GOD SAVE THE KING, OKAY?

My mother bore a striking resemblance to Queen Elizabeth, not to mention being close to an exact contemporary.  Thus it’s difficult to get out of the grocery store these days without my mum looking back at me from the covers of the many commemoratives of Her Highness, seemingly asking worriedly if I think that gigantic bag of Doritos would be good for me.  And the public seems to be only slightly less interested, in its way, with the incoming king, Charles.

Now I realize that Charles is not popular and probably never will be.  I always thought that “dour popinjay” was an oxymoron, but indeed Charles seems to fill the bill pretty well.  To some extent, the public distaste is merited; most of it seems to spring from the notion that he displayed too much stiff upper lip when his ex-wife was killed, as well as his keeping a mistress (bonus points here for anybody who can come up with an English king who didn’t keep a mistress, or for that matter, limited himself to one).  And it’s true that the leak of his bedroom tittle-tattle with the Duchess of Cornwall didn’t show him off in a particularly favorable light, as though this would not be similarly the case for most of us.

Quite a bit more substantive is the contempt dripped upon him in the sciency corner of the internet, which despises his commitment to quackery such as chiropracty and homeopathy, some even suggesting that he has forced the National Health Service to adapt their coverage to include such.  In the first place, if the king, let alone the Prince of Wales has any input into the policies of the National Health, that’s somebody else’s problem, not Charles’.   And some of these folk even go so far as to wish him dead, which is pretty heavy weather. But I suspect that a lot of this antipathy has some other roots.

Going back some four decades, I remember Charles getting a lot of stick for his ‘meddling’ when he started in on trying to improve inner-city conditions for its residents.  I suspect that this was the sort of thing each American First Lady is expected to take on as a cause.  But no, Charles was meddling.  As far as I’m concerned, as he himself says, if this is meddling, let’s have more of it.  And on and on over the years, he’s spoken out on this-‘n-that.  Sometimes his thoughts have been quaintly at odds with anything remotely likely to be adopted by the recipients of his advice, as when he decided to convince the Church of England to quit modernizing its liturgy, though interesting now that he is nominally the head of said church.  Others, for his example his fancying himself as an architectural critic, were so abstruse as to be easily ignored.

Now, since his architectural and liturgical musings were both vaguely conservative, it was surprising, a little, that most of his other causes were rather easier for liberals to find favor with—the inner city improvements, of course, but also his environmentalism.  It’s no surprise that in the decade or so past, novels and plays have come forth which posit that he tries to buck Parliament and that the issue he takes up is invariably something standing up for liberalism, such as women’s rights or freedom of the press.

In short, I submit that this is going to be a pretty interesting guy.  Parliament has already told him to keep his opinions to himself on the subject of the environment, but I suspect that he’ll continue to raise his voice on behalf of his causes.  Why can’t we just have a laugh about his foibles and be glad when he speaks up for the good,  the true, and the beautiful, especially since none of his stances will probably have the slightest effect?