After Helen Mirren won an Oscar this year for portraying her as remote, proper and emotionally repressed, Queen Elizabeth II is now in Virginia repairing that impression with a touchy-feely schedule that includes meeting 100-year-old Oliver Hill, a civil rights lawyer involved in the 1954 Supreme Court decision outlawing racial segregation in public schools and, at her own request, privately getting together with some of those wounded in the Virginia Tech shooting and families of the 32 victims.
It would be easy to dismiss all this as image-making but, as a boy who fell in love with her mother in a powder-blue dress waving serenely from an open car at the 1939 World’s Fair, I take the Queen’s gestures at face value. Her reaction to Princess Diana’s death may have been icy, but it is not hard to believe she has been genuinely moved by the sudden, senseless deaths of so many young people in a distant country.
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