Since it is Christmas, it is time for the annual message from Queen Elizabeth II, and as a semi-loyal ex-colonist….I listened to it. It was, as expected pretty much as follows:
Yada, Yada, Yada….we are all in this together….Covid….We are inspired….next year.
It was a nice speech, and at 94, the Queen looked great and did it well. I will admit to being a little partial to the Queen. I’m not exactly a monarchist, but a woman who has dealt with a couple of dozen presidents and Prime Ministers, who slapped down Winston Churchill a few times, and is—extraordinarily—the last head of state in the world to wear a uniform during World War II, deserves a little respect.
Having said that, the Queen is not exactly in this with the rest of us. If the rich are different from us, the Queen is different even from the rich. According to Forbes, Jeff Bezos of Amazon is the richest person in the world at $230 billion (which shows you how incorrect Forbes can be). The queen easily has several times the wealth of Bezos.
I did a little back of an envelope figuring and not even bothering to list the assets worth less than a measly billion dollars, such as those piddly minor items like the shiny trinkets in the Tower of London or the diaries and notebooks of Queen Victoria. I stopped adding up the big stuff when the total topped $505 billion.
The Queen owns BIG stuff…. like Antigua and a half dozen other Caribbean Islands. And as the monarch, she owns the English seacoast and the seabed under the seas surrounding the country (In fact, she owns about 1.4% of all the land in the UK). The value of mining rights to this property has been estimated at more than $100 billion. And back in the 17th century, Charles I started a royal art collection every monarch since then has added to it. Today, the collection consists of some 150,000 pieces, valued at more than $10 billion. There are more than 600 Faberge eggs.
The monarch has six castles, three shopping centers, and more real estate than anyone could visit in a lifetime, over six billion acres. And who cares? That’s not the interesting stuff that fascinates me. Because of tradition, archaic and forgotten laws, and the longevity of the royal family, the Queen owns some really cool stuff that you have probably never heard about.
On the vast Balmoral estate, valued at more than $50 billion, there is a bat colony. These are not your regular cave dwelling bats—these bats inhabit Balmoral Castle. While most property owners would chase them off, the Queen likes the bats and has ordered the castle staff to leave the windows open so the bats can come and go as they wish (except when she catches them in a butterfly net to release them outside). Cool!—especially in winter.
Actually, the Queen owns a lot of animals. Besides a stable of race horses—and the Ascot Racetrack—the queen owns a couple of Corgis, two black jaguars, a sloth, all the dolphins in the United Kingdom, and two giant Aldabra tortoises. Though no one knows exactly how many of them there are—the queen owns all the swans on the River Thames. And while she technically does not own all the mussels and oysters in Scotland, she does own the fishing rights to them.
I guess you could say that the Queen has her own money, since her picture is on it. According the Guinness Book of World Records, her likeness has appeared on more currency than anyone else’s in history. And if she needs access to any of that cash, her bank had conveniently installed her own personal ATM in the basement of Buckingham Palace. I’m at a loss, however, to come up with a reason why she would ever need to get any cash. If she wanted to sneak out of the palace one night for a hamburger, she could go to a nearby shopping center where she owns the local MacDonald’s franchise.
The Queen’s grandfather, King George V, started a stamp collection in the 1890’s and when the public learned of the King’s hobby, he received large numbers of gifts to add to this collection. The Royal Philatelic Collection is now the largest stamp collection in the Commonwealth, comprising hundreds of albums. Leafing through the volumes must be sort of like looking at a family album, since a sizable portion of the stamps bear the image of someone in her family.
I have no idea how big the Queen’s closets must be, since she has an incredible collection of gowns and uniforms. Besides her own clothes and an estimated 200 Launer handbags, she owns the wedding dress of Queen Victoria and the suit of armor for King Henry VIII. And somewhere, she has to keep the 40 leather suitcases and 9 leather briefcases she travels with, each with a yellow luggage tag that says “The Queen”. (You have to ask yourself why she bothers with the tags, it’s not like she has to identify her bags on an airport carousel.)
If you are wondering what the Queen carries in her handbag, you might be surprised to learn that she always has a camera with her to “take pictures of celebrities”. And though it is now against the law in England, the Queen has carried a pocket knife in her purse since the days when she was a ‘Girl Guide’ in 1937.
Regardless of how many luggage carts the Queen needs when she travels—she also owns the award for the “most-traveled head of state in history”. Traveling over a million miles, she has been to over 120 countries—a list far too long for this blog so it’s far easier to just say she has not yet visited Madagascar, Cuba, Peru, or Israel.
Yet, despite all of her travels, there is one thing that the Queen does not own now and never has owned: a passport.
As an ex-colonist, I wonder if the Brits will ever decide what they want to be, a monarchy, a wild and woolly democracy, a representative democracy, or a socialist collective. They seem to be moving in the socialist direction, but so far they haven't established an effective politburo, although the House of Lords would be happy to take the job. Perhaps one of these days, they'll decide.
ReplyDeleteMeanwhile back in the ex-colony, Americans at once rejected the idea of monarchy complete with a privileged nobility, AND yet keep trying to find themselves a monarchy. George Washington turned down the job, Franklin D. Roosevelt, with the help of a depression and a 4 year long war, settled in for a kind of "reign" unique in American history. Our third example, a would-be "Dear Leader" named Obama, was thwarted in his plans for fundamental change to the American government, the culture and the economy by a stubborn gang of conservatives who fondly remembered the Boston Tea Party.
This last president badly frightened those who wanted a King Barak. They assumed the Cheetoh Messiah (their name, not ours) would also wish to be a king/dictator. To their horror, instead he weakened the power of the president to act arbitrarily (something King B expanded via executive orders), dismantled some of their favorite programs, strengthened the military, oversaw the recovery of the economy (which was supposed to have collapsed to bring in the socialist future of America) and badly shook up the distinctively leftist American Pravda.
One would hope this generation will at some point sit in an honest history class (rather than one patterned after the government history department depicted in George Orwell's 1984). I'm not seeing a lot of evidence that any of them have, despite the honest, often heroic efforts of history professors like your own good self to educate a generation suffering from the affects of the Utopia curse. There is a theory that the closer a society gets to peace and plenty, the more its people create some kind of misery for themselves as a kind of antidote to all that peace and plenty, safety and comfort.
Seems some people can't be happy unless they make for themselves some nice violence, chaos, and fear to tamp down all those pesky conditions for happiness that surround them. I can make a guess as to why some people can't handle happiness. I suspect that you need to someone else besides yourself to bear the ultimate burden of rule. It can be a person or a deity. The trouble is that people are, by nature if you believe in original sin, no damned good. At the same time the whole idea of God makes many nonreligious people feel imperfect and judged. Myself, I've come to know God over the years and I am content with peace and safety, plenty and comfort.