Word: queene
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Management has apologized for such breaches of trust as falsifying the results of a public vote held to name a cat on the children's show Blue Peter (producers rejected the winning entry, Cookie, in favor of Socks) and showing a trailer for the documentary A Year with the Queen with scenes shown out of sequence to suggest (deceptively) that the monarch had stormed out of a photo session...
...hard to say why, apart from habit, there should be any nostalgia for royal forms among Australians, especially when we are so fond of our national antielitism. But people, including Australians, want figures to admire. "If we don't have the Queen, whom can we look up to?" was one of the most frequent complaints at referendum time. The thought that in a democracy you don't look up to your superiors, but sideways at your fellow citizens, wasn't much aired in monarchist circles. And Australia has always been short not only of convincing shared ceremonies of national identity...
Another reason why some Australians want to keep the monarchy is unease about mixture. The Queen evokes the loyalty and gratitude of the "pure" Anglo-Australian because she personifies "pure" Britain. This worked fine a half-century ago, when more than 90% of Australians were still of British descent and could feel themselves to be, as Prime Minister Robert Menzies would later put it, "British to the bootheels." But today the picture of exclusionary Australia, the continent-size British island just below Asia, has almost faded away. The White Australia Policy, that disgraceful provision whereby no one of Asian...
...Tuesday, Spain's national court fined the magazine's publishers 3,000 euros for "insulting the monarchy.") The couple were already having a tough year: A few months earlier, Letizia's sister had committed suicide. This fall, groups of Catalan nationalists publicly burned photos of the king and queen, and last week, Morocco's monarch temporarily recalled his ambassador from Madrid to protest the Spanish monarch's visit to the contested cities of Ceuta and Melilla. Through it all, Juan Carlos and his wife Sofia have maintained their habitual calm, confident, no doubt, of both of their high approval ratings...
...talk shows insisted that one had nothing to do with the other, but it was hard to avoid speculation about the pressure the king must be feeling. Hard, too, to avoid the conclusion that 2007 has been a particularly rough year for the Spanish royals - or, as Britain's Queen Elizabeth said of 1992, a year that she would not "look back with undiluted pleasure" because of the marital troubles of her own progeny, "it has turned out to be an Annus Horribilis...