Tea with the Queen
The protests at the G20 Summit in London have gained as much attention as President Obama’s giving Queen Elizabeth an iPod. Which tells you something about the media.
This story was inspired in part by a segment on Tuesday’s Anderson Cooper 360, a ten minute report and discussion about the protocol the Obamas must obey in their audience with the Queen. Don’t leave the room before she does. Don’t turn your back on her. Don’t shake her hand. Don’t curtsy. Don’t speak until spoken to. And I kept thinking, “Who the hell is this woman?” What possibly justifies this demand that any head of state put on such a display of submission? I don’t care if it’s the “leader of the Free World” or the mayor of a Bunghole, Alberta, either one has more legitimacy than this monarchist relic.
Then all Wednesday reports of anger, frustration, peaceful protest, police violence, protester violence, and more came out of the streets of London. And I kept thinking, what a farce. Here’s your iPod. The world is going to crap, but here’s your iPod. The global financial system is collapsing and people around the world are losing jobs, homes and going hungry, but here’s your frikkin’ iPod.
Of course, the peaceful protests are by and large ignored. I guess it’s hard to notice those when protesters take over the Royal Bank of Scotland for a few moments.
April 2nd, 2009 at 12:23 am
[...] You should totally like read this cartoon. [...]
April 2nd, 2009 at 5:29 am
The queen is an absurd relic of our social/tribal need to construct meaning out of nothing by creating deities. In this case by putting an individual on a pedestal then proclaiming them to be royal as in not common like the rest of us. The trouble of course is that we need the person on the pedestal to believe they are better than the rest of us so that we can somehow feel better about ourselves. The person on the pedestal is more than happy to believe and to expect the rest of us to believe that he or she is better than the rest of us and to act accordingly. We may wonder why the British continue to accept and value this arrangement, but are Americans any different in our adoration of and efforts to imitate icons of political and economic power?
April 2nd, 2009 at 10:18 am
You’re right. It’s one of the things I hate about our celebrity culture. Billions of dollars and kilowatts is spent encouraging our admiration/envy/gossip about the lives of mediocre people. It’s like high school, only worse.
April 6th, 2009 at 10:24 am
The “protester violence” seems to have been little more than a few black-hooded “anarchists” breaking windows. How many of those do you suppose were agents provocateurs for MI-5 and the like?
April 6th, 2009 at 10:34 am
Those guys pop up everywhere and I often have that thought. There is no way to tell, of course. I think the police violence was worse than the protester violence, because it always gets more out of hand and victimizes people who are peacefully protesting but find themselves in the arc of a baton swing.
April 8th, 2009 at 3:04 pm
Exactly. Also disturbing is how, in reports about cases such as the gentleman who suffered a fatal heart attack after being knocked down by London cops, they go out of their way to distinguish “innocent bystanders,” who had no intention of protesting but just found themselves in the wrong place … leaving the implication that people peacefully exercising their rights are not as innocent, and perhaps even deserved, or at least should have expected, police violence.