Fishy
Oh dear, oh dear. One shouldn’t. One really shouldn’t. It’s most unkind. It’s like shooting fish in a barrel. One feels frightful about it, one feels almost tempted to leave it alone, to do the decent thing. And yet when one sees a barrel with a lot of lazy fish swimming around in it, one shoots at them. One can’t help it. And anyway, what’s the matter with fish today, why do they all seem to think they are qualified to do things far beyond their capabilities? Horrible jumped-up little bastards – where’s one’s gun?
No seriously the hell with all that. The hell with pacifism towards that particular easy fish. I mean – if Charles Windsor, of all the people in the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, really thinks he is in a position to rag on other people for wanting to do jobs without qualifications or natural abilities – well I mean to say. I mean to say he is literally the one person in the entire country with the least right to say such a thing. Bar none. His saying it is the exact equivalent of George W Bush and his handlers having the almighty gall to call other people ‘elitist’ when he would be doing well to be a part-time security guard if he had not been born into the shrubbery.
Oh dear, oh dear. It is funny though. Funnier than Bush, because of course Charles is so powerless, despite all the ridiculous sucking up and deference and bowing and Sirring and the bales and bales and bales of money. And it’s so funny that he apparently thinks he himself has natural abilities, at least compared with all these horrible striving proles he’s surrounded with, not to mention all these terrifying PC black women lusting after promotions. It’s always been funny. It was funny that he thought he was so clever compared to Diana because he read (wait for it) boooooks by Laurens van der Post. Oh very deep. Mind you Diana was funny that way too. Katharine Graham once told her she might enjoy going to university and Diana was very amused, saying she’d had plenty of education from life. Uh…right. Perhaps all toffs are like that. It’s a toff thing, apparently, to scorn education. One doesn’t need that sort of thing, thank you very much, that’s for the lower orders who have to do something, aristocrats have only to Be.
There are a lot of good letters on the subject here. And there is an interesting side point in this article –
Mr Clarke’s comments were seized upon by opponents as evidence of a breach of the convention whereby ministers do not criticise the Royal Family.
Well…excuse me, I’m just a Yank and a Republican and I don’t properly understand these things, but that does seem like a stupid convention. Why should the Royal Family be immune from criticism by ministers? I realize it has something to do with separation of government and crown, with keeping the muck of politics out of the more transcendent realm of the monarchy, and that that’s supposed to be good for continuity and the monarchy’s ceremonial role and all that. But still. It just does seem a ridiculous way to go about it. Choose this one person and treat it as if it’s magic, and then make the resulting oddity your head of state.
Since it’s such an odd system, I do wish we could stop trying to mimic it in the US.
OB: Are you a Republican, or a republican? For some reason, I find it difficult to imagine you’re the former.
Snicker.
A republican.
Maybe one reason you find it difficult to imagine is that we say in ‘About B&W’ that we’re both on the left. Or it could be a good many of the remarks I’ve let drop.
But I’m certainly a republican. I just don’t get the monarchy thing at all. Never have. (Thus I find it unendurably irritating to have a pretend one here, and yes that does also apply to Kennedys and Clinton.)
Let me put a devil’s advocate point for a moment: If we can be whatever we like then if we do not amount to much it must be our fault says one side, while the other side says it must be because some external power prevents it. But neither is (wholly) true because an individual needs some talent to get on in the world. That whole debate is an example of the false dichotomy fallacy.
I wonder if someone who was not associated with snobbery had made a similar point, that telling everyone they could be whatever they like is not a good idea, would we be able to have debate this on its merits?
Oh, sure. I have profoundly clashing opinions on the subject myself. I think people should aspire and dream big dreams and dare to be great, and I think people seriously thinking they will be millionaire sport stars or movie stars is silly, and I take the point that big dreams can lead to frustration and self-blame and misery – and so on.
No, it was definitely that Chuck of all people – not only because of the snobbery, but even more because of the obliviousness to his own lack of qualification – was not the person to say such a thing, that prompted my scorn. I mean to say, one wonders what he thinks he would be doing now if he’d been born Charles Bloggs to a bookie and a greengrocer in Kidderminster.
The convention is there because normally the Crown and the Government don’t criticise one another. The monarchy is supposed to be neutral, so it isn’t really allowed to criticise the government or do political things. This has frayed around the edges, but is still mostly in place.
I actually quite like the idea of a non-political head of state. It means that we don’t romanticise our head of government (normally) – Blair is just a politician, whereas Bush is not just a politician, he’s some sort of symbol of America. I think that’s one reason why people get more upset about Bush (and they got upset about Clinton) – it’s not just about some politician, it’s the Head of State, something like a living symbol of the country.
I’m not sure I’d choose the current head of state that we have at the moment, though.
I know (I sort of know – I know the crown is supposed to be quiet, which is one reason people worry about Charles). But if Charles doesn’t keep his part of the bargain.
I know what you mean about the head of state thing. But the monarchical version brings such awful baggage with it – the arbitrarily hierarchical nature of it all. But I can’t say much in defense of our version, especially now that it’s gone all pseudo-monarchical. Ecch.
To take a devil’s advocate view, I might say that the arbitrary hierarchy is a *good* thing; it’s easy to recognise that a King or a Prince is just a man, and his opinions are worth no less and no more than any other man’s (or woman’s). We can see easily that his claim to the Mandate of Heaven is at very best not proved.
But it’s much harder to dismiss the words of an elected official. They have a much better claim to rule – they have the implicit backing of all the voters who backed them. Their claim to be at the top of the hierarchy is rather less arbitrary.