Lies In State
When the news came that Queen Elizabeth II had died after 70s of her reign at the age of 96, the outpouring of grief and tributes to her character spread quickly and widely. I do not doubt that this public sentiment was genuine. But there has also been widespread dissent, particularly among the people her monarchy and country colonized for generations, as well as their descendants who live to this day with the inter-generational trauma of violence and oppression. In England itself, quite a few citizens expressed indifference or immediate hostility to either her or King Charles III, her successor and son whose reputation has been spotty for a long time. When London Police began arresting protestors against the monarchy, it brought to mind the news reported over a decade ago of the intense grief among North Koreans over the death of Kim Jong-Il — so intense that its sincerity was called into question by Western commentators.
“That’s not the same,” you could object. “You’re conflating and it’s insulting!” To the extent that North Korean authorities are known to crack down on dissent in much harsher fashion than you might expect from London cops, you might be right. No one in England has “disappeared” or been publicly executed or sentenced to a labor camp for holding up a sign saying “not my king.” But is the response by the London police acceptable in a democracy that purportedly “invented” free speech rights?
Hill said he was “gobsmacked” by what happened next, describing how he was pushed back by security guards. “Then police intervened, grabbed hold of me, handcuffed me, and put me in the back of a police van,” he said. “It was probably no more than five minutes since I’d called out ‘who elected him?’”
Hill said that, once he was in the police van, he repeatedly asked officers what law he was being arrested under. “They didn’t seem to be very sure, which is quite worrying. Surely arbitrary arrest is not something we should have in a democratic society.”
Meanwhile a certain billionaire took time out of his busy day busting unions to single out a Black woman of Nigerian descent for expressing disdain for the Queen’s legacy in her ancestral country, leading to a public rebuke by the university she works for and Twitter to remove her tweet. No, it’s not censorship, but the asymmetry of social power between Jeff Bezos, a major contributor to Carnegie Mellon University, relative to one of the university’s employees is huge. Fortunately, Uju Anya did not lose her job and has received a lot of support from workers, academics, and critics of British imperialism, Amazon abuses of employees, and anyone else with a sense of decency.
Anyway, this is the second time in the last few weeks I found myself drawing a bobby. Weird. But why did I put in Hieronymus Bosch’s famous little bird demon? Well, it’s not a totally faithful rendering: I left out the branch with a ball on the string that sticks out of the bird’s funnel. But the answer is that I have meant to include him as a character in Fetch since the beginning. (Note that another bird demon wearing a funnel hat appears in the beginning of Otherworldly Goods.) Scholars dispute what Bosch’s bird demon with the floppy dog ears means, but in Fetch’s world he is among many demons whom Fetch calls friend.
Discussion ¬