Undeserved fanfare

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				THE
Column Archive				VIRGINIA GAZETTE
				WILLIAMSBURG, VIRGINIA
Undeserved fanfare				May 12, 2007

There are times in life when you just have to sit back and ask yourself what on earth is going on. Have we completely lost our minds? Has our sense of reality and proportion left the cozy coop of reason totally uninhabited?

Now that the fussbudgetry associated with the visit of the queen and her cockaloric consort is over, we really need to examine the motives that propelled us to such a disgraceful level of orgiastic obeisance and unfettered opulence for the sake of a woman whose semiotics are enmeshed in faux-chic chapeaux and a man of questionable intelligence who delights in racial and ethnic slurs.

Why was I reading about floral arrangements in the “tussie-mussie” style or centerpieces that featured green snowball bush blooms, purple loosestrife, Weber’s Parrot cream tulips and galax leaves? Or that in the queen’s bedroom she found cream lisianthus and variegated pittosporum? What on earth is this stuff, and where does it come from? More important, how much does it all cost? What’s wrong with tender bouquets of dandelions and buttercups plucked from local lawns?

You will have noticed, too, that when the royals come to town common colors fade to nothingness. Other than red carpets rolled out for regal tootsies, no one talks about blue, green, red or yellow. Instead we read that the décor in the queen’s suite featured the much more soothing taupe and mauve.

The only thing I know about taupe is that it’s the French word for “mole.” So I assume this shade is akin to the color of a mole after it has burrowed through 20 or 30 feet of my garden and emerges looking like a dirty yellow blob in need of a bath. Why the queen would want to be surrounded by a hue derived from a smelly, grime-laden, blind grub-eater is beyond me. As for mauve, don’t ask. I have no idea what that is.

As expected, the queen’s Williamsburg itinerary was tightly scheduled. Once in Jamestown, she was given a tour by that learned guardian of the colony’s historicity, Dick Cheney. For the most part, however, they sat listening to interminable presentations dealing with life in the colony and wondering why on earth they were there. Pictures snapped of the two invariably showed them looking grotesquely grumpy, as though they were being forced to watch some grade B underground flic.

What really befuddles me is the adulation that awaited the queen wherever she went, and here’s where I think that we lost it completely.

Throngs of people turned out and waited for hours to get a glimpse of the strangely- attired little lady as she went from lunch to dinner or back and forth to the Williamsburg Inn to change costumes for her date with a rockfish.

One woman went so far as to claim that, after seeing the queen, her life was complete.

I have no idea what kind of life this woman has been leading, or if she’s been leading a life at all. I do find it a tad bizarre that the crowning moment of that life consisted of a glimpse of two people who are a throwback to an era long past being hauled around in a carriage on Duke of Gloucester Street. If it had been Don Imus or Rosie O’Donnell I could understand. But a retrograde representative of the royals we blew out at Yorktown? I don’t think so.

What bothers me about all this is that it’s so superficial, so far removed from reality. Are we really so admiring of inherited wealth and regal doodads that we find this the capstone of adulation? How can we be so utterly flapdoodled over people who have done little to garner millions to themselves other than lie as royal millstones around the necks of British taxpayers to the tune of almost $75 million a year? What possible connection does this duo going from one massively managed event to another have with our lives?

Had the queen deigned to don some common duds and gone to visit a homeless person living under a Colonial Parkway bridge I suppose I would have been impressed. Or had she ridden one of our transit buses out here to Burnt Ordinary to shake a few hands I might have gone out to give her a thumbs up. But she didn’t. Commoners are simply not ingredients in her social mixing bowl.

More than anything, I think this visit by the queen should cause us to pause and reflect on where our priorities lie relative to who’s worthy of honor and who is not. As for me, my tussie-mussie goes to the teacher who has labored for 20 years in our school system or to the guy who delivers my paper every morning at 4:30. It does not go to a shoo-shoo-fly-waving queen of England.