Excerpt:
Back in the nineties, when I was first a regular visitor to the Netherlands but not yet a resident there, I was, I am now embarrassed to admit, rather taken with that country's sovereign. I spent a good deal of time in Amsterdam's legendary brown pubs, and in many of them – this is a distinctive aspect of Dutch culture – there were large photographs or paintings of Queen Beatrix, often not just a single portrait but whole slews of them, some of them showing her with her husband, others with subsidiary members of the royal family or various commoners. The paintings were sometimes elaborately framed, and not infrequently, as a form of tribute, there were giant vases of fresh tulips placed in front of them. There was nothing remotely ironic, nothing tongue-in-cheek about any of this; the Dutch, young and old, male and female, gay and straight, quite simply adore their queen. In the pictures she always seemed to be smiling, and she always seemed to have a nice way about her, a certain style, a taste for big, fun, almost-but-not-quite-over-the-top hats, a charisma, a joie de vivre, a talent for balancing an easy dignity appropriate to her position with an endearing lack of self-seriousness. At one bar in particular I used to stare at her picture, reflecting that she looked rather like Mary Tyler Moore, and thinking that there would be worse things than to be able to call this woman my queen.
After not very long, fortunately, I snapped out of that romantic royalist reverie and back into my fierce American hostility to the very idea of monarchy. Whatever lingering affection I might have had for Queen Beatrix utterly evaporated, moreover, in the wake of the butchery of the Dutch writer and filmmaker Theo van Gogh by a homegrown jihadist on a busy Amsterdam street in November 2004. To her everlasting obloquy, Beatrix, instead of attending van Gogh's funeral or even coughing up a kind word or two in his memory or sending a sympathetic note to his family, chose to react to this monstrous act by rushing off to a Muslim community center to assure the people there that she didn't bear them any ill will.