Regina, Imperatrix

The main problem with adding a queen to the American political establishment at this point would be that we've gone on this long without one. I mean, how do you even choose who it gets to be? There's no question, obviously, that if we were doing it by acclamation, it would be Oprah. Stands to reason, right? Well, then we immediately get into the next problem: if we're going to adopt a monarchy, are we also going to adopt a genetic method of succession, like primogeniture? Because Oprah, pretty famously, don't have no kids. Obviously Oprah is perfect and permanent and will never nor could never die, but ON THE OFF CHANCE THAT SHE DID,* we're basically choosing to introduce a new constitutional crisis straight away as we cast about for a successor.

The other option is to do what the new monarchies of the 19th century did and just dip in to the existing monarchical pools and import a royal family from the lesser branches of the established ones. The ruling family of Belgium were plucked from German aristocratic obscurity in 1830. The Romanians elected another German, from the slightly better heeled Hohenzollerns in 1881. And the Greeks chose the second son of the king of Bavaria, also German, and hey... I'm starting to sense a pattern.

OK, so established precedent is to go with an obscure German family. Sounds like a stretch considering how a couple of those ended. The Greeks traded out for some Danes (I guess they liked the Aryan type) and the Romanians eventually preferred the communists, but even the British went out of their way to replace their actual royal family with some weird German nobody and that's more or less turned out fine in the long run.

The problem is Germany went small-r republican on us (though maybe not strictly by choice) after the War to End All Wars,** so we're all out of legitimate German nobility, no matter how obscure. So we'd be kind of working without a script here.

Oh, maybe at this point you're asking "hey, what the fuck?" because I forgot to start with: I think we need a queen. Or it could be a king I guess, but those seem a lot less interesting. Patriarchy and all, meh, it's been done. OK, it's BEING done. You know what I mean.

What I'm thinking is is that the people in constitutional monarchies or the Commonwealth of Nations in general have it pretty good. What they do there is separate out the Head of State position from the Head of Government. The idea is that, in exchange for setting aside some funds to pay for crowns and carriages and shit made with ermine fringe, you give the Head of State job--the dignified and aloof embodiment of the people--to some mostly harmless old fussy-britches and watch them do the tedious but showy stuff like go to state funerals or smash champagne bottles against new warships or cut ribbons at the opening of an especially large Tesco, etc. Meanwhile some actual political person is the Head of Government and gets stuck in doing the actual administrating, handling budgets and funding the military and slowly sapping civil servants of their will to live.

We've never really needed this before, although between Bill Clinton and George W. Bush, we've come close. For the most part, a president more or less got that the thing they were doing required them not only getting on with the business of government but that their position required a certain dignity and self-possession relative to the, for lack of a better term, majesty of the office of President of the United States.

But now look, we got this dude who pouts and fumes and obsesses over every perceived slight, which fine, OK, but now he's spreading it around to foreign governments we have to deal with during and after his own administration. Like, how hard do you have to try to piss off Australia? Granted, their prime minister is Australian so there's no way he was 100% sober at the time, but I find that usually makes them even jollier. Still, Trump found a way to take offense and end his phone call on a hissy fit, to the humiliation of all, including a few senators who tried to fix it.

Did you watch The Crown on Netflix? It's pretty dull and the person ostensibly at the center of it, Queen Elizabeth II, was the dullest thing about it, but after I got done with the whole first season and especially since the Trump inauguration, I realized what a brilliant job the writers and actress Claire Foy did. The queen is boring because she's obsessed with her duty, which is to prop up this whole window-dressing apparatus of timelessness that is wholly reliant on resistance to fashion or the passions of the moment. Exactly the opposite of the Trump administration. That way she could continue to represent the grandeur and permanence of the United Kingdom (in reality a roiling and shifting thing, same as it ever was), to give the illusion of steadiness and sturdiness through prosperity and crisis, no matter how petty or profound.

And now, I'm thinking, that wouldn't do us any harm at all. All we'd have to do is figure out some way to fill the job without pissing off too many... OH! I've got it. Beyoncé. It's the only choice. Not only can she do steady in the face of turmoil*** but she's already got an alternate regnal name if she needs it and we already know the succession is all sorted out. The more I think about it (and I've put in almost 11 minutes already), it's the only answer that makes sense.

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*I understand that the higher likelihood would be that she would be assumed bodily into heaven, escorted by angels on a beam of light, like the Virgin Mary. Nobody is ever allowed to suggest the death of Oprah, no matter how tangential or even in the most purely biologically inevitable terms. Well, of course you can, but that way there be dragons.

**The first one

***Looking at you, Becky with the good hair