God save the queen

Friday evening, 26 December 2008

Someone online asked me this afternoon if I had noticed, or if I appreciated, that I have an 'affectation' of using 'Britishisms' (a term I despise though I knew what he meant). I said yes, I know I do; but it is mostly habit and less deliberate. I spent two years in an English public school (read that, in the US: 'private school') and what I came to appreciate was a culture which was always part of my family heritage and always interested me, but to which I had always been only an outsider. It was one thing to hear about a real-life city being lived in by real-life people that happens to have a 10th-century castle right in the middle of it-- it is quite another thing to actually BE one of those people living there and being able to actually touch the 10th-century castle on a daily basis. It gives you a unique perspective, and it has expanded, not narrowed, my own. I discovered and came to love the routines of being English-- singing the national anthem and reciting a prayer for the sovereign in church (and in school) and driving on the left and calling the 'sidewalk' the 'pavement' and so on. Returning to the US a wiser and older person I honestly found it hard to remember all the words to the Pledge of Allegiance and the 'N' form of the past participle and that I have to look left, not right, when crossing a street from the kerb.

I did NOT 'pick up an accent', as someone asked me once, though at one point before I got there I did consider doing that. I confess it's been a temptation, especially living with my stepmother for so long, but though I am often accused of being a thespian I decided it would be disrespectful to do it badly and so left it to Gwyneth Paltrow who does it much, much better.

Some people will remain convinced it is really just an affectation and that by continuing to use the grammar and spellings I use I am trying to say I consider myself superior to most American people. That is a common accusation I get. My stepmother, being ethnic English and Anglican but raised in Roman Catholic Australia, has had it all her life. The saddest part of it is, as my father says, how everyone in America may be so quick to judge all things British as being inferior, but, as he says, 'not one of them would refuse an honorary knighthood.'

One 'Americanism' I have learnt to utterly deplore is the tendency to so quickly judge everything by American standards. For a country which pretends to be so 'tolerant' and 'open-minded' and 'liberal' we Yanks really are not. We do not really accept other cultures' ways of doing things without at least a little bit of feeling superior to them all, and this is nowhere truer than with the British. Disney and Mel Gibson and so many others have made millions from belittling, disparaging and incorrectly portraying British history and culture, and their ugly assumptions are what Americans have come to accept as truth. I got into an argument once online after mentioning that I had read Churchill's book 'Their Finest Hour' over the summer which clearly shows how the British fought World War Two totally ALONE on about five fronts for nearly three years before the Americans chose to become involved-- and all I got for saying this clear FACT was 'Oh, no, WE "bailed out" the Brits.' ('Well the book was written by a Brit', someone said.) The FACT is that America allowed Mr Churchill's government to suffer immeasurable losses and only got involved in the war when it served American interests to do so-- and yet, even so, the British people extend to America a grateful, admiring respect because they're just that unselfish, humble, and affectionate. It's one of the things that makes them British.

For Christmas, Mother gave to Gran the movie 'The Queen' on DVD, and we watched it tonight. When I say 'we' I mean all of us, even little J.J., nearly three, who played quietly, 'as good as gold', on the floor of the TV theatre down stairs. It is a very well-made, serious and sympathetic portrayal of HRH The Queen as she and her household coped with the death of estranged princess Diana in 1997. Naturally the filmmakers had two options with this story-- the most likely was that they would depict the queen as being cold, ruthless, hateful and spiteful, deliberately ignoring anyone's feelings but her own, sticking to principle at the cost of ethics, and so on. The least likely was that they would depict that whole situation as being so unorthodox and unpredictable that the queen deserves our sympathy for simply not knowing how to handle it. The strangest thing of all was that the filmmakers did both.

The most important statement the film 'The Queen' made was nearly at the end, when the queen explains to the eager and innocent PM Tony Blair that 'This is how I was brought up.' She (played by Dame Helen Mirren) explained that she believed the best of the British people would expect their queen to be somewhat stoic, not easily moved to mush at the loss of one person (who by her own choice wasn't even family any more). The character of PM Blair actually gets mad at one of his assistants and says how 'this woman' (the queen) has devoted her life to quiet, principled leadership, including towards a young girl (Diana) who devalued everything the queen offered to her and spent the last years of her life vocally denouncing it all over the world. The American-style mourning for Princess Di, public, emotional, unreasonable and completely out of proportion to her actual, formal status, even called for lowering the British flag on top of the palace-- though the British NEVER observe that custom even when a PM or king dies, the royal family were prevailed upon to adopt it 'just this once' for someone who had willingly and gratefully left their family and that house altogether. People (and the press, on both sides of the Atlantic) were sending public hate letters to the queen personally. This could have made me cry if not for the strong, almost stoic way in which Dame Helen played her. And when you understand what the actress was going for (yes, we watched all the 'making of' special features too) you must have some appreciation for the queen herself. After all what has made Britain as great as it has always been is the very British way in which they do things. To a Briton there really is no other way to do them.

My father has on his office wall a copy of the queen's formal Coronation portrait from 1953. He says he likes the picture, but we all sort of know better. True-- the queen herself is very pretty, a 26-year-old young mother and wife who ascends to her father's place almost shyly, but willingly-- that's a role model for any woman. But Daddy likes more what the picture represents-- almost 1000 years of unbroken tradition in culture and government without which this country of America would never have stood. America broke free of Britain because of the British way of doing things, and yet it survives for the same reason. After all there can be no unselfish, elected service and leadership without the English concept of 'noblesse oblige'-- the philosophy that the good people do the right thing just because it IS the right thing. It is 'Deus et mon droit' = 'God and my right hand' --God blesses what I do that is right, or, when I do the right thing God is with me doing it too. The point is that it is right because it is right.

The British motto is the Old French is 'Hony soi qui mal pence' -- 'Evil to he who thinks evil of it.' How Americans should learn this! It means that you condemn, you deserve to be condemned. If you judge, you deserve to be judged-- since the truly right thing is so right that only the truly evil could ever condemn it. Or, as Alexander Pope said, 'Whatever IS is right' --because it comes from God. God's will be done-- and God save the queen.

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