U.S. media overkill on Queen Elizabeth II should make us mourn, fear rising autocracy | Will Bunch

It took more than 28 years, but we finally know the location of the TV news trucks that followed O.J.’s white Bronco when it went off the road. Their route stopped on Donald Trump’s tarmac for live shots in 2016 before crossing the pond and turning into the film Griefmobile.

The images of Queen Elizabeth II’s Class E Mercedes-Benz hearse, with its big windows displaying her coffin flag-draped in imagery of an orb, sceptre, and the bejeweled Imperial State Crown depicting domination, briefly reform.

Every morning this week, viewers of the major U.S. cable networks might be curious about what Donald Trump did with those leaked top- secret documents, anxious about the future of women’s reproductive rights, or terrified about America’s would. When King Charles III addressed his subjects for the first time, ABC, NBC, and CBS cut into normal programing to carry it live for Americans, just days after those networks refused to do the same for President Biden’s speech warning about the threats to our democracy which, it must be

The takeover of American airways has been too much for a lot of us. “It’s weird traditions and everything, and I’m like, ‘Jesus, enough with the Queen!'” said radio’s Howard Stern, finding his Everyman voice As he told the New York Times, it was like a dog with a bone. The news outlets aren’t going to let go! The truth is that millions of Americans are enamored by royalty.

CNN, desperate for a ratings spark under a controversial new boss, won the coveted 18-49 ratings demographic with its first day coverage, so no wonder its still gnawing on remnants of that bone days later There were endless interviews about the depths of Brits mourning the only queen most had ever known, coverage of boring church services, and all the sidebars about Charles’ arrogant fits of royal pique or informing the Queen’s bees of her passing.

We humans are hard-wired to be fascinated by royalty, the absolute top of the celebrity food pyramid. Our fascination with the fantasy that TV’s The Crown was taking us inside Elizabeth’s more complicated inner life has fascinated many viewers in the same way. There is a reason it went viral when a wag referred to the coverage as the “mound hub”.

Only a few of us are completely immune. For nearly 50 years, I have amused friends with my own story of the night when a 17-year-old high school friend and I, on a low-budget whirl through the 1976 Summer Olympics in Montreal, inadvertently missed the last bus of the night and were aggressively grilled on a street.

My view of monarchy was summed up by my favorite movie of that era, Monty Python and the Holy Grail, where a peasant woman tells King Arthur, “Strange women lying in ponds distributing swords is no basis for a system” The Sex Pistols said in 1976, that their figurehead is not what she seems. In the summer of 1976, Thomas Jefferson laid out the case for government without a single word about King George III in the Declaration of Independence.

The conversation that ought to be inspired by the passing of Elizabeth and the ascension of Charles is the one that, with a few exceptions, we aren’t really having. It shouldn’t be surprising that the one constant in the praise for Elizabeth’s reign has been “stability”. The quest for continuity and a feeling of order has only intensified during a queen’s long rule that overlaps with the chaos, cultural upheavals, and gross inequality of our real regime: late-stage capitalism.

The death of the 96-year-old queen did not occur in a vacuum, but in a moment when everyday people around the world are turning not to cosplay autocrats like Charles but real ones such as Hungary.

The barely hidden fascist of Ron DeSantis made a pit stop on the race.

The United Kingdom had an attempt to have this both ways, by giving the common folk the embodiment of English tradition and continuity in a figurehead whose regal bearing could paper over the unraveling of the British Empire. Britain also offered a largely democratic system of governance, even if it eventually produced bad policy, like Boris Johnson, the clownish leader.

In the U.S., there is a similar desire for law and order, a backlash against rapid cultural changes, and a desire to make America great again. Instead, that outlet has become a Republican Party that has rejected the basic 1776 principles of the American Experiment that cast off the United Kingdom, where the authoritarianism isn’t the polite dress-up kind. The spirit of colonialism that faded, though not properly apologized for, is still alive in the policies of Donald Trump, Greg Abbott, and Ron DeSantis.

As I write this on Thursday morning, the fog of royal grief drifting over from across the pond is finally lifting, with some news coverage of a horrible twist in America’s embrace of autocracy. The game of demagogic one-upmanship would take place between Florida’s DeSantis and Texas’ Abbott, whose teams tricked 50 Venezuela migrants onto a plane and dumped them in Martha’s Vineyard.

The rise of this cruel-is-the-point fascist in America is playing out in many ways, including Sen. Lindsey Graham sounding more monarchical than Charles III in arbitrarily picking 15 weeks as the limit for when women can abortion. As seen on TV, this is the opposite of the feel-good brand of authoritarianism branded by Elizabeth and Charles.

This is the reason why I find America’s media overkill on Queen Elizabeth so troubling, that this celebration of soft autocracy is offering cover for the steady rise of the more dangerous kind here in America and around the globe. As Great Britain prepares to coronate a new king, America is losing sight of the values that made us fight so hard to reject monarchical tyranny. We need to be talking about this, not hypnotizing democracy to death by watching a royal hearse roll. Everything isn’t meant to be ok, like the Sex Pistols’ American heirs Green Day.

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