Spayed Queen

Everybody knows England has a Queen. Despite the many photos of William littered about, not as many people—I promise—realize England has had Kings and will again subsequently. If this seems preposterous, consider the order of information apprehended by children. Speaking for myself, who probably encountered the Queen first in full color on bills in British Columbia^1,2, I understood quite certainly at a young age the world included a Queen of England, and as far as I knew it had always been that way. I believe this is true at some point for anyone born late in the reign of Queen Elizabeth II. It is a little like the undercover faith in immortality you carry until anyone who was always in your life, like your grandfather, dies. Later, you discover characters like King Henry and King James and King George, but they are rather like protagonists or villains than governors and so have no relationship to people at large. Moreover, they are all extinct. The women come up most often in words like Victorian or Elizabethan but these terms reference the character of a culture in time—not individual people. The Queen is but her Queendom. This is all part of the same headitching male hegemony that makes you wonder, since there is a Queen Mother, why that woman is not Queen. Eventually the mechanics of succession avail themselves and the relationship of Henry to Elizabeth appears. Yet you can hold this in your head and still maintain the aphorism that England has a Queen and that’s all there is to it. That is to say, the fact that history, which allows us to behold such characters as "Victorian," also gives birth to a character of the future already visible in the present does not interfere with the unshaken reality we all inhabit and universally trust (even though we’ve never met the Queen ourselves)—any more than the future in its own unlimited wisdom can reach back and alter what happens now. Once William ascends, of course, all this is destroyed irrevocably.

note1: I want to dispute any idea this might raise that I ever had any money then

note2: Interestingly America displays its presidents past in monochromatic stylism, and so money there carries historical perceptions rather than anything having to do with any existing real world. Nevertheless I still say Americans are acutely conscious of the Queen of England.