NEWSPAPER COLUMNS
 ¶ Most Recent
¶ Miscellany
|
COMMENTARY
June 2, 2012
Her Canadian Majesty
This being the weekend reserved for the full celebration of the Diamond Jubilee - 60 remarkable years and counting - we should celebrate. It's a party, and anyone who does not wish to attend is welcome to stay home, lock his doors, and close his ears on the firecrackers.Our media being what we have become, I am already flinching for the republican features that are commissioned for any royal anniversary; having recently endured the atheist features, that appear every Easter. The Ottawa Citizen is an exception, of course. Here, I'm sure a loyal toast will sweep through our offices, with "Honi soit qui mal y pense" on every lip. As a lifetime reader of old newspapers, including Canadian ones; and as a man now suddenly himself embarked upon his 60th year, I see the tide receding. One thinks of the old "Coronation Numbers" in our mainstream press, of the portraits of our Queen and her father before her, emblazoned on front pages whenever they came in sight. Of Royal Tours quite different in spirit from the one last year, in which the focus was entirely upon "Will and Kate" as celebrities of fashion. The visit of Prince Charles, the immediate heir, went to the inside pages; for as a journalist friend assigned to that tour grumbled to me the other day, "He is a B-list personality." Her Majesty remains an "A" however, and Long May She Reign. As the dead I left behind me - the old hacks, my elders in the old newsrooms, smoking like chimneys around editorial "horseshoes" long since gone to their own scrapyard graves - would have been pleased to explain, "We put the Queen on the front because she sells papers." They were masters of cynicism, but often just beneath, bleeding loyal hearts. For they would also tell gentle reader that the Queen, beyond her personal merits, is the primary symbol of Canada: the linchpin of a constitutional monarchy that had proved then, still proves today, among the world's happiest and freest countries. She is the rule of law, the continuity of institutions, the embodiment of "family," and true patriot love - a mysterious force binding one to another, through generations. Not "family" in the limited sense of "family values," which pertain to one nuclear family at one moment in time. Rather, that extended family, through which I am connected with grandfather, and great aunt; with refugees and pioneers, farmers and fishermen; with my children and their children to come. And through the British Empire and Commonwealth, with more obscure people. She is a hereditary monarch - born into the succession, and thereby aloof from politics, and the grubby business of grabbing onto power. Her cameo, on stamps and coins, her portrait above the chalkboard in yesterday's classrooms - was our guarantee that we would never have to look at some ratty demagogue, or party commissar. And she's the proof that "we aren't bloody Americans," as the same old hack might have added at the end. For in that great civil war of 1775-'83, when Loyalists and Patriots divided, and families were rent apart by politics, our Canada was also forged. Loyal we remained, not only to a King, but to certain principles our brothers had rejected. It is interesting to read the shock with which many of our ancestors greeted the vanguard of the new republic. They were not merely opposed to it; they were puzzled by it. In a sentence: "How can you deny everything you are?" For to the mind of the Loyalist, beyond material considerations, if you were British born, then British you will die. It was that simple. It was, at some profound metaphysical level, not in your power to choose a new identity. To struggle for various reasonable reforms was perfectly legitimate. But to turn against the Crown is an act of treason: not only against the State, but against your own people. Consider that. One might, arguably, acquire another loyalty by emigration. But to stand in one's place and declare a new allegiance, was unthinkable. This is, needless to say, a view that is almost entirely lost on postmodern generations. We take it for granted that we may choose what to be. But is that true? Or might it be so false, that in the end we must deny being human. At the nursing home, where my mother now resides, the staff - mostly Filipinos and Tibetans, who themselves "chose Canada" - put up a Jubilee display. They found photographs of Queen Elizabeth, with every president, from Harry Truman to Barack Obama. And over that they wrote, in finest bold calligraphy, "Sixty Years - Twelve Presidents - One Queen!" Naive this may be on the surface, even funny. Yet it shows a rekindling of what we, as a nation, once understood A Mari, Usque Ad Mare: that implicit in "God save the Queen" is, "God save us." David Warren
© Ottawa Citizen
|
Top