4 - Sunday, December 27, 1992 ~ North Shore News

British royals serve as political fiction

I THENK I've finally fig-
ured out what it is about
the British Royal Family
that doesn’t work for me.

At first, royalty was exciting
enough. Standing up in the
classroom along with 40 other
kids to sing God Save The King
was actually quite stirring. And
there he was in a framed picture
behind the teacher beside the Red
Ensign and the flag of Manitoba.

Later, it got boring. But you
still had to do it.

If you didn’t do it, you could
end up with a detention, not being
let out at recess, or, God knows,
even the strap.

Things didn’t change when the
picture of the King became the
Picture of the Queen in 1952. Not
a bir.

Like the King, the Queen look-
ed down impassively from the wail
on scenes of awful confinement
and torture. ,

She never smiled. Just looked
down on us.

And she condoned, by her
presence, everything the teachers
did to us.

We were being mass-program-
med, of course, as surely as any
cadre of Maoists or gang of Zulu
warriors or shop floor of Japanese
worker bees or pack of boy
scouts.

It was quite military. Standing
at attention in rows, face forward,
chest up.

It wasn't just the Queen we
were saluting. She was stitched as
tightly as could be together with
nationalism. Our country. The
Queen. One.

The entire exercise — the na-
tiona! anthem, prayers, the Queen
— now that I think about it from
a post-multicult point of view,
was incredibly honky and
anglaise.

O Canada linked us emotionaily
to the physical land. the Truc
North Strong And Free.

The Lord’s Prayer opened up a
channel to the great Christian God
Himself.

And the Queen evoked a sense
of continuity going back through
Queen Victoria to the Battle of
the Plains of Abraham, and fur-
ther, back’across 1,000 years of
time, actually, to William the
Conqueror.

Sweaty tribal stuff. This was
our Canadian identity then.

The British Empire might have
expired during the Second World
War, relieving Britain’s aristocra-
cy of the heavy burden of guiding
the destiny of the world, but the
news hadn’t filtered down to the
elementary and secondary
classrooms in Winnipeg.

None of the British imperial
trappings in school had changed.
The symbols and rituals were all
the same. Same drill.

We were still firmly a part of a
British Empire of the mind, still
being taught to stand to attention,
bow, scrape, curtsy and wave to
The Great White Mother on her
throne.

There is something awesomely
primitive about regimented litdle
colonial children being trained to
chant prayers before an image of
a distant supratribal demi-god-
dess.

Primitive? This was heavy-

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Bob
Hunter |

STRICTLY PERSONAL

handed brainwashing by the state.
1 am harkening back to the im-
mediate post-war period when
teachers wielded straps, ruters,
yardsticks, chalk, books, anything
they could le: fly or hammer you
with withour breaking the Mesh.

it wasn’t until quite late in life,
really, around Grade 5, when I
began to resent to idea of God
saving ber, the Quecn, instead of,
say, my mom, or the nice lady
nex: dort,

Hey, wha: about me? I figured
T could use some saving.

Here | was, caged up in a
classroom every day, quivering
with an urge to be outside, forced

to follow the dictates of warped
aduh chaingang bosses, almost
every single one of whom was
some kind of dominance freak,
and none of whom liked mouthy
little show-offs like me.

In later life a psychologist told
me my problem was that | have a
problem with authority. Don’t like
being told what to do. Don’t like
being told whar not to do. Just
like being ieft alone to do my
thing as much as possibic.

As far as I can tell, this sort of
attitude makes me a fairly normal
Canadian, Reasonably
autonomous. Egalitarian-minded.
Uafazed by wealth or power. In-
different to class structure. Unim-
pressed by claims of superiority.

The very idea that somebody
from a particular family, say, the
Windsors, is any better than
somebody from mine simply
because of lineage is not just
deeply offensive, it is ridiculous.

We are all evalved from one-
celled organisms a few billion
years ago.

With no particular real-life bio-
jugical function 10 perform (some
pharaohs at least impregnated
thousands of peasant girls, and
don’t forget the African chaps
with hundreds of wives, the sheiks
with their dozens), the British
Royal Family serves merely as a
political fiction.

It has allowed itself to be used
with great success as a policy in-

strument of the British govern-
ment. In exchange for certain
favors.

In the context of the Com-
monwealth, the Royal Family has
assisted dozens of post-colonial
governments in their efforts to
tule over ungainly new nation-
states forged at the point of a gun
out of squabbling tribes, the Iead-
ership of these new countries hav-
ing included an astonishing
number of thugs, monsters and
crackpots.

This is what the Royal Family is
finally always about. Ruling.

No matter how softened the
image of the Crown has become
in the post-imperial era, its well-
documented roots are firmly
planted in tyranny. That’s just the
way things were done in the past,
of course. But why honor it today?

i was a lucky kid. J only caught
the tail end of a millenium of
submission to a British Crown.

Still lucky, I might get to see in
my lifetime the final demise of an
institution that is, after all, an af-
front to the basic premise of
human dignity, whether you look
at it politically or spiritually,
namely that we are all fundamen-
tally equal.

Betty Windsor, please step
down. Don't you realize? None of
your entourage is wearing any
clothes any longer.

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