Scrubbs Or Buckingham Palace For Charlie

Last night I saw a television dramatisation of the romance and politics of Ronald Reagan. In America the media tolerates and broadcasts only Democratic intelligence. Other forms of intelligence do exist but the media instantly shuts them out. So we should assume only certified Democrats produced, wrote and acted in this docudrama. They would hate Ronald Reagan and his ilk with a low-down passion that makes me wonder now if the primary colours of red and blue of the American Parties already have started a contemporary version of the War of the Roses.

So no roses for Reaganites. I however watched it with as an open-mind as I could possibly fathom. Very quickly I could see the fundamental problems of the American Empire. In ancient times a southern Italian village, by luck and the prowess of its fighting men, found itself the capital of a world empire. I am thinking of the village of Rome, that defeated in two great wars the Punic hegemony in the Mediterranean, and made a southern Italian peasant-mentality the masters of the world.

Simple minds like to believe that men and women surrounded by the loot of their conquests and the fate of millions of their new subjects are transformed into statesmen and moral philosophers. The wise have always known that a peep into their secret councils from Tel Armana in Ancient Egypt to the White House in America is always disillusioning. Once a robber and a brigand, always a robber and a brigand, even if you are now a world statesman. That seems to be a universal rule in history.

I was quickly struck that Ronald and his intimates were nothing much more than a bunch of rather silly, ignorant, and immature people. The grasping and selfish nature of their poor forebears had in no way diminished. But lacking the excuse of poverty, it had become offensive and putrid. Whatever folk wisdom may have survived in the hardships and learned experience in their forebears had been truly squashed out by the consumerism of twentieth-century rich Americans.

The docudrama starts in the the late 1940s, and already the seeds of neurotic, hypochondriac, pigeon-brained America is apparent. The only people who come out of the story with an ounce of wisdom and integrity are the Reagan children, Ronald's and Nancy's, from their previous marriages.

In one hilarious scene the little Reagan child Maureen suddenly stops an electric company T.V. commercial which she is acting in with her parents by snapping, "Let's cut this, this is silly." Ronald evades the child's words with an in-house joke while Nancy smacks the child in her bedroom. Nancy snaps to the child, "Your father's livelihood depends on this."

I sympathise with her justification but it tells us about the decline of American civilization. In the next scene, Reagan, always the smooth performer, is addressing an American blue-collar crowd about how evil communism will deprive their children of their American freedom. That scene is loaded but I can't evade its point.

As Ronald is on the brink of actually winning the Presidency, an incredulous Maureen weeps that she loves her father as a person, but has nothing but hatred and contempt for everything he represents.

Having surveyed with disgust mixed with compassion the twentieth-century American Republican royal family, I have turned with relief to the Windsors. Theirs is too a dysfunctional, sometimes also a silly and immature royal family.

But despite all the folly and tragedy I believe they represent something that is important and far beyond themselves. Their actual family roots are obscure German Royalty. It is the sort of continental European royalty with cardboard gold tinged crowns the Grimm brothers and Hans Anderson loved to write about.

But in this frosty, often eccentric, family there lies a blood-line of the great, ignoble, and murderous kings that since 1066 were at the head and the heart of England and her fellow Kingdoms and dominions. To be pedantic there was of course the Cromwell Protectorate. I am sure he was not finally crowned King of England only because he unluckily could not trace his bloodline to any sort of English Royalty.

The English royal history has shared with real greatness, also monstrosity and nonsense. All parts of English royal history are all the parts of human history and human nature.

Prince Charles is faithfully waiting for the Crown. When script-writers write his story it will be embellished with fine language and cultivated dignity. His future Royal Highness's history may already be predicted in the B.B.C. script-writer Davis' House of Cards.

Today the Prince of Wales lives under a cloud. He is actually being investigated by Scotland Yard concerning the death of his late wife, Princess Diana. The Prince is totally sang-frois. True to the purple, he can never see policemen as other than funny people with funny accents who will always call him "Sir" and "Your Highness". That saves his entire Kingdom a lot of stress.

Providing there is not an actual revolution – which would most likely put him in the English prison Wormwood Scrubbs – the Establishment, i.e. the English Monarch and the palace advisers, himself at last, will always insulate him from what happens to mere commoners who do what comes naturally when in bondage to a mad woman.

Princes Diana herself leaves a legacy that is rich in British history. She evokes the ghosts of Princess Caroline; even, with poetic licence, the Queen Marys of sixteenth-century England and Scotland.

Now what American Royalty can leave so illustrious a legacy? Theirs can never represent more than it is. It would even be bloodier. I have read the Prince of Wales dislikes and avoids visiting America. He is too unwelcome, to too many powerful people, because his Royal conscience is bothered enough. I suspect he has now complete contempt for the utterly corrupt and traitorous to their own American people, the hay-seed and counterfeit politicians in the village by the Potomac, Washington D.C.