The Diamond Jubilee... A Farewell To Monarchy

"Like the Vatican, the Crown is above the natural law of the land. Canadian courts refuse to hold it responsible for crimes against indigenous people..." - Kevin Annett

(SASKATCHEWAN) - (Editorial note: The Diamond Jubilee - currently entrancing tradition-fixated British imbeciles, mammary-habituated Canadians and superior but envious Americans - has almost run its news cycle, so it's time to recall my family's progress from genuflecting to an attitude tantamount to The Gunpowder Plot, all in three generations. Because my family has proudly represented – and been marginally tainted by - all three nationalities.)

My father was an imperialist. He was raised in Tory Ontario in a Baptist family that was perhaps embarrassed by the listing in the family Bible of the rebel Philip Annett who, four generations earlier, had seized the family flintlock and hastened to join William Lyon MacKenzie during the abortive rebellion of 1837. (Ontario history may not have been as dull as we thought.)

But my father, Ross, was totally inured to the imperial tradition, without hesitation enlisting in the European Great War “for King and country,” just as he cheered on my late oldest brother to follow suit some two decades later. The latter war, perhaps with better justification than the picking off of an Austrian archduke by a Serbian nutcase (or was it the other way around?) had seen Canada rushing to declare war on Germany scarcely before the ink had dried on the idiotic Neville Chamberlain's famous document signed by Hitler confirming “peace in our time.”

My first rebellion against my father's allegiance to the Crown had already occurred years earlier when on Christmas morning we were constrained from ransacking the tannenbaum until after “The King's Speech To The Empire.” Herded into the kitchen and placated with brazil nuts and Jap oranges, we – my brothers and I – huddled in revolutionary mode as King George VI stuttered through what was intended as a fifteen minute socio-spiritual message to the colonies but dragged on for half an hour. Why?

Because George (Bertie in the Windsor household), as you may remember, suffered from a speech impediment. Let us not, my brothers and I vowed through gritted teeth, to the marriage of true colonies, admit impediments. Our unstated conviction was that if “The Madness of King George” (George III) had forfeited America in 1776, Canada's impeaching of George VI in the Dirty Thirties made much more sense. I have loathed royalty of all stripes ever since what I call The Georgian Christmas Message era.

Check that: I would at the time have amended that blanket royal aversion, inserting the single exception, retroactively, of old Eddie VIII who, despite his Nazi affiliations, was fairly cool, according to my childhood perception. He was to me “the glass of fashion and the mold of form,” what with the bags under his eyes and his fin de siecle ennui, his obviously dissipated globe-trotting lifestyle with Bessie Wallis Warfield Spencer Simpson Windsor, whose multi-matrimonial achievement even then rivaled those later records set by Liz Taylor, George Sanders and Larry King-Live. I've favored a Windsor knot ever since. (Which, come to think of it, is perhaps the only useful contribution made by la famille royale Windsor over five generations, dating back to the Saxe-Coburghs, who unloaded Prince Albert of Bavaria as the royal stud for the Victorian miracle.)

My royal watching reached its zenith in September, 1939 when, with ancestral voices prophesying war, G-G-George and the Queen Mum were dispatched to stir up royal fervor and rally the colonial troops. The Royal Visit of 1939 succeeded in spades, because the First Canadian Division was on the way to Blighty before the Big B.E.F. Bug-Out from Dunkirk. But that royal tour cost them my vote forever, and I'll tell you why.

The royal train couldn't go everywhere in Canada and the closest it came to my little Alberta town was the rail line 80 miles to the north, which passed through the metropolis of Wainwright, then boasting at least twice the population of the 300 souls in my town. The patriotic subjects of the entire surrounding region flocked to Wainwright by car, truck, Bennett-buggy, horse and on foot. In our case, we arose at 4:00 A.M., having pre-arranged box lunches and a sort of car pool in our town. My father's Model A Ford was pressed into service, and was assigned several kids in addition to our family. That fact is key to the following anecdote.

I must note that the subsequent brief view of their Majesties was ante-climactic, in terms of adventurous excitement. Bobby Turton, who rode with us, unaccustomed to such world travel, was afflicted with violent car sickness around Mile 60. My father, pressed for time and preoccupied with driving over a dark prairie trail, instructed Bobby to let fly out the left-rear window. The instruction came too late. Bobby had already upchucked on John Coulton's sandwiches. After that, it was all downhill, entertainment-wise.

My father, behind the wheel, persisted in doing his best, but by the time our old Ford rattled into Wainwright, we were noticeably late and a vast multitude had descended on the railway station. Dad managed to get parked four hundred yards west of the Visit's epicenter, where their Majesties had already detrained, right on schedule.

They proceeded to shake hands with the Mayor, receive a three-finger salute from the local Boy Scouts and a bouquet of pussy willows and prairie roses (Alberta's official floral emblem) from the Ladies Aid. Then with flawless timing they retrained, and were almost immediately flashing past our position, as we scrambled out of the car and up onto the roadbed.

