One of my favorite pastimes is to wander from bar to bar not drinking but pretending to do so while listening to fellow alcoholics opine on the issues of the day. Sometimes I bring to bear a TV-B-Gone, fine-tuned tool of terror, to shut down with random precision the screens so that the sports monkeys are enraged when the men playing with each other’s balls can no longer be seen.
The screen goes dark with the power of the TV-B-Gone!
And suddenly there it is – the meaningless-empty-nothing which is the reality of American life, the void which the screens must fill daily.
Otherwise what might unfold across the land without the distraction of the images streaming? Despair, enlightenment, mass love-making, renewal of marriages, immediate divorce, lament, rage, collapse into solipsism, death by masturbation, wide-eyed rumination, combinations thereof.
The screens lately have been coursing with images about the death of the queen, and so it was natural that I stopped at a bar in my stomping grounds in Brooklyn to get the take on the situation from drunks who I knew would be more honest about little Lizzy Windsor’s passing than the court scribes in the media.
The scribes were busy, of course. In the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, the Washington Post, et al., ad nauseam, it was all queen all the time, splendid with devotion. I asked the bartender what he thought of the noise coming from England.
“I fuck the queen in the ass!” interjected a dude at the bar. He was pale as a whitefish, old before his time, and drinking the death drink, vodka, killer of men. Nursing my 7-Up, I asked a reasonable question in response: why, pray tell, would any man do such a thing, given she is so old and unattractive? “Well,” said the drunk, “I…yeah…’s a good point, yep.”
Now mind you: most people, regardless of their sexual consideration for the elderly, do not want to fuck the queen in the ass. They are in mourning. Their mourning is due to the great love, honor, respect they had for the noble monarch. Which to me is such an alien phenomenon, and almost as silly as, say, watching sports, that it has the appearance of madness.
What person in their right mind would not agree with the French solution to monarchy made clear in the years following the revolution of 1789?
Put another way: why have the proud free English people not chopped off the heads of their titular ruling class centuries after the French showed the way?
To comprehend the obscene entitled parasitism that constitutes the Royals, and to understand why their decapitation is so long overdue, consider the case of the famous prince, now king, Charles III, who (as the New York Times reports in one of the paper’s few worthy pieces on the ugliness of the matter):
…spent half a century turning his royal estate into a billion-dollar portfolio and one of the most lucrative moneymakers in the royal family business…Charles was far more deeply involved in developing the private estate known as the Duchy of Cornwall. Over the past decade, he has assembled a large team of professional managers who increased his portfolio’s value and profits by about 50 percent.
And while he was enriching himself, what was the fate of the lowly commoners in the fair kingdom? Brutal budget cuts to social services (austerity, old chap); soaring levels of poverty, especially among children; the doubling of the use of food banks; and so on.
Continues the Times:
Today, [Charles] ascends to the throne as the country buckles under a cost-of-living crisis that is expected to see poverty get even worse. A more divisive figure than his mother, King Charles is likely to give fresh energy to those questioning the relevance of a royal family at a time of public hardship.
I am hardly in the vanguard in decrying the Royals as blood-suckers dressed in finery who pad the Duchy of Cornwall with largesse taken out of the mouths of the kingdom’s children. LBTQ author and activist and fellow CounterPuncher Sherry Wolf, with humorous aplomb, tabulated a decade ago the royal family’s gorgeous circumstances, including “the fact that they essentially live on the dole rent-free in palaces with 285 apartments, 6,000 rooms and 1,000 people to slop out the toilets and change the bulbs.” The Windsors “run quite a racket. In exchange for cultivating an extravagant life of piffle, they manage to grab a king’s ransom of $300 million a year (£180 million) out of Britain’s public coffers.”
Wolf notes that “[c]enturies of chasing foxes, dressing for tea and practicing 16th century elocution as the main day’s activities have naturally cultivated a family of dim-witted layabouts” – such that Oxford University apparently had to lower its standards to admit poor silly Charles.
Meanwhile, “[t]he imbecility and implicit racism of inherited position ensures an outlook on the world worthy of a Klansman,” as Wolf writes. So, for example, Prince Philip in 1986 told a group of British students in China, “If you stay here much longer, you’ll all be slitty-eyed.” Walking out of a showing of Schindler’s List, Princess Margaret described it as a “tedious film about Jews.” According to the Socialist Worker newspaper in Britain, sadly departed Queen Liz used to describe black people as “nig-nogs” and “blackamoors.”
What’s to be done? I say it’s time to get 1789 on these mincing costumed cretins. Seize their estate, give it to the poor. Drag them into the public square, the whole bunch of the royal family, parade them around a bit, then straight to the guillotine. Wham! Pike the heads at Trafalgar Square for the pigeons to sit on and call it a day. The French did it more than two hundred years ago to their royals, and the English now need to play catch-up.