Queen Elizabeth II and her husband arrive in the United States today to commemorate the 400th anniversary of the founding of Jamestown, a happy celebration of disease, famine and war with native Americans.
It seems funny that our forefathers staged a revolution to throw off the shackles of an oppressive monarchy and yet, centuries later, hundreds of modern Americans are clamoring to see the current monarch and fretting over what to wear and how to behave.
What also seems funny is the sanitized world in which the royals live. I wonder if they realize that wherever they go, they are seeing a highly glossed and polished view of what really is. They see schools where children stand quietly, wearing their best clothes, presumably pressed the night before. They see hospital wards that are clean, quiet and, I suspect, devoid of patients screaming in pain.
At NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, which the monarchs will visit during their current trip, the chief of public affairs is mainly concerned with making sure the queen and prince "don't trip over extension cords stretched across the aisle."
When I lived in Kenya, there was a patch of tarmac just down the otherwise pothole-filled road where we lived that was perfectly paved and smooth. The patch started and ended abruptly and lasted for about 20 feet. I always wondered why someone had bothered to pave just one small, random patch of the road. Then someone explained:
The Queen had come to visit a few years before. Her itinerary involved her driving from the airport to the United Nations campus in Gigiri. To get there, she needed to drive close to where we lived, taking a fork to the right to ascend a hill. From the incline, if the royal dear had bothered to turn to her left, she would have seen a beautifully paved, 20-foot patch of road. Not surprisingly, the exact route that she drove had also been smoothly tarred just before her arrival. What I wonder is if Lizzie realized that this had all been done in her honor, or if she congratulated herself on leaving Kenya in such a fine state after colonial times. "My what lovely roads they have here!"
In the interest of full disclosure I should relate one other anecdote to counteract the somewhat cynical tone of this piece. During my last year of high school I lived in Barbados, a tiny Caribbean island that had not, at the time, been independent of Buckingham Palace for long and was still known as “Little Britain.”
I attended Queen’s College, one of the top high schools in the country. Our school had outgrown its facilities and plans were under way to build new, modern grounds. During a visit to commemorate the 350th anniversary of Barbados’ Parliament, the Queen was to lay the foundation stone of our new school. The entire island seemed to have been spruced up for her arrival. One day, before our stone-laying ceremony, the royal entourage was to drive past our old school on the way to the Parliament buildings. All the school children were given tiny paper flags and asked to line the street and wave when the cars passed by. I wanted to gag. I ranted to my parents about the irrelevance and pretension of it all. I was adamantly anti-royal.
The day of the ceremony came and the afternoon was predictably choreographed. The Queen made a speech and laid the stone. At least we all assumed she laid the stone; we were seated too far back to see much of anything. My photographs of the day consist of a sea of blue school uniforms surrounding a little dot wearing a hat. After the speech, the Queen and her entourage filed out down an aisle past the seated students. Half way down, they stopped and began to chat with students, Queenie on the far side and her hubby, Philip, on my side, directly in front of me and a few of my friends. He asked about our uniforms, what class we were in and other inanities. When he detected an American accent, he had an in-depth chat with my friend Rachael the exchange student about her hometown in Oregon.
Suddenly my teenage rage completely dissipated. Phillip was suave and charismatic and we were all sad when he moved on down the aisle to talk to some other students. For weeks, perhaps months, I related this story to everyone I met. I had been charmed by a royal.
