There's no England now...

 ...the title of which I ruthlessly pirated from this LGM post discussing the mix of assumptions, illusions, and legal fictions required to gain and maintain sovereignty.

In this case, of Great Britain

As a person I have - no, really, I'm not kidding - absolutely no opinion one way or another on monarchy as an institution in general and the British "royal" system in particular, other than it seems slightly more nonsensical than most human social gimmicks.

You're my boss because your mom and dad were my boss?

Get the fuck out.

But as We the People seem bound and determined to prove, the "Will of the People" can produce equally ridiculous results (Empty G? That you? Siddown and shaddup, girl.) so, well, okay. You be you, Brits. You want some king? Knock yourselves out.

That the current occupant of the throne of the United Kingdom of Great Britain, Scotland, and (a little bit of) Ireland seems to be a doddering old goof whose beliefs include a pottage of nonsense and crunchy granola nature-fakery (along with some genuinely sensible love of nature itself...) seems unimportant to the big picture. The job is kind of central to the idea, not the person who does it.

This picture itself says it better than words...

The goofy hat and gold cocktail frock that encases the old white guy IS the king. The old white guy is just the dressmaker's dummy that holds it up.

The Brits want that? Fine. Not my circus, not my gold-encrusted monkey.

What made me think about all this mummery was turning on the television last Sunday morning (looking for the "other" British thing I think about, football - okay, "soccer", anyway...) and the first image that emerged out of the dark was this:

First, no question; the British do this whole "gorgeous, tactically useless, military spectacle" thing better than anyone. Part of it is the outfits; they've had centuries to get the dress uniforms right, and their Class A's (Number One dress? No, the Wikipedia tells me that the formal name is "Full Dress") are fucking sharp as a razor.

(Don't take this the wrong way; there's military and morale value to that "useless military spectacle". A soldier who looks and feels badass, whose unit looks badass, might well be more badass when the military chips are down.

Modern warfare often makes your own combat power invisible. In a world of artillery and tac air to be seen is to be hit and hit to be destroyed, so we do our best to disperse and hide ourselves.

So there's a value to be had in stepping out on parade, looking good and feeling strong. Illusion? Sure! But there's a sort of "dress for the job you want" to it there, too. And the British have got that shit down cold and hard. Drill Sergeant Lawes was all swoony.)

Second, and finally, though, it drives home the ironic point that kings (and presidents and caudillos and juntas and congresses and so forth) are, at bottom, what they are because they're hedged about with those marching troops.

The "importance" of those rulers, in a national and international sense, is almost entirely dependent on all those soldiers and sailors and fliers in their pretty clothes that marched down the wide mall to the pretty palace last Sunday.

Them - and their gajillion guns and tanks and trucks and hordes of ginormous battle ships and aircraft and bullets and missiles.

But in Britain? Now? Pretty soldiers and sailors and fliers on parade?

That's all this king has left.

The massive armies and fleets they symbolize? The storms of bombers? The sort of real military power that those big blocks of marching men (and now women) once meant? The temporal power that made the "King of Great Britain, Scotland, and Ireland" someone who had to be reckoned with?

Gone.

Modern Britain is a geopolitical afterthought. Not quite Andorra...yet. But no longer any sort of real global economic and political power alongside the real Greats.

And that's fine in a human sense. You can have a good and satisfying and happy life in Andorra as easily as in a Great Power. More easily, frankly, than in some - Russia or the PRC, I'm looking at you. For many of us in this Great Power? There's a cost to all those tanks and ships that might otherwise go to our lives. 

Ask some poor sod in a leaky tent down by the Cut in North Portland how that works.

Watching the pretty marching, it occurred to me that habits of thought are as difficult to break as habits of body. 

We think of "The King (or Queen) of England" as Somebody, a person of consequence, because there's still all that Stuff; palaces and crowns and fancy golden wagons. But mostly because of all those marching soldiers and sailors and fliers.

That's how they became kings and queens back in the day, right? Because they were the bosses of armies and fleets of the baddest motherfuckers around. Because swords (and rifles and cannon and missiles) hoicked them onto the Iron Throne and, beyond all laws and rules and customs, when push came to shove, kept them there by naked force, against all enemies foreign and domestic.

The U.S. president, the Russian premier, the Chairman of the Chinese Communist Party?

Those people still have that power.

King Charles III?

Does not.

What makes that interesting is that we just talked about a time when that job, and the person who did that job, did have that power. When all those marching guys really did symbolize a scary badass guy's imperial reach, the mailed fist at the end of a very long royal arm.  

Not anymore.

So if I was British I'm not sure but that Sunday morning might have felt really odd, like I was taking part in a MMORPG, a sort of Great Power cosplay. 

All those gilded coaches and gorgeous uniforms and soldiers and sailors right out of the Empire? 

In the words of Bashō:

natsukusa ya
tsuwamono domo ga
yume no ato.

夏草や兵共がゆめの跡

That is to say;

Waves of summer grass:
All that remains of soldiers’
Impossible dreams.

So as not to end this silly rumination on a serious note, here's the "Wins the Internet" comment from the linked LGM post:

"*hushed Huw Edwards voice:
"And now the Rt. Hon. Capt. Penny Mordaunt RN, PC, MP, acting today in her role as Moistened Bint Peculiar, proceeds down the aisle carrying the magnificent Imperial State Scimitar which she will then lob at His Majesty in a part of the ceremony dating back to the time of King Arthur."

