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.
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| 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?
