The Queen is dead, long live the King!

©Elanour Tomlinson

We are often advised to say only the nice things about the recently departed. Somehow, all the ill feelings and the wrong paths crossed are temporarily swept under the proverbial carpet. Everyone, including the ones who tend to benefit from the deceased's passing, is expected to carry a sombre outward appearance - wear a sad face, dress down and avoid merriment. 

After the so-called mourning period, it will be pretty much no-holds-barred, I guess. 

But now, even before the dead are laid to rest, the wokies are already at it. I am referring to the recent demise of one of the longest reigning monarchs of the once most enormous Empire of the world, where the sun never set. True, she inherited a bounty of loot from the world over. At one time, pirates scaling the Atlantic high seas were free to pilfer gold from Spanish vessels legitimately under the auspices of the British Crown as long as they paid their dues to the monarch.

True, they went out with their imperial stance with a chip on their shoulders and a stiff upper lip to match. And plunder wealth from civilisations that had found peace with their place in the sun, create mayhem to liberate the oppressed and destroy other cultures with their new economic model.

This turn of events is inevitable. Every nation wants to improve life for itself. The designated / king does that for his subject at the expense of a gamut of benefits for himself and those under his umbrage who held his torch. This way of conquest was thought to trickle down the food chain and continues to date.

There were plundering imperialists, and there were cruel plundering imperialists. Some maimed their subjects without caring about their future. In a way, the British made some humane decisions to ease their administration but ended up causing their Empire's own destruction along with other compelling factors. They laid down plans for proper administrative machinery, invested in education for natives to help (and look down on their own cultures) and created an extensive web of transportation networks. 

If not for the English, this blog would not be in English or an incomprehensible language that could hardly pass for English. We were lucky that English became the lingua franca of the world, the modern language of communication. Left to our politicians to steer us to the future, we would still be a fumbling fishing village ruled by despots, not that they are not preventing this from happening. An unthinking obedient herd of the population led by their leash to the slaughter is their idea of utopia. If we had been savaged by colonists, we would have been brutalised by our own kind. As the Tamil saying goes, "Whether Rama or Raavan rule, it doesn't matter to me, I don't give a damn!"

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

It does not matter...

This weekend would see meaningless parties and stupifying merrymaking in the name of a monarch who is synonymous with opulence and redundancy. There cannot be a worse time to glorify a family when the rest of the world looks at entitlement as a bad word. The idea of a person, by his birth, being feted up to high heavens despite all the scandals that have linked with the royal family does not make any sense. It is worse when the ruling monarch takes the helm as the head of the Church of England.

Nothing looks pretty when we talk about their predecessors' curriculum vitae or past glory. Her laurels include legitimisation of robbing non-British merchant ships of their gold and silver, giving a royal seal to pirates to loot the Spanish royal armada of their wealth,  allowing famine deaths in their subjects (just because they are brown) to feed their soldiers and brutally murdering millions in the name of civilising the natives. Yes, the Platinum Jubilee of the longest-reigning British monarch is here. 

  

Completed 1903 to mark Queen Victoria's
Diamond Jubilee (1897). At 60 ft tall, it
commemorates each year of her reign.

When the wokes are up in arms questioning the privileged, the errors and omission of the generation past, as well as the blatant widening of the gap between the haves and have not, this is in bad taste. There is no reason for the royal family to flaunt the wealth that they acquired by birth and force others to revel in jubilance. If anything, it only rekindles old festering wounds and re-emphasises the extent of the limit humans are able to dehumanise each other. 

To the aristocrats and plutocrats, it is an opportune time to reinforce their loyalty. In return, the tongue-hanging loyalist would pounce upon the mittens shrewn to them as picturised in the children's folklore 'This Old Man' - give a dog a bone!

In my school days, I remember walking past a clock tower in Penang, erected in honour of Queen Victoria's Diamond Jubilee. Then from pictures in magazines and museum documents, I realised that Penangites were having a whale of a time during Queen Victoria's Diamond Jubilee and King George V's coronation. The million-dollar question is whether the colonial subjects really share the sentiments of their Masters, or there are they there just for the party?

Like the Tamil proverb that says, ராமே ஆண்டாளும் ராவனே ஆண்டாளும் (Whether Rama rules or Ravanaa rules), it does not matter to the Average Joe. The life of the ordinary man hardly changes for the better. Still, like Sisyphus, Average Joe tries to find contentment via these meaningless celebrations despite his seemingly hopeless life. He can pack his troubles and seek a release from his bottled-up emotions for one evening. But come tomorrow, it is back to the same grind mill.

(N.B. The idea of celebrating a Jubilee goes back to the time of the Old Testament. A Jubilee is celebrated in a kingdom every 50 years. At this time, debts are written off, enslaved people are freed, and people take a full year of a break from work. It is a kind of reboot. The land is not planted, and people were expected to fete in ecstasy for the ruler.)

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

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