The lyingest lie I ever told was when, like four years ago, working at a chain record store (more of a chain Skull Candy earbuds store) with a useless Master’s Degree and little in the way of job prospects, I applied for a staff writing job at Hello! Canada.
During the 20 excruciating minutes of the interview I had to pretend that I was interested in working for a magazine that, in large part, doggedly tracks every footstep of the British monarchy. The whole time I was trying to do the arithmetic in my head to calculate how many days it would before I became a full-blown alcoholic, just to cope with the dismal reality of working at a place that would care about these things. (I didn’t get the job. Maybe because my contempt was so thinly veiled. Anyway.)
I had to say words like “I think the monarchy is important to Canadian identity” and “the Queen is really fascinating.” I felt weird and outside of myself, like I was watching a movie starring me, but the real me had been supplanted by a dead-eyed doppelganger who gives a shit about stuff like queens and dukes and rich people watching horse racing. I rank it among one of the more odd and difficult things I’ve ever had to do in the course of my laughably easy life.
So the mania surrounding His Royal Highness The Babiness Of Wales Or Whatever is confusing to me – and also, for some reason, personally offensive. I don’t care about the Royal Family. In fact I actively dislike them. I am not interested in their pseudo-incestuous political marriages or their offspring or their clothes. I am not interested in humanizing portraits of monarchs that depict them as oppressed by the expectations of their very royalty (The Queen) or as stuttering incompetents (The King’s Speech) or as even as superficial relics worked up about having to eat a hot dog (Hyde Park On Hudson).
So everyone. Please. Shut up about the royal baby. If you care about there being a new member in the baby-ranks of the monstrously archaic Royal Family, you are either:
a) a mush-minded moron who would be entertained by a balloon or, worse
b) a monarchist
If you are just an idiot: fine. That’s your right. Here’s a picture of The Queen to look at. You can imagine how nice it would be to pay all your taxes to her so she can live in an actual palace and put a literal crown on her physical head and bathe in rosemary-tinted champagne and loofah her stretch marks with rare amethysts. Go.
But if you are an actual monarchist, and are a Canadian, you are a traitor.
If you tweet anything other than jokes about the Royal Baby, you should be tried for high treason. Do we have that in Canada? We should. If only so we can imprison any monarchists teeming in our midst – anyone who ever set an alarm to wake up early for a royal wedding, anyone who collects spoons with the Queen’s pallid face on them, anyone who doesn’t audibly groan every time they handle a Canadian $20 bill monarchy-side up – for life.
It seems that, generally, Canadians aren’t even aware of how connected to the British Royal Family we even are. Maybe because teaching the fineries of the constitutional monarchy has been scrubbed from provincial education curriculum, replaced by hour-long civics lessons about what a mayor is, people think the Queen is just a symbolic representation of Canada’s monarchist past, holding about as much political sway as a loon or a beaver or the Canadarm. No. Technically, the Queen of England is The Queen of Canada, a job which basically amounts to occasionally puttering around our soil so she can be greeted by sycophantic morons – the same kind of sycophantic morons who crowd Buckingham Palace to get a look at a piece of paper announcing the birth of a new King Baby.
Maybe it’s because Canada’s such a relatively new nation, a bit of a Royal Baby itself, that we glom on to Britain’s history, iconography and penchant for ornate, curlicued crests flanked by lions and horses. Maybe because we struggle so vainly to manufacture the illusion of a national identity in a nation that spans such broad cultures, histories and geographical expanses, the stuffy pomp and circumstance of a facile, wasteful British monarchy offers some sort of structuring presence. I don’t know. And I couldn’t care less.
What I do know, in my hearts of ashen, angry hearts, is that if we can’t endeavor to actually learn about how the British Royal Family still grips our nation in its clammy fingers, or – one day, Queen-willing – formally abolish Canada’s ties to the monarchy altogether and reprint all our cool money with images of Geddy Lee and Tommy Douglas and Samantha Bee, we can at least make a deliberate effort to ignore it.
Even the BBC knows that a new baby being born is not news. No matter how much purple chugs through his tiny newborn veins.
