Conceits of monarchy: Okay for Britain; for us, not so much.

Summary: the birth of a son to the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge has called forth the usual spectrum of American response, ranging from dutiful royalism to splenetic “guillotine the bastards” Jacobinism.  For all the Jacobinism, the British seem to like the Windsors; support for Republicanism in Britain is at an all-time low.  Still, what is good for our friends across the pond is not necessarily okay for us.  Politicians like Cathedral City’s Kathleen Joan DeRosa, with monarchical conceits of themselves, should profit by the example of the ruin that befell the ruling houses of Romanov, Hohenzollern, Habsburg, and Osman, whose autocratic rulers all fell before the titanic stresses of the Great War.  Kathleen DeRosa is no Catherine the Great; her peevishness and personality defects cause her more to resemble Marie Antoinette, or Germany’s sad-sack last Kaiser, Wilhelm II, and his feckless cousin Nicholas II, the last Romanov tsar.

By: Paul S. Marchand

“Her Royal Highness The Duchess of Cambridge was safely delivered of a son at 4.24pm,” and within minutes popping sounds began to become audible on this side of the pond: either champagne corks or heads exploding.  American reactions to the birth of the Prince of Cambridge have ranged from the sycophantic to the splenetic; on one side are Anglophile royalists whose fascination with the Royal Family verges upon the creepy, while on the other are the angry American Jacobins who would happily guillotine the whole lot.

In any monarchical form of government, the birth of a new dynast necessarily plays an important role in the body politic.  Having done her dynastic duty, HRH the Duchess of Cambridge has managed to secure the future of the House of Windsor into the 22nd Century.  As one wag has put it, there is now an heir, a spare, and an heir to the spare.  The Windsors now have a cornucopia of future kings.

Yet the very mention of kings or queens tends to send our local Jacobins into froths of head-exploding “guillotine the bastards” anger.  Some of the Internet commentary on the subject of the royal birth has been sulfurous.  One cannot escape forming an impression of a certain type of reverse colonialism; if not having a monarch is good for us, that it must necessarily be good for you, too.

While we Americans have happily done away with the whole idea of monarchy, preferring the raucous uncertainty of our own ostensibly democratic system to the solemn, yet ultimately alien rituals of dynasties and monarchies, we should still remember that the monarchy in the UK enjoys almost overwhelming public support.  The monarchy appears far more secure now than it did when George I, the first of a series of unlovely Hanoverian monarchs, succeeded Queen Anne, last of the star-crossed Stuarts, in 1714.  The monarchy also appears far more secure now than it did when Queen Victoria ascended the throne in 1837 at the tender age of 18. Republicanism in Britain is polling at close to all-time lows, its adherents often coming across as prim, grim, dour, sour, and humorless exponents of an ideology possessing little appeal to “Middle Britain.”  

And, indeed, some of the more Jacobin fulminations emanating from commentators in this country suggest a kind of love-hate relationship with the monarchy in the UK; why invest the time and emotional capital attacking an institution if its existence does not in some way fulfill a felt need, even if just for something to rage against?  Even so, there does seem something a little offputting about some of the more venomous attacks upon the Cambridges and their infant.  It really is too soon to start limbering up the guillotine.

Nonetheless, America’s fascination with royalty does tend to resemble a social pathology, a pathology not too distant from our own often unhealthy fascination with celebrities.  To a certain extent, the Windsors and the unfathomable Kardashians both share the attribute of gratuitous celebrity; they are famous largely for being famous.  We can argue endlessly about the extent to which royal families or celebrities bring value added to their economies, and in the end no agreement will be possible; Burkean conservatism and revolutionary Jacobinism can rarely have anything to say to one another. 

Still, what we Americans should object to and resent is the extent to which our own political officials develop often highly monarchical conceits of themselves.  Here in Cathedral City, we have one such example.  For nine long winters, Cathedral City’s mayor, Kathleen Joan DeRosa has displayed just such a monarchical conceit of herself and her position.  Unwilling to take “no” for an answer, and possessed of a predilection for trying to bludgeon others into submission, DeRosa’s reputation for being a vindictive control freak and a bully very much precedes her.

