Not all Americans are so crass

In the face of American snark about the Queen’s death, many a British newspaper reader was disgusted. With bad tidings imminent on Thursday last week, an academic at Carnegie Mellon tweeted: ‘I heard the chief monarch of a thieving raping genocidal empire is finally dying. May her pain be excruciating.’ An assistant professor in Rhode Island tweeted that she would ‘dance on the graves of every member of the royal family, especially hers’.

Once the bleak news was in, a co-host of the popular US television show The View imagined this the ideal time to observe: ‘If you really think about what the monarchy was built on, it was built on the backs of black and brown people… She wore a crown with pillaged stones from India and Africa.’

Meanwhile, true to form, the New York Times simply hasn’t been able to control itself. Having waged a vicious propaganda campaign against the UK ever since the backward, disobedient country voted to make European tourism potentially more inconvenient – the condescending quasi-parental disappointment has evinced a distinct flavour of colonialism in reverse – the paper just had to commission British writer Hari Kunzru to poop on the Queen’s coffin. ‘Like many other people around the world whose families fought the British Empire, I reject its mythology of benevolence and enlightenment, and find the royal demand for deference repugnant.’ The ‘white queen’, he wrote, ‘spent a lifetime smiling and waving at cheering native people around the world, a sort of living ghost of a system of rapacious and bloodthirsty extraction’.

With the same impeccable sense of decorum, the paper also commissioned a Harvard history professor to point out that ‘the Queen helped obscure a bloody history of decolonisation’. (You can’t win. Colonisation is evil; decolonisation is evil.) The Commonwealth she headed ‘had its origins in a racist and paternalistic conception of British rule… She represented a living link to World War II and a patriotic myth that Britain alone saved the world from fascism.’