Glamour, celebrity — and ideals
Here, after a day of watching Victorians go gaga for the Royal Family, is the best argument for maintaining Canada’s monarchy: Donald Trump. Seriously. Sort of. OK, not really. Still, what stood out Saturday was the flat-out adulation accorded the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge. People hung over the Patricia Bay Highway overpasses as they drove by. About 25,000 showed up on the legislature lawn. Young women whom Kate paused to chat to along the red carpet were giddy afterward. For some it was just a brush with glamour and celebrity, but for others the draw was what the royals represent, the personification of an ideal. Hero worship, based on values.
This is what opponents of the monarchy forget. People want other people to look up to, which is fine, but it gets tricky when said idols are counted on for both moral and political leadership, are admired for qualities they don’t really have, are given unearned respect. That’s how you end up electing George W. Bush not once, but twice. (Really, America, the first time was bad luck, but the second was sheer sloppiness.)
I have a book coming out soon that contains a chapter on Victorians’ relationship with the monarchy, which is described as being something like our relationship with lacrosse: more popular than elsewhere in Canada, but still not embraced with universal zeal.
If I may continue the argument from the book (and I may, because I wrote it) the sad truth is that the people who seem most passionate about the institution are those who oppose it — republicans. “Wretched, grim-lipped, dour, pedantic fun-suckers (I don’t mean that in a negative way; it’s not their fault that they’re totally dead inside), these are the same puritanical zealots who want to ban street hockey, Teletubbies, Harry Potter, and any mention of Christmas outside the privacy of your home. Their hobbies include worshipping Stalin and burning works of art.
“We hear from them each Victoria Day when groups with names like the Citizens for a Canadian Republic or the Humourless Bastards Who Should Devote This Kind of Energy to Real Problems demand that we punt Elizabeth 2.0.”
At one point they tried to chuck out the Citizenship Act requirement for new Canadians to swear allegiance to the Queen, calling it “a major embarrassment that Canada hasn’t yet dealt with this relic of colonialism.” No, it’s a major embarrassment that the disparity in living standards between indigenous and nonindigenous Canadians is so great, that we are the highest per capita consumers of energy on the planet, and that we got halfway through converting to metric, then sort of gave up. The Citizenship Act, by comparison, is a minor curiosity.
But they keep telling us that Canada is no longer a British colony, as if we didn’t know this, and that our monarchy is illogical. Well, of course it’s illogical. All monarchies are until you consider the alternative, which is to replace the figurehead at the top with Vladimir Putin, or Bashar alAssad, or some other unfettered “strongman” and end up with a country full of people who feel pressured into cutting their hair line Kim Jong-un.
And now, a sizable number of our southern neighbours have decided to invest their faith in Donald Trump, a man who is — how to put this delicately? — a mean, vulgar, conceited, shallow, whining liar, not only stupid but, worse, ignorant. (Stupidity can be forgiven but ignorance is a choice.) Is that really who they want to believe in?
By contrast, the Canadian Press’s Dirk Meissner wrote a piece this week in which he found a connection between the compassion of William’s mother, Diana, who showed a fearful world that it could treat AIDS sufferers with kindness, and the subjects reflected in the itinerary of the royal visit: a visit to a Downtown Eastside agency that helps mothers struggling with substance abuse, Victoria’s Cridge Centre for the Family, which offers help for children, women and families. They do that sort of stuff all the time.
Think of that when weighing the merit of our illogical anachronism.