It should come as no surprise, then, that on DeRosa’s watch, City Hall has suffered a hemorrhage of highly qualified municipal staff.  Indeed, speculation continues to swirl that outgoing city manager Andy Hall’s departure may well have been precipitated by an unwillingness on his part to truckle to unreasonable or unsustainable demands from DeRosa.

Certainly, DeRosa, like would-be monarchs and dictators the world over, has wasted no opportunity to try to create for herself a cult of personality, aided and abetted by the tame, lazy reporters of our local Gannett newspaper.  DeRosa’s goal could not be more clear or obvious; by creating a community cult of personality, and by cultivating local media, she has attempted to insulate herself from any form of accountability.

Yet, what DeRosa forgets, is that monarchies survive when the monarch functions within the constraints of a constitution.  What saved Queen Victoria when Republicanism in Britain was an all-time high was her conscientious adherence to the norms and customs of the United Kingdom’s unwritten constitution; by reigning, not ruling, Victoria brought her dynasty safely into the 20th century.  By contrast, more autocratic dynasties, such as the Romanovs, the Hohenzollerns, the Habsburgs, and the Osmanlıs, with their tradition that an activist monarch should both reign and rule, all collapsed in the general ruin that befell so many ancient states during the Great War. 

Like all control freaks, Kathleen Joan DeRosa craves power, and wants to rule Cathedral City as long as she can bamboozle the electorate into returning her to office.  Last fall, her attempt to run a compliant slate that would give her a permanent, controlled, three-vote majority on the Council failed when voters turned out incumbent councilmember Charles “Bud” England, who had for years been a reliable sycophant and controlled vote for DeRosa, replacing him with former police chief Stan Henry, who has already begun to show signs of distancing himself from an increasingly unpopular Mayor. 

DeRosa’s unwillingness or inability to work collegially with others, together with her need to be the bride at every wedding and the corpse at every funeral, causes her to bear more of a resemblance to an Arab oil sheik than to one of the constitutional queens of Western Europe, while her indifference to the well-being of Cathedral City calls forth ineluctable comparisons between her and the feckless Marie “let them eat cake” Antoinette.  At all events, she is certainly no Catherine the Great.  As with Germany’s sad-sack Wilhelm II or Russia’s star-crossed last Tsar, Nicholas II, DeRosa’s peevish assertions of her own will usually create nothing but ill-will, division, and disaster for Cathedral City. 

If we take any lesson from the birth of a new Prince in Britain, it ought to be that what is okay for them is not necessarily okay for us, and that as Americans, we should resist to our last breath any effort by self-aggrandizing politicians to turn themselves into de facto local monarchs.  As Patrick Henry once declared, Caesar had his Brutus, Charles I had his Cromwell, and our own little wannabe monarch should profit by their example.  Monarchism in America is never admissible, not even in Cathedral City.
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Paul S. Marchand is an attorney who lives and practices in Cathedral City.  While he has no particular issue with the ancient monarchy of the United Kingdom, and wishes Duke, Duchess, and infant prince well, he abhors and despises the idea that any American should cultivate a monarchical conceit of herself.  The views contained herein are his own, and not necessarily those of any other entity, and are not intended to constitute legal advice.

AFTER TRAYVON: Second-Class Citizens

Summary: As Americans around the country rally for “Justice for Trayvon,” queerfolk should think carefully about the structural similarities between the successful “black boy in hoodie panic” defense George Zimmerman’s lawyers ran in his trial and the so-called gay panic defense so often proffered in crimes of violence against queerfolk.  Zimmerman was one of a crop of armed human failures wandering aimlessly through our society, attempting to work out their own insecurities through the barrel of a gun.  Trayvon Martin represented the kind of Other that formed the sum of all of George Zimmerman’s fears, as he might well have done had he been not a 17-year-old African-American teen, but an obviously gay adolescent boy.  At all events, the Zimmerman verdict reinforces that for we who are Other in American society, our citizenship in the commonwealth remains contingent, probationary, and very much second-class.

