In the midst of moving my parents from their house on the farm to a new home in town a few years ago, I had cause to ask my mother why she and my father had accumulated so much stuff. Her reply was the typical one, to the extent that one doesn’t discard what one might, at some indeterminate future date, find useful. Well, indeed. Moreover, where would I be in my current endeavor if everyone threw out every item of personal property every few years? 18th century furniture pieces would be even fewer on the ground than they are.
The idea of this though, keeping what one might need, puts me in mind of the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee. We all saw the final day’s activities, including the Queen drawn from Buckingham Palace in the 1902 state landau, her dress, taking her cue from that of her grandmother Queen Mary, in a style of an earlier day. Despite the vicissitudes of her royal children, made the commonest of common knowledge by an ever hungrier media, Queen Elizabeth is beloved, making a virtue of preserving the best from the past as head of state. Has there ever been a time in her 60 year reign that republicanism waxed strongly? If it has, it has only been considered as a possibility once the present monarch has become the late one.
While the queen’s presence has been an enduring one, the gala hoopla of the jubilee certainly functions valuably to underscore that fact, and provide the opportunity to consider within the context of an extra special event how important and comforting tradition can be. With Queen Elizabeth’s reign basically business as usual, without the special occasion of the Jubilee, one would become naturally indifferent.
And the length of her reign has resulted in celebrations at just the right intervals. Unfortunately, Americans have had nothing similar since the Bicentennial of 1976. Heavenly days! 36 too many years ago. Don’t tell anyone, but for the 4th of July that year, we threw fireworks off the top floor of my condo building at 2611 Ala Wai Boulevard in Honolulu.
Amidst the acrimony that is now sadly the central feature of partisan politics in this country, an acrimony that has degenerated into factional hate mongering, one wonders whether we wouldn’t be well served as a nation, as the British have, from a jubilee that reminds all of us of our endurance as a nation and commonality as a people. When things were at a low ebb, with recovery from the war creeping forward with glacial slowness, London was the site of a Festival of Britain that engaged and consequently invigorated the entire nation. What more opportune time than now for a festival of America. Now there’s a thought.