In the pre-dawn darkness, I caught a brief glimpse, on the last pullman's rear platform, of what I recognized – being a keen 12-year old – as the pusser winter blue uniform of an Admiral of the Fleet (five star, for those Americans still with me) surmounted by a bored Windsor countenance. Alongside, but a respectful pace to the rear of Stuttering Bertie, there was a blur of white dress, a small white hat (which would dictate Canadian fashion for months) and a fluttering white-gloved hand.

The Royal Visit @ 30 mph accelerated into the still night in the general direction of Edmonton.

Since that brief revelation, we've retained in our society a lingering sentimental Queen Bee devotion, partly a conditioned matrilineal yearning, partly the gloating notion that, while our royalty is only symbolic (apart from our judicial system, our parliamentary structure, our speech, our syntax and our religious dogma), it is one of the few national treasures we have over the bloody jealous Americans.

In 1952, shortly following our exodus from Canada, my wife was employed in Manhattan's Tenth Avenue garment district, a solitary Episcopalian among a buying office's 125 employees. One morning – like any other, as far as we were concerned - she arrived at work, noting a hushed silence, as if someone had clicked on a mute button. She was immediately approached by a crestfallen Belle Bernstein, the blouse buyer, who entoned: “Mr. Greenberg asked me to tell you to take the day off.”

My wife thought for a moment, nodded and – suitably condolenced - headed for the nearest outside phone booth (there were no cells, then, much less smartphones), and dialed my office. I met her at Grand Central with alacrity and, while plans were finalized for Princess Elizabeth to ascend a distant throne, we spent the day at Jones Beach. In London, as in Hamlet's corrupt Danish court, the funeral meats may have coldly set forth the coronation table, but our muted mourning consisted of hot dogs and beer. That was 60 diamond-studded years ago.

In retrospect, what had transpired on Tenth Avenue didn't seem to me as much like American envy, as it was perhaps misinformed but sincere respect.

And then there's the item of taxpayer expense. Some people object to the $50 million ponied up for a token minority figure to parade as Governor General (no Wasps need apply in contemporary liberated Canada) to live in a sprawling government mansion in Ottawa – together with smaller replica sprawling government mansions in the ten provincial capitals – for the singular purpose of being told by the Prime Minister (or the ten Premiers) what to tell the Prime Minister (or the ten premiers) every four years or so, like the trained but obedient Corgies in the Windsor household.

Take Normie Kwong. Please. The Honorable Norman Kwong, third generation Chinese/Canadian, first generation sensational former fullback for the Edmonton Eskimos (ethnicity inaccurate) and sometime stock broker, was until recently Lieutenant Governor of Alberta. Normie is also a great guy. Our paths have nudged from time to time since he was at Crescent High in Calgary and I was at Mount Royal 65 years ago. But he is perhaps about as qualified to be an assistant Queen as I – an octogenarian beachcomber – am capable of being an astronaut.

Is this anachronistic monarchy a harmless, albeit extravagant, Limey tradition? Is it merely a symbolic (read innocent) Canadian knee-jerk icon like Ottawa's Cenotaph or the Peace Arch between B.C. and Washington State? Is it justifiable as American ga-ga titillation and perhaps penis envy? If in all those cases that were all, the answer might be a qualified yes.

But the brutal irony is that it partakes – even today – in the most abominable history, embracing five European empires and one sickening corrupt corporation close to Rome, which managed to commit the greatest intergenerational genocide known to mankind, covering the entire Western Hemisphere, and the re-engineering of a once noble civilization.

If you're okay with that, let modesty draw the veil, and allow my son Kevin to have the last word in this slow-moving and disjointed apologia:

“Like the Vatican, the Crown is above the natural law of the land. Canadian courts refuse to hold it responsible for crimes against indigenous people. A feudal compact of church and state still runs our country, enslaving and decimating aboriginal nations and severely truncating the legal rights of all Canadians. It is time to fulfill the founding vision of our two nations with a sovereign Republic, elected head of state, Senate and Congress representing all our people.”

Bill Annett grew up a writing brat; his father, Ross Annett, at a time when Scott Fitzgerald and P.G. Wodehouse were regular contributors, wrote the longest series of short stories in the Saturday Evening Post's history, with the sole exception of the unsinkable Tugboat Annie.

At 18, Bill's first short story was included in the anthology “Canadian Short Stories.” Alarmed, his father enrolled Bill in law school in Manitoba to ensure his going straight. For a time, it worked, although Bill did an arabesque into an English major, followed, logically, by corporation finance, investment banking and business administration at NYU and the Wharton School. He added G.I. education in the Army's CID at Fort Dix, New Jersey during the Korean altercation.

He also contributed to The American Banker and Venture in New York, INC. in Boston, the International Mining Journal in London, Hong Kong Business, Financial Times and Financial Post in Toronto.

Bill has written six books, including a page-turner on mutual funds, a send-up on the securities industry, three corporate histories and a novel, the latter no doubt inspired by his current occupation in Daytona Beach as a law-abiding beach comber.