I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America. And sometimes to the queen of England when she visits on national holidays.
Don’t worry, if they couldn’t get “under God” out of the pledge, there is no way they could add this in. It doesn’t have to be in the pledge to be a bizarre reality though.
Queen Elizabeth II, the reigning monarch of England, visited Virginia last week during the 400th anniversary of Jamestown. This week brought her to the White House, where President Bush reported that she gave him a look “that only a mother can give her child.”
Only in the U.S. would you find such an oddly disturbing relationship between the people and a former colonizing power.
Anywhere else you look, colonization has left deep and still-seething wounds, but we invite our colonizers to make speeches at our festivals and actually line up to cheer as their queen saunters by.
What makes it possible for us to completely turn around in our attitudes? Were they not as much passed down through history as those of other countries? Is it easier to look upon a colonizer after a successful revolution? Or is the sight of a queen so quaint and extraordinary in our world of exaggerated meritocracy that it only seems fair to catch a glimpse of one when you can?
When the words, “No title of nobility shall be granted by the United States,” were resolutely penned down in Article I, Section 9 of the United States Constitution, there is no doubt they did the fledgling country a world of good. But that was also the moment we lost any hope of a Hans Christian Anderson vibe.
Everything is possible in America. We have rags to riches stories, we have men and women breaking out of class structures and thousands of tales of Yankee ingenuity, but we have neither prince nor princess.
And even though I would in no circumstance ever vote to have such a figure instated in this country, the evidence that Americans might miss the glitter of such a person now and then is embodied in our strange relationship with the queen of England.
While reading of the hundreds of Virginians who welcomed and listened attentively to the queen on the anniversary of the first settlement in America, I couldn’t help but wonder how this would play out in other countries.
The people of much of North Africa and islands such as Guadeloupe and Martinique still feel the memories of colonization under France, and they see very thin lines between service and servitude to the “white man.” There is no way that they would accept someone like the newly elected President Sarkozy into their festivals.
Come to think of it, Americans have always had sort of a strange fascination with England, and especially its monarch. When everything from an episode of the late-’80s television show “Full House” (which I know you still watch intently) to the Oscar winner for best actress has to do with the queen, you start seeing how much American attention is directed toward that figure,
I don’t see any other former colonies of the queen acting in a similarly bizarre fashion. But then again, many of them have had chances at bowing down to and finally rejecting the whole concept while we have never had a monarch on our land. In India, for example, before the country became a part of the British Empire, it was a conglomeration of several separate kingdoms with not one but several kings of the land.
Because we never had a monarch on our land that we had to personally get rid of, we have no particular stigma against borrowing one, even if it is from our former colonizers.
Of course, one of the best things about being an American is to never have to dive into a curtsy (or a bow) for anyone because their family, at one time, had been behind the oppression or upkeep of your ancestors.
Looking at it this way, it makes sense to me why we might have a need for some of the Old World.
When they do idiotic things like wear Nazi costumes to parties or marry ex-mistresses, the royals can be seen as “just British” and become the target of every joke made by John Stewart that week. But borrowing them for festivals and other sequined occasions is always an option.
America, as the world’s youngest power, has the freedom to choose what to adopt from the rest of the older traditions without it marring our national conscience. We may have the queen today, but next year, the same Virginians could be craning their necks to see the Dalai Lama.
Report other strange mother-child combos to Joshi at rjoshi@media.ucla.edu. Send general comments to viewpoint@media.ucla.edu.