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ZorbaTHut  2yr ago (text post)   45539 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 5, 2022

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Hate to say this but this has more relevance than when it is usually used, but UK poster here.

It feels quite eerie. The Queen is (was now, I suppose) a part of the country in a way that will be felt. You could at any time in any place put on a voice of an old woman speaking in an extra refined RP accent and people could immediately tell who you were referring to. Moreover, she lived through several decades of incredible, breakneck change. Several PMs have said of her weekly meetings that they were the most valuable time in their week, to be able to talk to someone who was as close as you could get to impartial advice and had such experience.

She was also the only thing the country could have theoretically united around as a single cultural marker. Before the Jubilee you could go outside and see union jacks and banners depicting the queen's face on almost every house, then on the day everything shut down and neighbours roped off streets to get large open spaces so that they could celebrate the event. That is gone now. Charles does not have the benefit of being a still point in a moving world and comes with several bizzare views about coffee enemas, and it is likely he will be King for the rest of this decade. We may very well see the end of the Monarchy as a cultural touchpoint and the transformation of this country into a complete satellite state of the US will be done.

There was rain and thunderstorms here all throughout the afternoon, which if you believe in portents is not a good sign.

There was rain and thunderstorms here all throughout the afternoon

The Queen: "Apres moi, le deluge".

When in real life or in social, talking about this death, I say to people that the greatest risk is the permanent loss of British cultural independence, and the loss of their social-political-cultural rally point, they see me as a crazy

Incredible how the basic function of how institutions works has been completely lost in the liberal age

Gotta agree. When bemused foreigners ask me why we have a monarchy, I point at things like royal weddings and jubilees. Because it's what we do. It's grand, old, tradition, and it's opulent spectacle without being too tasteless, and we're the best and most authentic in the world at it. And it provides a lot of cultural export and soft power.

Sounds like he's going with Charles III as well -- which is potentially portentious.

Very portentious.

Soon

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