September 14, 2022
"It is lack of individuality as a person that makes a monarch, and it is the negative virtues of not doing naughty stuff that allows a committed and orderly life to be expanded..."
"... by commentators into rare gifts and shining goodness. God helps true characters who wander into the monarchic frame. Poor Fergie, excoriated Meghan. A form of martyrdom, à la Diana, is not unlikely. The Queen lived a long life repressing herself and did it so well that now she will be buried under an avalanche of adjectives that signify, above all, her achievement was she sat on her true nature.
So the encomiums fall flat and stick to our earlobes like treacle. Because they are signs of a woman being disciplined by herself to a remarkable extent. Negative virtues are then elevated to the rhapsodies of positive, godlike, saintly probity."
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What if the Queen's true nature was to carry herself as a disciplined, dignified monarch? Some people really are oriented toward duty, honor, and country, though that seems a concept beyond Keneally's grasp.
I've never heard of Keneally and you have no other entries under his tag. He's taken all the virtues we've praised for most of Western civ's existence -- patience, humility, temperance -- and turned them into grievances. Well, he didn't come out and wish the Queen excruciating pain, but he's just as tacky and incurious as that twitter professor.
Fergie, Diana, and Markel weren't born and raised to be the monarch.
Diana was apparently some low-level aristocrat, but nothing like being in the big show.
Pretty big difference.
But it does seem like the queen is getting accolades for being boring.
According to modern British custom, the king/queen can't really do anything other than cut ribbons at shopping malls...
By the bowels of Christ, man, consider that ye may be mistaken!
Maybe the public is right, the snotty commentator is wrong. Happens at the racetrack numerous times every day of the year.
It's not that complicated: Monarchies follow birth and people get thrust into the role like it or not, suited for it or not. She followed shortly after a UK king who abdicated in favor of being a playboy, and gave birth to Andrew, the Prince of Perversion. She was reliable, predictable, inoffensive, and dutiful. There's no reason to feel strongly about her on the positive or negative side.
But, monarchies remain popular with some people.
Keneally is the Schindler's List (actually Schindler's Ark) author. He has been banging the anti-monarchist drum for decades.
He makes sense, though. House of Windsor, Inc. was like GM or GE or US Steel were in their glory days. Playing a gray role and not standing out were virtues. Individualism and experimentation weren't. The goal was to give yourself to the organization and keep it going.
But that is more a fault of bureaucracy than of traditionalism. An Australian Republic would be more chaotic and less dutiful, but no friendlier or more encouraging when it comes to individual genius than the monarchy has been.
Here's the Wikipedia article on Keneally:
"Thomas Michael Keneally, AO (born 7 October 1935) is an Australian novelist, playwright, essayist and actor. He is best known for his non-fiction novel Schindler's Ark, the story of Oskar Schindler's rescue of Jews during the Holocaust, which won the Booker Prize in 1982. The book would later be adapted into director Steven Spielberg's 1993 film Schindler's List, which won the Academy Award for Best Picture.... He said in an interview in 2007 that what attracted him to Oskar Schindler was that 'it was the fact that you couldn't say where opportunism ended and altruism began. And I like the subversive fact that the spirit breatheth where it will. That is, that good will emerge from the most unlikely places.'"
You can compare that to what Elizabeth II is praised for doing.
That was written by a clown.
He's written many novels, including "The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith," which you may remember as a movie.
"The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith is set in 19th century New South Wales and tells the ultimately tragic story of Jimmie, an Aboriginal man caught between his family and culture and white settler colonialism. The story is written from the perspective of Jimmy Blacksmith, an Indigenous Australian man on a mission of revenge. The story is a fictionalised retelling of the life of the infamous Indigenous bushranger Jimmy Governor. Keneally has said that were he to write the novel today he would not write 'from within a black consciousness.'"
He makes interesting point about Charles. I would have said that at 73 Charles will accept a retiring role. But the gerontocracy in the US suggests otherwise.
Is what Elizabeth did all that difficult? Haven't modern monarchs around the world behaved in similar self-effacing ways? Don't they generally recognize that they have a good thing going and try not to spoil things? Look at Japan.
"it’s astonishing to see the nonstop public piety in operation"
Celebrating the queen's virtues is a safe, indirect way to express opposition to the prog depredation of the culture.
The piety expresses vague echoes of old notions of virtue, as excellence within certain established practices and selfless dedication to duty.
The queen was a living rebuke to progressive morality and culture. But now she too is dead.
"The Queen lived a long life repressing herself"
And you know that how? Because you would have to repress yourself to do it? Perhaps for her, it was the height of self-actualization, doing exactly what she wanted to do and what she felt was her best life.
Kemeally was born in Australia--and is an Australian. He's also Irish, and not of the Northern Ireland variety. So taking a shot at the dead queen is right in his wheelhouse.
That said he's written a lot of books--a prolific author, and some of them were actually quite good. His "Schindler's Ark" was made into the movie "Schindler's List".
The Queen lived a long life repressing herself and did it so well that now she will be buried under an avalanche of adjectives that signify, above all, her achievement was she sat on her true nature.
Yes and she was born into an 'old school' royal family and had been raised to be that way, just like the rest of her family.
And I doubt Keneally would have the same view if he needed to have his car fixed and arrived at his mechanic's shop only to find a note on the door explaining that they were closed because fixing cars all day was too repressing!
Derbyshire estimated that the Queen had an IQ of 100-110.
The democratic/dictatorial model is dead. Long live the democratic/dictatorial model with diversity [dogma] (e.g. color bloc, class-based judgment) enhancements.
The Queen lived a long life repressing herself
Because you don't know exactly what the Queen thought about everything, she has therefore repressed herself? What vacant thinking by Keneally.
The queen was a living rebuke to progressive morality and culture.
This is exactly right, so far as it goes, and explains dozens of the pieces of nastiness that have appeared in the press.
Was Prince Philip repressed?
Repressing herself? How do you know that?
There is no self other than what a person does.
The Queen was the CEO of "The Firm," her Royal holdings of property, real estate, businesses worth an estimated $28,000,000,000 last year. She behaved as a CEO should, first and foremost protecting "The Firm" at all times from those who might diminish it in any way, from other family members behaving badly, to radical anti-monarchists, to foreign powers, to Parliamentary busybodies.
Follow the money, if you want to know what motivated her over her whole life.
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