In fact, just as Mirren, the actress, has acquired the regal confidence to leave the theatre and command silence in the streets (when vexed by drummers), it has become easy to imagine her double deploring, if not a hereditary monarchy, then the lamentably few roles – outside her palaces – available to older working women.
This would be deplored if Jewish men were compelled to hide their yarmulkes to feel safe, and if those Jewish women who cover their heads for modesty, as some Muslim women do, were in fear to wear their preferred religious garb.
And I deplore it if it has increased.
The practice of representing atrocious suffering as something to be deplored, and, if possible, stopped, enters the history of images with a specific subject: the sufferings endured by a civilian population at the hands of a victorious army on the rampage.
While no one will ever claim that chants of "Iron my shirt" are anything but the sexist rants of a raving misogynist who should be deplored, denounced, (if not tarred and feathered) accordingly, this does not mean that the majority of anti-Hillary sentiment is steeped in sexism.
Conservatives tend to back the Electoral College, liberals to deplore it, but if the shoe were on the other foot, liberals might make the same arguments for the Electoral College that The Wall Street Journal does today: that it knits the country together, say, or discourages corruption.
If we deplore Iran's brutality, shouldn't we also deplore yours?
Pulp frontman Jarvis Cocker had previously taken to social media to deplore the proposals: "They say if the ravens ever leave the Tower of London then the whole place will collapse.
The violence inherent in Israel's occupation and its policy of taking Palestinian land should be equally deplored by Washington if Arabs and Muslims are to see the United States as a fair mediator and not a partner of the occupying power.
But if humanity is gone, and there is nobody left to deplore our era, that doesn't make us any less deplorable".
