Remember Elizabeth as a person who knew how to keep silent — unlike some people today
Despite his name, my constitutional law professor, the eccentric and occasionally volatile Royal C. Gilkey despised the monarchy.
He was incapable of saying “queen” without the disgorged word positively dripping in venom and disgust. To him, the throngs of Americans that turned out to see Queen Elizabeth in 1983 were Yankee Doodle’s greatest embarrassment since the 1919 Black Sox Scandal in the year of his birth.
“Queen,” he snarled to our civil liberties class. “I wouldn’t walk across the STREET to see a queen.” When he said the word “street,” he slapped his hand on the table with such violence that the stack of papers thereon jumped four inches into the air. We young and tender students were scared, both of him and for him.
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Steeped in the U.S. Constitution, it was beyond him how Americans could idolize a monarchy that we’d gone to such good time and trouble to divest ourselves a mere two centuries prior.
The queen had no legislative power, to be fair, and our own moribund democracy — at the time, dealing with gasoline shortages, sky high interest rates and inflation much worse than today’s — had not exactly distinguished itself.
It struck me at the time that the most hated form of government was the kind that did little, while the most loved was the kind that did nothing.
Maybe Dr. Gilkey’s influence is why I never caught the royals bug. The institution seemed an absurdity, a Tom and Jerry cartoon beneath the glass in a museum exhibit. So defanged was the institution as an agency of governance that any utterance by a family member that could be construed as a policy statement was greeted with nationwide outrage.
Elizabeth, in death, is categorized by a universally fawning press as a deep thinker whose job was to refrain from giving voice to deep thoughts. But in this world of hot takes, impertinent social media posts and the 24/7 news cycle, let’s not diminish how great an asset silence can be.
Washington Post archivists dug through 70 years of Queen Elizabeth quotes, and with no sense of irony whatsoever, deemed this to be among her most profound: “1992 is not a year on which I shall look back with undiluted pleasure.”
Take that, Oscar Wilde.
And really, going through 70 years, 13 presidencies and seven papacies without using a verb is an impressive feat. But is it worthy of idolatry? She’s like the baseball player who collects 3,000 hits, not because he’s a particularly good hitter, but because of a particularly long career. So do we still put her in the Hall of Fame?
I think so, because there must have been times — probably many times — that she was able to keep her mouth shut, even though she wanted to scream. How often did the queen want to go full Will Smith, walking straight up to someone and slapping them in the mouth? And most of these times were probably occasioned by her own family.
Charles and Diana. Prince “But I Swear, She Looked 18” Andrew. Harry and Meghan. Even Prince William, who, for personality, makes a dishrag look like Odell Beckham Jr. I wonder if she didn’t look at that scalawag Harry and think, at last, someone with a pulse.
She was not afforded this luxury. She spent her life in the gilded cage, as human topiary with not one leaf out of line, trotted out for special occasions where she was wildly cheered not for what she had done, but what she hadn’t.
That would get old fast, wouldn’t it? You and I aren’t kings or queens, but at least we can wear our sweatpants to the convenience store for a honey bun and a pack of cigs.
So remember her as a queen if you want. But more important, remember her as a lovely person who, unlike most people today, knew a thing or two about human decency.
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Tim Rowland is a Herald-Mail columnist.
This article originally appeared on The Herald-Mail: Queen Elizabeth II kept her mouth shut, and that's beautiful
