal opposition vies with the majority party to govern with a spirit of compromise and accommodation.
All that is, we will be told again and again, captured and encapsulated in a symbolic King, the European version of the Japanese emperor.
