Please forgive me for the protocol breach of writing you in utero.

But after watching your parents—Harry and Meghan, the Duke and Duchess of Sussex—tell their Santa Barbara County neighbor Oprah Winfrey that you are expected this summer and will be biologically female, I’ve been thinking about what your arrival might mean for California.

We Californians, whether we realize it or not, need you. Because the next great start-up here must be our very own monarchy. And you would be the perfect person to serve as our very first queen.

Generally, I’m not a fan of monarchies, but many Californians are. In fact, alluring visions of monarchy are one of California’s most reliable economic exports. Burbank-based Disney is a factory of minting fictional princesses and princes far more animated and musical than any real-world royal. Your great-grandmother, the Queen of England, has no more loyal subject than the executives at Los Gatos-based Netflix, which distributes The Crown and gave your parents a production deal estimated at $100 million.

Unfortunately, Californians pay far more attention to these fictional monarchies, and other entertainments offered by our ruling technological and entertainment giants, than they do to the actual governance of our state and local communities. So, as I thought about your impending and historic birth, I began to wonder if introducing a queen might encourage Californians to follow government more closely, and even work to improve democracy here.

California suffers under America’s presidential system, which puts too much power in one chief executive. The core problem is that system forces that leader to combine two disparate roles: the head of state, who should represent and unify the whole country, and the head of government, who should handle the politics and policy. Other countries split these roles between a monarch and a prime minister, but the U.S. doesn’t, which means one autocratic California-hating president can effectively check or cancel the rights and democratic choices of 40 million Californians.

To protect our state against future Trumps, California is already asserting greater autonomy from the U.S. government in many policy areas; to reinforce that effort, we should also make the symbolic move of naming you as our monarch. You would be our unifying head of state, with only limited and ceremonial powers—like your great-grandmother in England—leaving the politics and government to our governor and legislature.

This would be more than just a powerful protest against excessive presidential and federal power, or a reminder to the rest of the U.S. that California has the size and wherewithal to pursue independence. A monarch might curb California’s own destructive tendencies, as well.

California governments focus obsessively on responses to immediate problems; a monarch, who serves for life and across many administrations, is a big-platform reminder of the long-term. California is dogged by our age’s excessive political partisanship; a monarch gives us a state leader who is non-partisan. California treats ballot initiatives like royal edicts that can’t be altered and end up ruling us for generations; perhaps the permanence of a royal family would give us the comfort to permit easier amendment of tax and spending measures like Prop 13 or Prop 98.

A monarch, by handling the pomp and circumstance of California affairs, would give our governors more time to focus on doing actual stuff. Our last three governors wasted considerable energy tending to their regal public personas when they should have been governing: Arnold Schwarzenegger, the Austro-Californian king of the box office; Jerry Brown, the callow princeling-turned-monarch/sage; and Gavin Newsom, with royal looks and a perhaps politically fatal weakness for the food and drink of Versailles.

You might ask why the Queen of California has to be you. Fair question. We certainly have no shortage of royals here: Queen Latifah, King James of Laker Nation, and the most benevolent of pop rulers, Beyoncé. But they are transplants—from Newark, New Jersey; Akron, Ohio; and Houston, Texas, respectively. California leaders, of course, can come from anywhere. But I think it’s best that the queen of a new monarchy be born in the land she rules.

Unlike your big brother Archie, born back in the U.K., you’ll be a native. Your parents, while deeply flawed, are perfect for the roles of Queen Mum and Queen Dad. You’ll be the child of an interracial woman from Los Angeles who worked in Hollywood, and of a member of the royal family with which Californians are most familiar. The fact that they were considered bad seeds in that British regime, and decided to flee, only makes them better Californians. We are often our families’ departed bad seeds.

Your father’s foreign citizenship means that you, like half of all California children, will have at least one immigrant parent. I also like the idea of you finding a way around the child labor laws so you can start some royal work at a young age—California might invest more in its children if they had more power. You could make it your mission to bring kids together, thus answering author Joan Didion’s still-stinging criticism of her home state: “Not much about California, on its own preferred terms, has encouraged its children to see themselves as connected to one another.”  

A monarchy like yours would be new, but it’s not without precedent. California was ruled by Spanish monarchs back in the 18th century. Queen Victoria and her descendants moved and married abroad with such ferocity that they now head all of Europe’s royal families.

The only real downside of making you queen is that other states might jealously follow suit. Texas would surely want its own sultan.

Perhaps you don’t want all this, and you’ll lead a commoner’s life. Fine. But being the first queen of California could be a sweet gig. Your parents have already established a home base for you in magnificent Montecito. For a northern outpost, even you probably can’t afford the Bay Area—no one can—but you could take an apartment in Sacramento and then build a Balmoral-style retreat up in Modoc or Lassen County, where the locals share the Windsor family’s taste for hunting.

As for the name you take as queen, I have a suggestion. The name California comes from the story of Califia, a fictional queen ruling over an independent island of Black pagan women in Garci Rodríguez de Montalvo’s 16th-century epic, The Adventures of Esplandián. The poet probably took the name Califia from the Arabic khalifa, meaning religious state ruler. The queen’s island was called California.

So, let me be the first to say to you: God Save Queen Califia II! Your kingdom awaits.

The post An Open Letter to California’s Future Queen appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Your Majesty, I realize you move slowly, and I don’t mean to rush someone who turned 92 this week. But it’s high time that you showed California proper appreciation—by making our entire state an honorary member of the British royal family.

