Royalty for the day

Arnon Grunberg, a novelist, the author of The Jewish Messiah and Tirza, has an article in The New York Times about the Dutch Queen (no, not a gay guy in Amsterdam, though there are some):

On 30 April 1980, Queen Juliana of the Netherlands was succeeded by her daughter Beatrix. That day was marked by violent rioting in Amsterdam. Under the motto Geen woning, geen kroning ('No roof over our heads, no crown on yours'), squatters and anarchists railed against the new Queen’s coronation and the country’s housing crisis.
I was nine, and I sat with my mother watching it all on television. The smoke bombs and riot police made more of an impression on me than the coronation itself. My father was as unimpressed with the squatters as he was with the queen, and spent the day immersed in his stamp collection.
My parents, German Jews who fled to Holland in the 1930s, were not exactly what you’d call royalists. But my mother had a certain weakness for royal families, and especially for the scandals that go hand-in-hand with monarchies.
And when it came to Queen Juliana, my mother got her fill of scandals. Juliana’s husband, Prince Bernhard, was a notorious philanderer who sired any number of illegitimate children, and was accused of accepting bribes from Lockheed in the 1970s, forcing him to surrender his status as inspector general of the Dutch armed forces.
The 33-year reign of Queen Beatrix has been relatively free of scandals. The most significant blot on the royal reputation came when her eldest son, Willem-Alexander, who will soon succeed Beatrix, married a daughter of Jorge Zorreguieta, who served as Argentina’s deputy minister of agriculture during that country’s military dictatorship and, in all probability, knew about the systematic disappearances during the “dirty war”.
Another of Beatrix’ sons, Friso— in a coma after a skiing accident in Austria— married Mabel Wisse Smit, a former intimate of the drug lord Klaas Bruinsma, who was murdered in 1991 in front of the Amsterdam Hilton.
Beatrix herself remained above reproach. And her husband, Prince Claus, was seen as a moral beacon. He made a lasting impression on the Dutch public in 1998, during the presentation of awards to three African fashion designers, by calling on the “workers of the world” to throw off their “shackles”, “the serpent around their necks”— a reference to the necktie. He also called Nelson Mandela the best-dressed man he ever knew.
Riots like those in 1980 will probably not take place during the succession this year. Squatters in Amsterdam are few and far between these days, and the progressives of 1980 have shown growing appreciation for the royal house. This is due in no small measure to Beatrix’ disdain for the Party for Freedom, the extreme right-wing party led by the almost-forgotten politician Geert Wilders. Beatrix had little use for Wilders’ racist, Islamophobic thought.
But, beyond expressions of public reproach, the only real political power the Queen possessed— the right to appoint the individuals charged with forming a new government— was recently taken from her by parliamentary decree; she played no role whatsoever in the formation of the latest Dutch cabinet.
When NRC Handelsblad, a leading Dutch newspaper, recently described the royal house as “state theater”, it was telling. Indeed, the monarchy these days amounts to little more than a constitutionally compulsory form of performance art. In that same newspaper, a famous doyenne of the Dutch theater revealed that a few of her colleagues had been discreetly approached with the request to provide the royal family with acting lessons. Those actors, unfortunately, would not to be paid for their services; this job, after all, was an honor.
Today’s advocates of doing away with the monarchy are relatively weak. The Socialist Party is too small to wield real clout, and the Netherlands’ Republican Society makes a drowsy and generally fumbling impression. That latter observation need hardly come as a surprise: why, after all, would one put any serious effort into opposing performance art?
Perhaps because the remuneration for that performance art is a bit uncommon. The future king of the Netherlands, Willem-Alexander, receives a tax-free annual salary of over a million dollars, as well as a $5.7 million allowance “for the costs of personnel and material expenses”. His wife, Maxima, also receives a minimal tax-free salary of $425,000, and an additional $750,000 or so as compensation for incidental expenses.
Such sums are a bit overdone in a day in which the Netherlands has imposed drastic cuts on government subsidies for other forms of theater. It does seem old-fashioned of the royal family to try and slip the leash of market mechanisms and meritocracy.
Now that theaters, opera houses, and museums cannot exist without sponsors, perhaps it’s time for the Dutch to resign themselves to having a royal family that, during state visits and official occasions, subtly drops the message that this visit was brought to you in part by Royal Dutch Shell. Or Pfizer, for that matter. In these days of globalization, the Dutch royal family shouldn’t necessarily be sponsored only by Dutch enterprises.
And wouldn’t it be nice if, from now on, auditions were held for the roles of King and Queen  One could probably find candidates who have far more acting ability than the current royal family, and would be willing to perform for a fraction of the salary.

Rico says that his friend Rob would be perfect for the role, and wouldn't ask for more than a million or so a year...