Ruminating on Uncouth Nobility

Analyzing the motivations for W's insistence on "acting like a regular guy" Elizabeth Warner wrote in the New York Times blog yesterday--published online today:

A White Tie Kind of Guy


So President Bush, it seems, confounded expectations and managed to keep it together for Queen Elizabeth II’s state visit this week. He didn’t slobber, chug-a-lug from an Evian bottle, spew bits of buttered roll or engage in any impromptu shoulder massages.

Bully for him.

His only slip-up came when he had a bit of a sequencing problem and placed one of the Queen’s prior Washington visits back in the 18th century. “You helped our nation celebrate its bicentennial in 17…,” he blundered, before self-correcting. But that turned out to be kind of cute.
“She gave me a look that only a mother could give a child,” he said, after reportedly winking at the Queen, his ease and rapid wit indicating that he perhaps has had long experience with just that kind of maternal look. And perhaps with just that kind of mother. All of which, with that wink, put the lie to the whole conceit of this week’s story line, which was that, in the presence of well-mannered aristocratic types, our “regular-guy president,” as the Washington Post called him, is a fish out of water.

In fact, I’d venture to say that it’s just the opposite. I think it’s in the presence of people like Queen Elizabeth, Prince Philip and the various courtiers who came with them that our president finds himself pretty much right at home.

This isn’t what the White House would have us believe, with all the bluff and the bluster and the not-so-secret leaks about Laura and Condi’s all but physically forcing the president into his white tie and tails. It isn’t what the president himself would have us believe, having spent considerable energies over the years rebranding himself as a Texas good old boy, as different as can be from his patrician dad. (“The biggest difference between me and my father is that he went to Greenwich Country Day and I went to San Jacinto Junior High,” is how he has put it.)

But let’s take a moment to think past the spin. Our president may have grown up in West Texas riding bikes and blowing up frogs, but he’s no rube. He’s the son of a diplomat and statesman. He’s said to be a 13th cousin to the Queen. He’s got at least as much Kennebunkport as Midland in his veins. And he is one of a tiny handful of people in this country who actually came up in the world with things like White House state dinners and even royal visits as a feature of family life.

In her memoir, Barbara Bush recalls Queen Elizabeth’s 1991 state visit to our George I:
We had a quiet lunch. … I jokingly told Her Majesty that I had put our Texas son as far away from her as possible at the table and had told him that he was not allowed to say a word to her. … She asked him why that was. Was he the black sheep in the family? George W. allowed as how he guessed that was true. (Not true at all.) Then she said, “Well, I guess all families have one.” George W., of course, asked her if their family had one and who it was. She laughed and asked me why I thought him so dangerous.

Not exactly the experience of a “regular guy.”

Bush talks with his mouth full because he can. He drinks mineral water straight from the bottle at a formal function because he doesn’t have to prove his good breeding to anyone. His “black sheep” exchange with the queen wasn’t a “gaffe”; it was a tribal handshake. He has the arrogance of the long-established.

So how about we retire the notion that the president’s comportmental shortcomings – his dubious straight talk and selectively bad table manners – make him “normal” or in any way one of “us”? And why don’t we acknowledge instead that he’s much less some kind of phantasmagorical Average Joe than cut from the same cloth as Prince Philip, another naughty and haughty verbal prankster, known throughout the world for his faux pas and bons mots?
(Philip, the Duke of Edinburgh, to a Scottish diving instructor: “How do you keep the natives off the booze long enough to pass the test?”
To British students in China: “If you stay here much longer you’ll all be slitty-eyed.”
About the less fortunate, in recession-era Britain: “Everybody was saying we must have more leisure. Now they are complaining they are unemployed.”)

The “people,” it should be said, didn’t have to be dragged kicking and screaming into their most special duds for the Queen’s visit this week. They voluntarily got decked out in their best suits, hats and dresses. They were on their best behavior, while the Queen and her consort did their part to work at giving an impression of relaxed “regularness,” which they did, with all the forced charm that their nobility requires.

The Queen visited a one-year-old heart patient at Children’s Hospital in Washington and pronounced him “jolly.” The Duke gently jousted with a 14-year-old girl in a wheelchair. And on a royal tour of Goddard Space Flight Center, he asked British astronaut Piers Sellers, who was describing a space suit’s life-support system, “What do you do about natural functions?”
Prince Philip and the president really ought to spend more time together. Seems like they could have some good laughs.

The idea that being boorish, ill-mannered and uncouth somehow brands you as a “regular guy” holds water only if you ascribe to the view that the people, globally, are idiots. It works, I suppose, if your whole political reason for being is to dress up elitism in know-nothing populist garb.

But it doesn’t work for me.