I woke up on September 9 to some big news. Charlie Crocket, the rapidly rising United States country singer whose music has become a byword for authenticity and quality song-writing, had a new album being released that very day. I if you are into that sort of thing.
I realised something else had happened when I logged on to Twitter and saw a bunch of right-wing snowflakes losing their minds over some jokes that upset them. Honestly, you can鈥檛 say anything these days.
It鈥檚 not that the death of Queen Elizabeth II left me entirely cold. The prepared script written by professional speech writers and closely vetted by high-ranking officials that our new king managed to read out without breaking into joyous laughter and cries of 鈥渇inally!鈥澛爓as the most moving thing I'd heard in years.
My response, though, was mostly disinterest. There are聽7 billion people on this planet and a 96-year-old dying is about as surprising as the latest beer price rise. It鈥檚 what happens as time goes on.
I do, however, realise many others have a different response. I have no desire to tell anyone how to respond to anything, nor is it hard to understand. For most people in England and also Australia, the queen appeared in their lives as a largely neutral figure. Neither the good nor the bad were attributed to her influence and she seemed more like a character in a fairytale. Responses to her death mix nostalgia with the sense of a changing era.
The problem comes when this response is virulently pushed on the entire world when most of the world has good reason to hold a contrary view.
Of course, you expect the Daily Mail to lose their shit 鈥斅爐hey a random cloud was the departed queen looking down on her former subjects. Expecting them to talk sense is like expecting one of the late queen鈥檚 corgis to recite a Shakespearean soliloquy.
Of course Pauline Hanson responded to Greens Senator Mehreen Faruqi鈥檚 tweet that she would not mourn a symbol of racist colonialism by her fellow senator to go back where she came from.
And sure, Pakistan, where Faruqi comes from, is a case study in the real-life consequences of British colonialism. Having brutally plundered the subcontinent for centuries, Britain its Indian colony when finally forced to leave, precipitating a horrific genocide and tensions between now-nuclear armed powers that continue to threaten human civilisation.
But no one expects Hanson to know or care about such historical footnotes. So far, so standard.
But I鈥檝e never seen a Twitter mob with the ferocity of the one that came for Carnegie Mellon professor Uju Anya. The top trending term on Twitter was 鈥渧ile鈥 after the Nigerian-born professor caused outrage by tweeting: 鈥淚f anyone expects me to express anything but disdain for the monarch who supervised a government that sponsored the genocide that massacred and displaced half my family and the consequences of which those alive today are still trying to overcome, you can keep wishing upon a star.鈥
There is a massive disconnect for many in Anglo societies, who seemingly can鈥檛 imagine that the fairytale queen they recognise might look different to those in the places from which the shining jewels in her crown and sceptre .
The defence is often that the queen can鈥檛 be personally held responsible. Yet so much of the coverage emphasises how 鈥渄utifully鈥 she played her role as the head of a state that murdered and plundered without restraint. It can鈥檛 be both. Either she was a dedicated head of a state associated with horror on every continent on Earth or she wasn鈥檛.
The outrage shows a disturbing lack of perspective. No words tweeted by Faruqi or Anya, however much you disagree, can be put on the same scale as genocides that wiped out countless human lives and whose consequences countless more humans have to live with today.
This massive disconnect was seen in the pearl-clutching and tut-tutting that followed Irish football fans 鈥淟izzie鈥檚 in a box鈥. If you think this is tasteless, just wait until you hear about watching their national team in a pub in 1994 by forces backed by the British state.
Bursting into a pub in County Down on the northern side of the Irish border imposed by Britain, Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF) members opened fire with automatic weapons on those watching Ireland play a World Cup game. Six people were killed. Collusion between the UVF and British state forces in the attack was .
Maybe a rude song is worse, I don鈥檛 know.
I certainly don鈥檛 want to stop those who wish to mourn the queen. Most aren鈥檛 doing so to celebrate such horrors, or even to support the monarchy as an institution, but for far more complex reasons. Mostly, I鈥檓 just glad to live in a country where they didn鈥檛 cancel the football on the weekend. Or where I don鈥檛 get murdered for watching it in a pub.