The queen mother of all blind spots.
Adulate British royals? You may as well be MAGA. Plus, another weird family story!
1.
I really didn’t want to write about the death of some old lady I’ve paid zero attention to most of my life.
I didn’t want to say anything much about QEII or the British monarchy in general, although I expressed some strong opinions to my Facebook friends. Up until the weekend, I was doing what I’d promised last week: researching our nation’s water infrastructure, its increasingly outdated and barely functioning urban systems, which now experience further stress under climate-change-related droughts and super-storms….(it’s an important topic and I’ll have to get back to it…)
But then I suddenly remembered that Elizabeth is my middle name, given to me by Indian immigrant parents.
They were both born in 1936, so they were school kids when their nation gained independence from the Empire in 1947. My sister was given a Biblical middle name, as well, although not one pinned directly to the, um, House of the Oppressor. I understand I am doing what you’re not supposed to do, projecting my modern values on a previous generation that seemingly didn’t know better—but seriously, it’s hard for me not to view my middle name as a symptom of post-colonial Stockholm syndrome.
2.
A certain number of historically astute, naturally skeptical Americans have always questioned why so many fellow citizens fawn over the British royals, with their glittery trappings of feudalism and the divine right of kings. In years past, I’ve side-eyed Princess Di fans and other Royals obsessives without any further analysis than stupid celebrity worship/gossip…reactionary anti-feminism…dictator fantasies of the weak-willed.
But now is different. We are in a dangerously delicate moment where the President was just emboldened to call out the powerful fascist elements threatening us. Yeah, sure, he was more conciliatory than he should have been to the essentially nonexistent “decent” Republicans who aren’t Trump cultists. Yeah, sure, somebody did a truly awful job of set-designing his September 1st speech in Philadelphia; the deep red/receding blue chiaroscuro lighting and the explicit military presence only served to heighten the hysteria on the right. See? See? It’s we liberals who are the real tyrants here. (Oy vey.) Despite its shortcomings as political theater, the language and posture of Biden’s speech were unlike any we’ve heard in recent memory. And well overdue. And probably too little too late. Still, many of us were thrilled to finally hear it said plainly.
Then a few days later, there comes this outpouring of public grief and nostalgia, using empty words like grace and dignity to describe the representative of a brutal, greedy empire. Not just any old empire, but a fairly recent one that propagated explicit and intentional white Anglo-Saxon supremacy as its prime directive. Oh, there have been some silly little addenda about how Elizabeth was different from her lineage because she happened to exist while the Empire shrunk and several dozen nations fought for or negotiated their independence. Or that she should be admired for not being as obviously awful as her forbears. Also that she was such a hard worker. Fine, admire a person who will never experience unmet material needs for not opting out of some important civic duties. We all love it when famous people turn out to be, you know, people.
None of this takes away the fact that Elizabeth was the product of a racist, classist, and religiously exclusive power structure. An involuntary role, of course. She didn’t ask to be born into it. All the more reason not to act as if she were special or heroic. She was produced by a certain kind of machine for the express purpose of helping maintain that machine. Grace and dignity were among the required skills. She rose to the occasion. She fulfilled family expectations.
Then again, couldn’t the same be said about Ivanka and Jared, Donald Jr. and Eric, etc.? Ok, not the bit about grace and dignity, but you catch my drift.
I have a very smart friend, American by birth but an occasional resident of England and Spain during his youth, who believes constitutional monarchy is the best form of government. The people get their purely symbolic ruler—who bleeds off their need for a celebrity to mark the collective identity—while actual non-glamorous legislators get down to the actual governing.
Maybe that’s a reasonable argument in some abstract way, but again, we are not speaking abstractly. We are speaking about a view of the world in which a very, very narrow band of people is deemed qualified to rule, even if “ruling” in this case simply means presenting oneself as “mother” or “father” of a nation for people who enjoy political infantilization. A very narrow band of people, these born-to-rule types, who either hold racist views themselves or have been unwilling to publicly safeguard the mixed-race wife of a man fifth in line to take the throne.
Oh, but it must be a total coincidence that they are the same very narrow band of people who think this country has been “taken away” from them and must be “taken back” by any means necessary. Right?
3.
Please just shut up about how much you’ll miss the goddamn Queen and start thinking about how to defeat our homegrown fascists in November.
4.
Was it my father’s or my mother’s choice? Hard to remember if either of them ever told me, but Dad was the house Anglophile. He did become an American citizen at some point. Shortly after 9/11 that he began displaying US flag memorabilia among his other tchotchkes and put a “9/11 NEVER FORGET” bumper sticker on his (of course) Jaguar. That last one may have been a defensive move against random bigots in parking lots, but I don’t think my father was self-aware enough to do such a thing tactically. It would have been in keeping with his training as the mocked, belittled, and scapegoated son of a narcissistic father. He was a classic go-along-to-get-along guy, built for patriotism, one kind or another.