AUTHOR'S NOTE.  As this post was in preparation, Cathedral City municipal clerk Patricia Hammers died, apparently of natural causes, at her residence in Cathedral City.  I send condolences to her sister Pearl, and to her family and friends.  It is much too soon to engage in any kind of instant or other analysis of the implications for Cathedral City of Ms. Hammers' unexpected passing.

By: Paul S Marchand

As “Justice for Trayvon” rallies spread around the country, I found myself trying to take some time to think a little bit more deeply about the implications of the acquittal of George Zimmerman.

Almost from the moment the prosecution implicitly accepted the defense’s framing of the events that led to Trayvon Martin’s death, I predicted a defense verdict.  So, I was not surprised when the jury came back with a “not guilty” verdict.  The prosecution’s performance was not poor, it was piss poor, making the prosecution effort in the O.J. Simpson matter look like a masterpiece of competence by comparison.  The defense, by contrast, turned in a masterful performance, wasting no opportunity to plant seeds of doubt in the hive mind of the jury.

Still, when the verdict was announced, I felt a sinking sensation in the pit of my stomach.  For, in a larger sense the Zimmerman verdict may very well come to mean what many leaders in the African-American community have suggested it betokens: it’s open season on young black men.

Because the entire gravamen of George Zimmerman’s defense was that seeing a young African-American man in a hoodie walking through a gated community (where, presumably, black people don’t live) was enough to reduce him to a state of quivering fear, sufficient to justify the use of deadly force by him in a confrontation he himself had initiated.

By saying, essentially, “I saw this black dude and he frightened me so badly my balls retreated back up into my abdomen,” not only did George Zimmerman manage to cut a pathetic, unmanly figure, but he also managed to legitimate unreasonable panic as a perfectly acceptable trigger for deadly force under Florida’s “wild West” stand-your-ground law of self-defense.  If the presence of an unarmed black teenager armed with nothing more than a bag of Skittles and an iced tea comes close to being enough to make George Zimmerman shit himself, then clearly Zimmerman has a whole series of issues even a psychotherapist might have difficulty helping him resolve.

But for queerfolk, the Zimmerman verdict raises other, more troubling issues than the extent to which George Zimmerman was a timorous wuss with serious Freudian issues packing a pistol.  (“Please, George, by all means, demonstrate for us the insufficiency of your penis.”) For us, the Florida jury’s finding that Zimmerman could, in effect, probably about his gated community and shoot “dangerous” strangers with impunity, causes us to wonder how long it will be before some other fearful wretch with a gun shoots dead a queer person and invokes the so-called gay panic defense.

The gravamen of the gay panic defense is that the accused was so shocked, panicked, or angered, by an ostensible homosexual advance that the accused lapses into a state of violent temporary insanity and kills or injures the victim.  Gay panic defenses are often tacitly encouraged by a law enforcement mentality which has historically tended to regard the civil rights of queerfolk as lesser things, less deserving of protection, than the civil rights of our straight neighbors. 

Indeed, to the extent that law enforcement tends to regard itself as the conservator, curator, custodian, and enforcer of what it considers ought to be “correct” social values, law enforcement often tends to view queerfolk and queer sexuality as in some way “wrong,” and a proper subject for muscular police interdiction.  A police force that regards itself, even unconsciously, as an enforcement body for a heteronormative paradigm may well be receptive to claims of “gay panic.”  Certainly, crimes of violence against queerfolk often get short shrift from law enforcement agencies whose institutional culture prejudices them a priori against even investigating.  If you are a faggot, you got what was properly coming to you.  (For additional analysis, please visit the Cathedral City Archived blog at the following link: http://cathedralcityarchived.blogspot.com/2013/07/the-expandable-other-neither-justice.html

Would the Sanford, Florida Police Department has been as willing to give George Zimmerman what amounted to a pass in their initial investigation of the death of Trayvon Martin had Trayvon Martin been a young gay man?  If George Zimmerman had shot Matthew Shepard, would the result have been the same?  Would Zimmerman have been able to sell a gay panic defense to an all female jury?  In all three cases, the answer might well have been “yes.”
For, in truth, a gay panic defense, like a “brotha in a hoodie” defense ultimately depends for its success upon the sheer Otherness of the victim.  Otherness often encapsulates the sum of every fear that clouds the minds of cowards and fools like George Zimmerman.

