American presidents since Elizabeth's accession -- quite a mix.
We've got a couple of real patriots, men of solid accomplishment; and philanderers, buffoons, mirror-gazing narcissists, and grifters; and sometimes men who visited both camps. Nor can I think of a single woman politician in America right now who has anywhere near the grace of the late queen. So many shrieking harridans. "I'll help YOU, my pretty!" said one of them in West Virginia back in 2016, "and your little dog, too!"
I know that, as an American, I'm permitted to be sympathetic to the British crown only because there's no political power attached to it. You can have a king or a queen, so long as the monarch is only a figurehead. But actually, I've long wished that the queen had pushed matters a little, had been more of an actor and less of a symbol. Nevertheless, she was a powerful if quiet symbol, a personal focus of national identity.
When I consider the vast and obscenely expensive and all-intrusive power of Jabba the State, I can't really get up any worry that a monarch with some modest authority will turn into a tyrant. Jabba swallows lots of camels. And once in a while I imagine the one George who broke with the other George, shaking his head and saying, "Was it for this we fought?"
