"God save us all"

A Canadian offers a bemused view of the upcoming coronation from the standpoint of a colonial:

In a time of post-post-colonialism, of anti-racist iconoclasm, a time in which the very notion of gender as a legitimate distinction is contested, and Christianity has been reduced to a scandal management system with costumes, a 74-year-old British gentleman will ride a fancy carriage to an old church where a few other elderly British gentlemen in gilded dresses will declare him emperor, patriarch and head of state because God says so.

You might think you live in a time of truth and reconciliation, or perhaps even, if you’re feeling optimistic, progress. But this week if you’re British or a member of the 56 sovereign states that still, somehow, find themselves in the Commonwealth, you’re waking up in a country where a priest is going to smear oil – vegan oil from Jerusalem – on a rather pinkish, rather broad forehead to signify one man’s status as the Lord’s anointed...

This week, on his fancy carriage ride, Charles will be surrounded by many preposterous objects. He’ll be holding the world’s largest diamond on the end of a stick. He’ll be wearing a hat with a ruby that Henry V wore into battle. He’ll be sitting on a chair over the Stone of Destiny, a stone English kings stole from the Scots over 700 years ago...

As someone who has spent several weeks for the purpose of this piece looking at everything you can put Charles’s face on – tea towels, biscuit tins, trays, Christmas tree ornaments, mugs – I have learned that his face steers naturally towards caricature. It takes real skill and care not to make him look like a cartoon, even in photographs...

See, I knew what the Queen’s face meant, what it stood for. There she was, my whole life, looming in the darkened hockey rinks on the Canadian prairies, waving from the tops of airplane staircases, or smiling somewhere in the Caribbean like a tourist on the most exclusive package tour available.

The Queen was why I, a Canadian, had to learn which fork went with which course. What if I were invited to dine at Buckingham Palace and embarrassed myself by using the fish fork instead of the venison spoon? What would she think of my parents?..

My Canadian mother grew up in Lower Coverdale, New Brunswick, and that year, my grandmother drove her the seven miles to nearby Moncton to see the film of Elizabeth’s coronation. It was the only film she saw her entire childhood, the only film she saw before going to university. That’s how much the royal family mattered.

There were reasons for that significance. My original Canadian ancestors were press-ganged into the Royal Navy out of Wales for the war of 1812, and a little over a hundred years later, my great uncle Driver Leaman died in France fighting for the British empire. He received a letter on Buckingham Palace stationery – I have it framed on my wall – signed by “Mary R and the Women of the Empire”.

When Driver died, a local newspaper reported a letter he wrote to his mother: “After he was discharged from the hospital in July 1915 he was considered unfit for service and could have come home. But he wrote her and told her that his place was there. HE SAID HE WAS NOT ONLY FIGHTING FOR HIS KING AND COUNTRY, BUT FOR HIS HOME AND MOTHER.” That’s who I come from: cannon fodder for the British empire, a lot of men who died for a lot of British kings...

“Canada is the only country in the world that knows how to live without an identity,” Marshall McLuhan said in 1963. We have returned to that condition. The Canadian government plans to bring in a million immigrants next year. “You guys want to be here. We must be worth something,” that policy says. “Maybe you can tell us what we’re all doing here.”

Every time a Canadian sees Charles on the currency, they’ll know: our country makes no sense, and we have no plan to change it. Canada is a colony in search of a metropolis. We have become a colony of the absurd. There could be no more appropriate head of state to represent that absurdity than Charles...

Charles’s face means being stuck between traditional iconography and celebrity culture. It means living with a past that, while fraught with violence and idiocy, nonetheless upheld values that some cannot bring themselves to abandon and a future that, while much freer and more sensible, can also be cruel and vacuous.

I fear the reason we don’t like Charles, the reason we don’t want to celebrate him, is that he represents ourselves at this moment in history all too well. He is our king; that’s the most absurd fact of all. The face that represents us does represent us. His absurdity is ours.

I really shouldn't excerpt so much, but there's lots more at The Guardian.