And this is why we have a royal family. I actually felt quite stirred reading that speech. I can't imagine David Cameron or Ed Milliband managing that. I think Churchill was an outlier.
[Edit: Strong general recommendation for that book, by the way. If it were not in a low-status genre, parts of it would be taught in high schools.]
That's what happens, anyhow. Read the book, Max Brooks does it a lot better than I just did from a three year old memory. There is also a very brief meditation by the character being interviewed by the frame narrator to the effect that the monarch is the custodian of the soul of Britain in a way that the Yanks just can't understand. Literary criticism: I would have struck that sentence because the book shows that powerfully and it is weaker for then saying the moral explicitly.
Excellent way of putting it. That is pretty much what she (or he) is.
I would highly recommend checking out the audiobook even if you've read the dead tree version. It is a different, but equally enjoyable, experience.
I went through a vehement anti-monarchy phase when I was younger, since then I'm starting to appreciate the idea of a head of state who isn't a career politician that campaigned or even bought their way into office.
This, after all, is how wars get started.
Edit: the dire circumstances being, of course, WW3 - the subject of the Queens' speech.
Having said that, I prefer having the Royals to an elected non-ceremonial Head of State. Having the Head of State separate from the head of the executive branch of government seems like a good idea to me.
If we were all loaners things would be much worse. You might not have war, but you would have lots of individual killing, and very little progress.
Your best option is not to fight it, but rather to use it: Get people in various countries to consider themself all part of one group. (One of the reasons I think the Olympics is a huge impediment to world peace. I almost never think of MY country as better than YOUR country - except during the Olympics.)
Bit of a selection bias there. Those of us who don't care just tend not to talk about it.
"The speech, devised by Whitehall officials at one of the most fraught Cold War periods..."
Seems like you would probably get on just fine with a fabricated character played by an actress, who is charismatic enough. Say, "Big Sister"
I'm not having a pop at Americans, but it may make sense to view the queen as a symbol in the same way that the flag is for Americans. It's just that our symbol happens to be a person.
Also, the Queen ties us back to stuff like Henry V and Agincourt etc.
If I am feeling particularly generous I tend to agree with Samuel Johnson that "Patriotism is the last refuge of the scoundrel."
The rest of the time I am more aligned with Ambrose Bierce's version from The Devil's Dictionary.
“Patriotism, n. Combustible rubbish ready to the torch of any one ambitious to illuminate his name. In Dr. Johnson's famous dictionary patriotism is defined as the last resort of a scoundrel. With all due respect to an enlightened but inferior lexicographer I beg to submit it is the first.”