Perhaps that seems a bit much, and yes it might breach protocol, but ask yourself, Ma’am: Does your family have a more devoted servant than the Golden State?

Over the decades, you have had any number of flunkies and public relations vassals in your employ. But none has been better at telling your family’s story sympathetically than the folks in Hollywood.

For the lowbrow set, L.A.’s entertainment news shows cover every little appearance of you and your kin. The other family those shows obsess about—the locally grown Kardashians—are perhaps best understood as a House of Windsor tribute band.

And for the highbrow, we have long championed films devoted to your stories and your lineage. In more recent years, British royalty and Hollywood have converged, with an avalanche of productions about you Windsors. The King’s Speech, about the stuttering struggles of your father, won the best picture Oscar. (Investigative reports suggest you may be the only woman that its producer, Harvey Weinstein, has ever treated with respect.) The Academy gave Helen Mirren the best actress award for playing you in The Queen. Even Northern California has been in your (streaming) service, with Netflix casting the charismatic Claire Foy as a young you in another award-winning series, The Crown.

All these productions would be enough to humanize most families. But you require more. So now California is preparing to give you our own flesh-and-blood, a glorious child of Los Angeles: Meghan Markle. She is scheduled to join your family by marrying Prince Harry on May 19.

Markle brings your clan a level of diversity (she’s biracial), education (she has an international relations degree from Northwestern), and beauty (those teeth!) that the Windsors have never managed on their own. She is marrying your less accomplished younger grandson, best known for having dressed up like a Nazi for a party. And Markle has handled herself graciously in the face of paparazzi stalkers, a nasty Andrew Morton biography, and racist Fleet Street commentary.

And as matter of foreign policy, this classy California girl has impeccable diplomatic timing. She provides a crucial boost to the faltering special relationship between our two countries, while also giving your nation a gorgeous distraction from the consequences of your horrifyingly self-destructive decision to exit the European Union. Not since FDR has an American performed so great an act of rescue for the United Kingdom.

If there is something already regal about her, well, that’s no accident. As the child of a cinematographer and as a student at one of our snootiest private girls’ schools, she grew up around wealth and celebrity in modern Southern California, about as royal a milieu as you can find outside Buckingham Palace.

Indeed, California has taken the lead from you in modernizing monarchical ideals for the 21st century.

Our wealthy folks live like royals—behind gates and big walls, often high on hills—and are obsessed with defending their privacy and cultivating mystique. Many of our wealthiest are Anglophiles—they keep apartments in London, play polo in Santa Barbara, or even hunt in the countryside with hounds, through clubs like the Santa Fe Hunt in Riverside and San Diego counties (though the prey here are coyotes, not foxes). Like any good hereditary aristocracy, they make sure the best job opportunities stay in the family. Drew Barrymore and Emilio Estevez have had film careers, so they don’t call it Hollywood royalty for nothing.

And while Silicon Valley is newer to the wealth, our tech lords are rapidly catching up to royal standards. Did you catch Zuckerberg’s testimony before Congress? His upper lip was even stiffer than yours!

One dirty secret about California is that for all our populist culture and direct democracy, we’re soft on monarchs. We’ve even granted the Queen Mary, the ocean liner named after your grandma, a permanent berth at the Port of Long Beach. This may be because we don’t share the American history of throwing off your ancestor, George III, like the states back East; we entered the Union later, in 1850.

Politically, we Californians also have a demonstrable weakness for elderly leaders who refuse to abdicate—like your generational cohorts Jerry Brown and Dianne Feinstein. And we’ve produced some of America’s most self-consciously regal chief executives, like Ronald Reagan and Arnold Schwarzenegger. While covering the latter for the L.A. Times, I once called him “an Austro-Californian king”; I meant it as a teasing barb, but he called to thank me and praise the line.

Now, even as I hereby request gratitude from a Queen, I also must thank you. Filming your family’s stories has made a lot of money for our state’s entertainment industry. And we realize that, in sending you Markle, we’re not giving you a film A-lister or TV network star. The series in which she appears, Suits, is on basic cable. And she’s a divorcee, which probably brings up all the pressures visited on your father after your uncle abdicated to marry another American divorcee, Wallis Simpson.

I must also confess that California could use a good wedding, like Harry and Meghan’s May nuptials, that celebrates our state’s diversity and glamor. These California strengths are now mocked by our president and others who wish to divide the country and stir resentment against us. It feels good to have at least one country that respects us and welcomes us, even if that country is not our own.

Forgive me, but I must lobby you on one thing. Can you do a little better for our Meghan than the titles currently being talked about in the British press? We read that you might make her just another duchess. Or she could lose her name entirely to her husband and become, weirdly, Princess Henry of Wales.

I realize this breaks protocol, but it would be delightful if you could make her Princess Meg of Windsor Hills. That’s the upper-middle-class, predominantly African-American neighborhood in South L.A., where her mother lives. Such a title would be a beautiful way to bind a California community and your family name together.

It’d also be cool if the organist could play at least a few bars of Tupac’s “California Love” during the ceremony. But that’s not a priority. It’s far more important for you to acknowledge what this wedding really is: the official consummation of a longstanding partnership.

Most of us Californians can’t make the wedding, so please pass on our best wishes to your entire family. So Mazel tov to Meg and Harry! And, yes, God save the Queen!

The post California Deserves the Royal Treatment From Britain’s Ruling Family appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.