Good Night, Ma’am
We lost a Queen today, and no mere monarch.
Historians, looking back at our modern age, may very well end an era at today, one that saw the dawn and dusk of American hegemony and more technological revolution than all the millennia before. The Second Elizbethan Age was not defined by her, nor was it even a golden age for her realm; and yet the world has lost perhaps its most stable institution outside of the Church. For Queen Elizabeth II was more uniquely situated to see this maelstrom of human change than perhaps any of us.
Titans fell and rose around her, names which are already myths to us but were contemporaries to her: Winston Churchill, JFK, John Lennon, Alec Guinness, Steve Jobs, Paul Newman, Mark Zuckerberg, Ronald Reagan, Barack Obama. It is as if we said a man died today who knew both Caesar and Theodore Roosevelt, and Thomas Jefferson and Robbespiere, too.
Through it all, and likely knowing far more about the goings-on of the world than you or I do, Queen Elizabeth II was somehow a steadfast and unchanging presence, an almost natural feature in the landscape of humanity. Indeed, she had more in common with the Rock of Gibraltar or the White Cliffs of Dover than she did with Sir Paul McCartney or Sir Richard Branson, whose glory comes from stirring the pot of humanity until it boiled. Physicists tell us that it takes a great deal of energy to create change; it takes even more to resist it. Queen Elizabeth did both, modernizing the monarchy while preserving it, and I suspect the latter was the hardest.
We colonists despise the pomp of our former governors, though it was Britain who taught us the stoic pride of self-government and eventually, governing others (and too late, its costs). But in creating the firm, enduring, longsuffering faith which good governance can inspire in a people, The Queen continued long after the English or American governments did, unrelenting decade after decade. To rest, unyielding against the forces of social entropy, indicates a vast depth of personal reserve which is inconceivable in any of our American statesmen and has been for decades.
Indeed, it is a stillness and depth of spirit more native to the English, who for all their whimsy are an elder people. The crown, for 70 years, embodied that solidity much in the same way the American government at one time embodied our own people's younger idea of stability, a steady forward motion. The Queen showed us the potent, long-burning power of not only monarchy, but reserve and steadiness. A hard thing to do, for it takes years, not days, and pages, not sentences.
And so an American, not a subject and yet in every way her inferior, raises a glass of scotch – the only suitable produce of the UK he could find in his Californian home — to a dead monarch who served her unending age well into the cold evening.
Good night, ma’am.
