The gerontocratic spectacle

 

When Charles was on the brink of thirty, he made a speech to the Cambridge Union in which he said: My great problem in life is that I do not really know what my role in life is.’  The coronation, which I saw – to the length that any tv watcher could stand it – was in line with that statement.

I don’t think I have seen a tv spectacle that was at once so “spectacular” and so heart numbingly boring since the great OJ chase of the nineties, when television discovered that large numbers of people would watch hours of traffic as long as it was accompanied by commentary and celebrity. OJ, at least, in his prime, did experience beauty. Watching documentaries of his great time as a running back for the Buffalo Bills, even a non-fan of the game such as myself could see that here was twentieth century art, to put up against any ballet or modern dance. The OJ who was chased, the bloodstained golfer and future author of If I Did It, was the aftermath of that transcendence – a flat figure, a NPC.

Charles has brushed up against transcendence, but from his horrendous upbringing to his horrendous marriage to his crowning, at the age of fucking 300, he has always been a non-playing character. In Rosemary Hill’s LRB piece about Charles and Camilla, she notes that throughout his career, the word used about Charles is “sad”, or “terribly sad”. As she also notes, nobody pitied Charles as much as he pitied himself. In this, if in little else, he matched his first wife – a flat figure who was meant to race around with seedy Eurotrash trust funders, but ended up, much to her disgust and his, with a Euro-non-trash trust funder.

The ceremony we saw emphasized how very much we are run by a global gerontocracy. Their messenger boys – the Prime Minister of the U.K, the president of France – are greasy with the task of fucking us all over, which they engage in with business school discipline. From the doddering Archbishop of Canterbury (who, at one point, must kneel to pray some kind of prayer, creating the one drama of the whole tedious scene – would he manage to get up on his feet by himself?) to the closeups of Charles, peering seedily around him under those untrimmed eyebrows, this festival in the retirement home of Westminster Abby begged for some, any ironic counterpoint. Instead of getting what we should have had - a series of torch songs of increasing melancholy – we got a thousandth iteration of tween choral music. In order to retain the innocence of those angelic voices, one noticed that Prince Andrew was not present.

In the end, as much as I hate the monarchy and the spectacle of the monarchy, I ended up feeling sorry for Charles. What a waste of middle manager potential, this guy who, if he had not had a fascoid prince of a father and a mother who clearly didn’t like him and wouldn’t die, could have had a happy life as, say, the VP in charge of petrodollar accounts at some City bank! He’d be retired with Camilla in Spain by now, indulging himself with the local vintages and participating in the gentle art of tai chi!

The song that should have been performed, Ithink, is the cover of the Tears for Fears song from Donnie Darko. But it wouldhave spoiled Charles’ one happy day.