Just Looking ...

I am proud to publish the first post on this blog on Her Majesty's 80th birthday. It is almost in bad taste in Canada today to be interested in the Queen unless you are 80 yourself. To be a monarchist seems contrary to our democratic values and to have a British queen against our values as a multicultural society. For a left-leaning academic like myself any serious enthusiasm about Her Majesty certifies, perhaps, an unacceptably elitist streak, but more likely a kind of dumbness not compatible with being a professor, a character popularly imagined as possessing a functional cerebelum. The truth is that, paradoxically, royalty has come to be seen as a popular culture entertainment reserved mainly for the supposedly half-witted "low-Other" whom the privileged bourgeois love to despise and laugh at. These are the sort of people who read romance novels and watch wrestling, and get their news from supermarket tabloids.
In our course we will learn to get rid of such haughty attitudes. But my point today is simply that I would like to wish the Queen a happy birthday. When I was growing up in a socialist republic I often wished we had a king or queen. I was thrilled when I became a Canadian citizen to have been asked to swear loyalty to "Her Majesty and her assigns," though I don't remember if my English was then good enough to know that "assign" was not something associated with holes. And as a grandchild of Holocaust victims I continue to think that Hitler would have been prevented from committing genocide had the German Kaiser been allowed to remain. The Kaiser was, by all accounts, an upper class twit of Monty Python stature and also an anti-Semite. But I once interviewed a researcher on the Kaiser about this and he agreed that even so he would probably have used his moral authority to stop the worst madness. (He did speak out against it, a little and to no effect, when he was in exile). God forbid we should ever need it, but somehow I feel that even a crazy dysfunctional royal family is a little bit of a guarantee against the far worse craziness that governments are capable of. So I decided to send HM a telegram wishing her a happy birthday.
In less than a second I received an automated email that said: "Her Majesty the Queen has asked her web staff to thank you for your birthday wishes."