What was so remarkable about Monday

The Column: 09.21.22

Nobody does royal funerals so beautifully as the Brits and an American watches with awe the long procession toward the chapel at Windsor Castle, the precision left/right stroll of the Grenadiers alongside the hearse, the horsemen behind, the bemedaled notaries and royal descendants and then, having come through narrow arches into the courtyard, the hearse stops, the rear door opens, and the eight uniformed pallbearers do a side-shuffle march to take hold of the coffin and lift it to their shoulders and take it up the steps. No simple task but they do it precisely and a stately silence prevails except on TV where American reporters venture speculation about a woman whose job was to be a mystery and who did it very well.

We sat and watched the committal service, we who threw all this away in the 18th century, all the costumery, ribbonry, and titlery and iconic disciplines and endless dignity, in favor of the mess we know all too well. The mind goes back to the funeral of George H.W. Bush in 2018 at Washington Cathedral, four exes present, Carter, Clinton, George W., Obama, and, keeping his distance, avoiding eye contact, not concealing his wish to be elsewhere, anywhere, our then head of state stood and refused to say the Lord’s Prayer, didn’t sing, didn’t amen, scowling as he shook a few hands. A sovereign head of state would’ve been appropriate in the ways a real-estate mogul finds difficult.

We are Americans, we can’t help it. When one courtier lifts the silver orb from the casket and hands it carefully to another courtier, I want him to drop it and a great byoingyoingyoing fill the great chapel and let us see the Brits stifle their laughter and refuse to admit hearing any byoing. Same when the lone bagpiper fired up his drone and walked the long hallway playing a tune, I wanted to hear him squawk like a wounded ostrich, but he did not.

My mother, whose father came from Glasgow, was a great admirer of the Queen who was a few years younger, and she visited London and stood at the Buckingham gate looking in, as if she might be invited in for tea and scones. My London friends are ferocious republicans and we never mention monarchy in their presence, except if discussing butterflies, because it will lead to a length and learned lecture on the evils of aristocracy. The Queen met Mr. Trump and though his love of pageantry was clear and he lusted after a carriage and platoon of horsemen for himself, we shall never know what she thought of the fool, only that she was polite. She didn’t leave a memoir in which she revealed her inner qualms and anxieties: I doubt that she allowed herself the luxury of qualms. She accepted her role.

And then it was over. The coffin was lowered into the royal vault below St. George’s Chapel and people departed in an orderly fashion, each knowing whom they should follow and what they should do. As the Dean said, “The life of man is as dust,” but dusty as we are, we are capable of putting on a good pageant. By “we,” I mean “they.”

But after a couple hours of admiring tradition and ceremony and everyone knowing which foot to put where, it dawns on me that this elevation of bureaucracy to an art form is what America fortunately escaped and thus was better able to give the world the phenomenal techno advances of my lifetime, the laptop, cellphone, GPS, AI, drones, radical reductions in the cost of solar panels and wind energy, new vaccines. These things were not created by platoons of people marching in place but by brilliant gamblers and entrepreneurs, nerds of many stripes. (We also gave the world the blues and rock ’n’ roll, but that’s another story.)

An English major in college, I looked down on IT students because they all dressed alike and carried plastic pocket protectors for their ballpoint pens. I saw them as dullards. As it turns out they were at work on data technology that led to the internet, which changed my life and yours too. Meanwhile, the English department and other humanities march along beside the hearse and the horsemen.

I wanted to be eccentric and got my wish but the engineers in my family are more engaged with the real world. Thank God our president is committed to technological advance rather than cultural combat. He’s never spoken in defense of the 2020 election results. Either you can count or you can’t.

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