Roosting with the royals

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				THE
Column Archive				VIRGINIA GAZETTE
				WILLIAMSBURG, VIRGINIA
Roosting with the royals				November 22, 2006

I can’t tell you how jollified I was to read that Britain’s royal family would be trucking over here next year to celebrate 400 years of archaeological remains at Jamestown. What could be more appropriate than the advent of a gaggle of dysfunctional British royals to put the icing on a suspiciously trumped up birthday cake devoted to hyping tourism in Virginia?

You’ll pardon my confusion, but aren’t these the remnants of the equally dysfunctional English royals who provoked the Boston Tea Party and the American Revolution? Didn’t we just celebrate the victory of our guys over Cornwallis at Yorktown? But now we want the present crown keepers back because their predecessors sent a group of colonizing hacks over here to claim Virginia for the Brits? I don’t get it.

It’s not that I have anything against the queen and her entourage invading our shores once again. But let’s face it. These are not the brightest regal stars in the international royal firmament.

While I always thought that the Queen Mum and Princess Margaret were living somewhere in the realm of reality, Elizabeth has had one, as she called it, annus horribilis, or horrible year, after another. Known primarily for her loopy hats and tony outfits, Elizabeth has ruled over a roost of out-of-control renegade offspring who are all too reflective of the Windsors’ questionable lineage.

To make matters worse, she married a man who, while he may have had all his mental marbles in the pouch when they were hitched, has become as notorious for his logorrheic lapses as George Bush.

On his recent visit to Hanoi, Bush told reporters that we should have stayed the course in Vietnam and not pulled out. How this went over with his Vietnamese hosts we don’t know, but I suspect they were shaking their Communist heads in disbelief. One Asian diplomat went so far as to refer to the president as “the American psycho.”

Yet Bush has far to go to equal the gruesome gaffes of Prince Philip.

On a visit to Nigeria, the playful prince told the traditionally dressed king of that state that he looked like he was ready for bed. And when asked what he thought was the key problem facing Brazil, Philip replied, “Brazilians live there.” While on a trip to Australia, the prince asked of an aboriginal man, “Do you still throw spears at each other?” And when in China, he diplomatically reminded a bunch of British students that, “If you stay here much longer, you’ll all get slitty-eyed.”

This, then, is the consort with whom Elizabeth has been hanging out for all these years and, sad to say, making babies.

The prime result of that undertaking was Prince Charles, or Charlie as he is affectionately known. Charles, who was to become the Platonic form of the annus horribilis, went through the usual scholastic course in militarism and came out slightly more intelligent and considerably less handsome than he was when he went in.

Claiming an intense interest in the formal niceties of traditional architecture, Charlie obviously had an eye for beauty and hence proposed to the shyly winsome Diana. But because Diana’s rung on the social ladder was about 200 feet below that of Charlie, distasteful rumbles shook Buckingham Palace. Nevertheless, the wedding proceeded, and the ceremony was beamed to a delighted world at large.

That the marriage would turn out to be a disaster could have been predicted. In the conflict between the lowly beauty and the regal beast, the beauty won out, wooed the world with her charm, curiosity and caring and overshadowed the polo-playing palace pony lovers to the point of ignominy. It is to her credit that her two sons inherited their physiognomy genes from their mother.

In the end, Charlie, having given up on all that beauty bunkum, took up again with his first love, the female doppelganger of Don Imus known as Camilla Parker-Bowles. That, coupled with the Andrew-Fergie fiasco, led even the fiercest royalists to wonder if the monarchy should just toss in the royal towels, and, as Philip once suggested, disappear “without a row.”

So this is the curious collage of crown bearers that will canoodle about at the Jamestown joyathon next year. Look for a plethora of jaunty hats plopped on the royal head and listen for some pearls of diplomatic wisdom from Philip. Evidently Charlie will give a nod to Jamestown’s curios and then be off to play polo in Leesburg.

As for accommodations for the royals, they better be top notch. On her last visit to the Cayman Islands, the queen allegedly whispered, “I’m so glad we’ve got the yacht with us this time. The last time we came, we had to stay in a guest house.”

One can only imagine how she would have reacted to the accommodations offered her in the Jamestown of 1607.