Maybe he was tasked with deciding our middle names since my mother had very specific reasons for choosing Hindi first names. I didn’t learn these reasons until well into adulthood. It was at a cousin’s wedding in 1995 in Phoenix. Late into the Endless Electric Slide phase of the reception, another cousin and I brought cocktails and cigarettes out to the hotel courtyard to escape the volume. “It’s too bad the A-branch of the family wasn’t invited,” he said. Hunh? Oh, I vaguely remembered my mother referring to her uncle Albert, who’d emigrated to California long ago; I’d never met him or his American-born children and grandkids.
This cousin proceeded to tell me that my mother’s maiden name was not our original ancestral name. It was an acronym created by my grandfather, Martin, using the first letters of all his siblings’ first names. Preferring not to invite identity theft, I’m not going to repeat the entire name here, but suffice it to say that it contains an M and an A and some other letters, in a formation that sounded legit enough to my non-Gujarati ear, but not recognizable like Patel or Desai or Gupta.
We, my mother and sister and I, this first cousin, the one getting married, and a few more…we were not just Martin’s grandchildren, but members of the so-called “M branch” of the family. I was 30 years old and this concept was completely new to me.
“Oh,” my cousin added, “the name was made up of the first initials of all the siblings, but it was only Martin and Albert who adopted it when they went into business together.”
(I’d heard some things about this family business from my mother: that it was basically a failure that kept my mother’s family in sordid poverty for all of her childhood.)
Back in New Jersey a few weeks later, I challenged my mother to explain what I’d heard. She and my father both were reflexive secret keepers who’d told us almost nothing about their childhoods in India.
Big fat tears started rolling down Mom’s face as she spoke. She told me how her father—my grandfather Martin, who died when I was still a toddler—was such a fanatical Christian that he decided to repudiate all vestiges of his family’s Hindu past, including the family surname. (I’ll omit the actual name here in the hopes of not giving away yet more info to the data monarchs who rule us all.)
The irony was that Martin's father, my great-grandfather, had converted to Christianity only halfheartedly and mostly as a practical matter. At that time in British India, converts had an easier time getting jobs, apartments, and places in good schools. My great-grandfather's expedient conversion ensured a first-rate, nun-supervised education for his children, but also gave his boy Martin the tools for rebellion: the religious fervor with which he would later denounce his family history.
“Why have you never told us any of this?”
“I was ashamed! I thought it was a ridiculous, fanatical thing my father had done! That's why I deliberately gave you and your sister Indian names. To defy what he had done!”
This was one of the very few times I felt some genuine identity with this woman who had spent most of her life tyrannizing me and undermining my attempts to be my own person. She was a rebel, her father was a rebel. They each took the usual path, first defying the generation before them, then turning about to help maintain the machine.
My own youthful rebellions and shows of independence were unwelcome, to say the very least. I’m sure my mother thought she was trying to keep me in line (in the lineage) for my own good. Trying to force me into my prescribed role of upholding the family machine and fulfilling collective expectations made before my birth.
5.
Again, I have spent the vast majority of my time on earth being utterly indifferent to the British monarchy, and a short period of time being downright hostile to the weird adulation of Princess Di, a rabid, relentless, and highly profitable adulation that more or less caused her violent death. I remember chatting with the novelist Caryl Phillips about the Princess, and he told me that by rule and custom, the wife of the heir to the crown had to be a virgin, come from a titled family, be Protestant for sure if not necessarily Anglican, and therefore—it went without saying—of white Anglo-Saxon heritage.
She and Charles had an arranged pretend-dynastic marriage, nothing more. And yet some enormous population of humans, I’m going to guess primarily women, seemed angry that Charles wouldn’t give Di the kind of magical fairytale love match she was “entitled” to receive because she fulfilled all the exacting requirements, including glamour. The groom and bride may have been equally unhappy to find themselves in a loveless marriage in order to maintain the machine, but that wasn’t the narrative I remember hearing. I just remember extreme judgment about Charles and Camilla: he was a cheat, she was a slut and ugly to boot, and Diana was the poor beautiful bulimic victim of a shitty husband. Not, of course, of insane and outdated expectations, hollow public performances, deadly paparazzi, endless media gossip—oh no, not any of that.
And now again I am seeing idiotic posts judging Charles for having the audacity to be, um, the devoted lifelong partner of the woman he actually loved.
Because that’s what’s really important here, folks. The lifestyles of the rich and famous. The love lives of total strangers. And nostalgia for a simpler time when we didn’t have to choose our rulers, or educate ourselves about upcoming votes, or do the hard work of negotiating equitably among conflicting needs and interests in a limited-resource world. We just looked on the telly one day, saw Dear Leader, and knew whom to love and obey.
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Your story is complex but this makes it more understandable. Thanks. We all connect in different ways to history of course. They really are all valid, though some (not yours...) are clearly more damaging (and shitty) than others. It is easy to forget others backgrounds and history and how that effects their current views. I've been thinking about this lately as I'm in Italy visiting my wife's family (second cousins and ancestral home). Her mother was an orphan born of an Italian immigrant and it's fascinating to see how things get passed on.
"And nostalgia for a simpler time when we didn’t have to choose our rulers, or educate ourselves about upcoming votes, or do the hard work of negotiating equitably among conflicting needs and interests in a limited-resource world." 💯 THIS!