For African-Americans, this Otherness generally expresses itself in the most obvious way imaginable, by color.  Trayvon Martin was Other —and thus a target--- from the instant he came into this world, marked ineluctably not by the content of his character, but by the color of his skin. For queerfolk, our Otherness is a harder thing to ascertain.  That many queerfolk can pass for straight, confounding the rudimentary gaydar of fearful straight folk, can often trigger primitive, reptilian-brain, penetration-anxiety emotions.  “You mean you’re… gay!?”  The gay panic defense turns upon the proposition that when the contents of the book differ from the cover, the mind necessarily will turn and thought depart.

What makes the Zimmerman defense and a gay panic defense so disturbingly similar is that such defenses necessarily put the victim (who, if dead, a fortiori is unable to testify) on trial.  In the Zimmerman case, the defense sought, with measurable success, to portray a dead black teenager as essentially a “thug for life,” prowling through a gated, largely white, condominium complex, “up to no good,” wondering, to borrow Cleavon Little’s line from Blazing Saddles, “where de white women at?”

Cleavon Little, Trayvon Martin.

If Cleavon Little could send up white sexual insecurities in the context of the Mel Brooks movie, Trayvon Martin paid the ultimate forfeit for George Zimmerman’s similar white insecurities.  If, in fact, George Zimmerman saw in Trayvon Martin a robber, a burglar, or potential rapist, then we may reasonably infer that Zimmerman’s perceptions were informed by a whole witch’s brew of racial, cultural, and even sexual insecurities, all of which were in play as Zimmerman, a wannabe cop, attempted to police and enforce a thoroughly retrograde racial dispensation in which a black boy like Trayvon Martin had no place crashing the gated communities of a white overclass.  We may justifiably wonder whether Zimmerman would have attempted to enforce his own sexual insecurities had encountered a young, obviously gay, 17-year-old boy.  At all events, George Zimmerman represented an epic fail of American manhood. 

In a post-Trayvon dispensation should we queerfolk now worry about where we walk and how we interact with strangers?  Should we ditch the hoodie, the Skittles, and the iced tea?  If I choose to go walking in my gated community in the evening, should I forbear from donning the hooded sweatshirt with the Vanderbilt University logo that is part of my wardrobe?  I like Skittles; should I avoid them?  Should I leave my iced tea in the fridge when I take my walk?  Do I need to worry that some of the neighbors in my own gated community may be packing heat?

Here in the Coachella Valley, where we queerfolk live and participate in large numbers in the larger community of which our own is a part, and where two cities actually have LGBT-majority councils, I can probably go walking in my gated community with some confidence that I will return home alive.  Indeed, we can probably feel a little bit less nervous than in, say, Oklahoma or certain rural parts of our own state.  Nonetheless, it takes only one emotionally, racially, culturally, or sexually insecure fraction of a man like George Zimmerman to blow away that paradigm of integration and inclusion.

If nothing else, the jury in the Zimmerman matter certainly sent a clear message to America’s Others that, notwithstanding years of struggle for civil rights, the status of the Other in American society remains probationary and contingent.  If, as an Other, you frighten some of the weak, contemptible, insecure men who -- like George Zimmerman -- wander aimlessly through our society, packing heat and looking to police retrograde racial or sexual paradigms, you should expect to be assaulted, injured, or even killed.  That, plain and simple, is the message the Florida jury sent when it gave a pass to an entitled coward like George Zimmerman.  As long as George Zimmerman remains free, Others like us remain second-class citizens of the commonwealth.

A year ago, many of us declared our solidarity with the Martin family in their loss, declaring “we are Trayvon Martin.”  At the risk of attracting contumely, it’s one thing to “be” Trayvon Martin as a gesture of solidarity, it’s quite something else to be Trayvon Martin dead on the ground at the hands of some weedy, needy, Freudian loser with a pistol.
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Paul S Marchand is an attorney who lives in practices and Cathedral City.  The views contained herein are his own, and are not intended as legal advice.