October 05 2007

Text By Greg Fallis

Ah, Elizabeth. Is there anybody alive who doesn't have mixed feelings about Elizabeth II, queen regnant of sixteen Commonwealth realms? For fifty-five years she's been there, the poor dear, half-hidden by hats, surrounded by small Welsh dogs, boxed inside of ornate frames hung with stiff formality on walls of places she would never visit in person.

She is both easy to love and easy to hate...easy because she is more symbol than human being. She is also easy to pity, which would no doubt offend her terribly. It's an odd thing, to feel a sort of pity for a woman who, in her royal capacity, is the owner of 6.6 billion acres of property in 32 different countries, amounting to about one-sixth of the land on the earth's surface. And yet, how can we not pity her? She owns property, but she doesn't own her life.

Elizabeth Alexandra Mary Windsor will spend the rest of her life in the same way she's spent the last half century. She will sit quietly and decorously in the background, framed and hatted, lending a certain aura of proper deportment and dignity to every environment. And while the clock ticks tidily away for us, nothing changes for her. She must hear the ticking, ticking, but for her the second hand never moves.