Long lived the Queen

Every so often I'm reminded that "hereditary monarchy" probably seems like a good idea when you're, say, a corn chandler in York, living around a shitload of heavily armed aristocratic assholes bred to consider the lack of ruthless ambition a character flaw.

Ensuring the rules say that you have to hand the keys to the national Volvo to the last boss' kid - even the stupid gormless one - as soon as the old driver croaks so these greedy bastards don't descend on each other and in the process you tend to find that your home and livelihood have been pillaged and burnt, your sons hauled off to dig siegeworks, your daughters and wife (and you, depending on how things go) raped and murdered, and your entire life pretty much destroyed and gone to shit probably seems like the lesser of two evils.

To spend a fairly large chunk of change to maintain this idea as your Head of State in the 21st Century, however, seems pretty silly when you think of it even for a moment.

Mind you, I live in a nation that "elected" Donald Fucking Trump as Head of State, so I should probably be humble at throwing shade on the Brits about that.

Spending money on pretty soldiers and fancy cribs when you could be, oh, I dunno, paying off oil sheiks? Not really an "investment".

But, still...as the placeholder of a fundamentally silly and pointless "job" Elizabeth Saxe-Coburg-Gotha (ok, "Windsor", fine...) seems to have done as good a job as you'd want anyone to do if that's what you wanted someone to do. 

She also seems to have been as decent a person who ever did this particular job, although her country's diplomatic and military decline during her tenure meant that she was unable to do some of the appallingly awful things some of the former employees of the Firm got into even if she'd wanted to. 

But she never seemed to want to, much.

(Mind you...there's some fair amount of disagreement about that; I don't have enough knowledge to make a sensible observation so I'll simply recommend you go read the linked article. Suffice to say that there are more than a few people who live were the British used to rule who have a veeeeery different view of QE2 and what she stood for.

There's also the issue of what Liz "stood for" as the figurehead for British aristocracy, as well as the whole weird anachronistic "above the law" thing that might have made sense to the corn chandler but seems just another damn entrenched-inequity thing now.

And as this obituary from the European Politico reminds us, the whole "queen" thing was not easy on the person of Elizabeth Windsor. To live as the "queen" meant she had to kill "Lilibet Windsor" as dead as any Kenyan rebel.)

Anyway, she had damn near a century as the rich person in the fancy headgear who was the notional symbol of her country.

Mind you, the end of a reign that doesn't include a vulturine crowd of glittering courtiers hovering around and plotting over the Royal Deathbed eagerly and anxiously anticipating the final gasp, and a dissolute Heir who, while roystering away in some bucolic hunting lodge surrounded by his hangers-on, bravos, and a trollop or three, is surprised while pawing his busty wench by a begrimed messenger leaping from his saddle shouting "The Queen is dead! Long live the King!" as the trollop is unseated and all the dissolute mob bays "LONG LIVE THE KING!!!" with flagons spilling just...doesn't seem quite right.

Ah, well. We live in sadly diminished times.

Li Rwè, li Lwè et l’ Liberté !

I found this a curious and interesting combination of news and history; apparently the Belgians are getting a new King.

"Filip/Philippe will be King of a country that is divided between a part of the population that is deeply attached to the Belgian unity, and part of the population (mainly Flemish nationalists) who prefer regional independence. The Belgian king has always played a crucial role in keeping the different parts of the country together, and the question is whether King Filip/Philippe, who is said to have less emotional and social intelligence as his father, will be able to fulfill this role in the same way as his father did. Journalists keep asking, up until today: “Is he ready for this role?”

The connection here is that Mojo and I dropped in on the Bazi Bierbrasserie on Hawthorne last weekend to enjoy a lovely evening out and celebrate Belgian independence day;

The Belgian brews were appropriately robust and floral, and the stoemp was damn fine; I've got to try making that around here, tho finding the mergeuez sausage here in Portland might be a bit tricky. We enjoyed a truly peaceful and intimate evening ending up at the Heron Haus B&B where we spent our honeymoon night eleven years ago this October.

One of the subjects of conversation that evening was "what is a Belgian", and the whole business of Flemings vs. Walloons came up. Several of the patrons and staff at Bazi had their own opinions, but the general consensus seemed to be that there would always be a Belgium.

But it got me thinking about what makes a "nation", how its citizens (or in Belgium's case, "subjects", although the idea of a tyrannical House of Brabant oppressing its subjects in 2013 seems rather ridiculous no matter how loathsome the colonial record of the second Leopold might have been.) And what a curious beast an "American" is, being defined (at least in theory) not by language, or race, or heritage, or "culture", or really even geographical location but intellectual and emotional attachment to a slew of political ideals about self-government and the relationship between government, its citizens, and society.

And I'm not quite sure what I think about that, especially given the great changes in the U.S. between the society I grew up in - which was founded largely on a social compact defined by the New Deal - and the U.S. of today (and in case you think I'm romanticizing the New Deal a large part of that compact specified excluding the darker-colored citizens of the U.S. and the changes wrought by the Civil Rights Era had a hell of a lot to do with the subsequent changes and the breakdown of that social compact...).

I can't honestly say that I see Belgium's political and civil issues as vastly greater than those I see around me right here. But I do know that I might be a teensy bit concerned if my country depended on the political and social skills of one guy said (in the comments section of the article I found) to possess "the intellectual and political skills...of a cabbage".

The stoemp was damn fine, though.