Tom Rachman is a contributing columnist for The Globe and Mail.
If I returned from tea with King Charles, I could guess your question: “What’s he like?”
Perhaps you’d smirk to find that His Royal Highness travels with His Royal Toilet Seat. Or maybe you’d sigh to hear that his jacket was full of sad little holes.
But I’d have a question for you: Why do we care? Not just about him, but about the pantheon of celebrities, all the randomly rich and fortuitously famous?
The latest spasm of wealthy-stranger worship comes Saturday, with the coronation of Charles III, when the new old monarch trundles in a carriage past crowds in central London. At Westminster Abbey, he’ll be formally fitted with his king bling, a crown representing power but conferring little anymore.
Personally, I will refrain from an oath of allegiance to the King and his heirs, which the public has been invited to declare aloud. Nor will my lunch be Coronation Quiche, the celebratory dish selected by Charles, seemingly in meticulous dread of any problematic ingredients. “This has to be the most tasteless unappetizing quiche imaginable,” a commenter on BBC GoodFood said. “Simply avoid.”
I feel no hostility toward the King personally – despising anyone for the happenstance of their birth is spiteful. Sometimes, I’ve even felt sympathy for Charles, who seems such a sheepish shepherd, as if frightened of scaring away his flock.
But what interests me more than the King is the wish to have one. Why the persistent drive – found in every society throughout history – to venerate a select few, to treat them as if they’re differently human?
The first celebrities were royal, their profiles on coins across the realm; their inaccessible glam flashed in fairy tales about Prince Charming; their personas updated for a mass-media age as the People’s Princess and the remarkably unremarkable Windsor clan that fascinates the world.
Being in a soap opera isn’t the downside of their celebrity. It’s the point. Celebrity is a morality play, the tale of what happens to those who land the pot of gold. Celebrity is also a vent for an unequal society.
Believing “our betters” are better makes fate feel less arbitrary. And if that doesn’t work, we have celebrity gossip, which punctures high-status characters from afar, depicting them as creepy weirdos. We commoners can then assure ourselves we’re actually better off at the bottom.
Regarding the celebrity caste of British monarchy, one defence is that society will always have its idols, so dutiful royals are the least toxic. “A kind of snobbery goes with them,” the English conservative philosopher Roger Scruton said, praising aristocracy. “Take them away, however, and you have the mean-minded obsessions of ‘celebrity’ culture, the American idolization of wealth or the power cult of the Russian mafia.”
What a dismal vision, that we should bow to old money lest we swoon over new money. Surely, there’s another option: choosing heroes among the worthy.
Some royals do undertake worthy causes; Charles himself is an earnest advocate for the environment. They also serve as a link to the nation’s past, although this is a fraught role lately, given royal ancestors’ complicity in colonial crimes.
A related question is whether today’s avatar of the diverse British state should be a 74-year-old white male who heads the Church of England, is proprietor of a palace or two, and speaks in an accent you’d struggle to hear in the wild. King Charles stands for a nation, yet is like almost nobody who lives here.
A majority of Brits do still prefer a king to a republic, if only from inertia. The novelist A.S. Byatt once called the monarchy “absurd,” only to note the exhausting efforts needed to abolish it. “There are more important things to get excited about,” she said.
Excitement is hardly frothing over this King’s coronation. In a recent poll, 64 per cent of British adults didn’t particularly care.
A miscast lead, Charles has prepped his lines for decades, and must play the part now, rousing himself to appear distant and mighty, while trying not to appear distant and mighty.
Inwardly, he must know an uncomfortable truth: that his own subjects consider him peculiar – his antiquated manners, the traveling toilet seat.
When King Charles gazes at the crowds Saturday, he must wonder about us, who crave proximity to a man whose opinions we don’t really want; envious of jewelry that he wears only with discomfort; enchanted by pageantry while sneering at the man who embodies it.
“What,” he may ask himself, “do they want me for?”
Celebrities can be strange. The public can be stranger.