Yecchh.
Alan Cumming, whose ticket to stardom was punched by acquiring his initial acclaim reprising a role that was originated by a superior performer (Joel Grey, the first “MC” of “Cabaret”) gladly accepted an OBE, the British award bestowed on the Scottish performer in 2009 by the late Queen Elizabeth II as part of her annual birthday honors list. Cumming was allegedly honored for his work as an actor as well as his campaigning for LGBTQ+ rights: the Crown was trying to pander to the LGBTQ crowd at the time. There is no way Cummings’ acting career warranted the honor itself. It was the equivalent of the Academy of Motion Picture Science giving a Lifetime Achievement Award to Demi Lovato.
Cumming happily accepted the honor and the prestige and publicity that go with it. Now, 11-years later, whatever momentum the Order bestowed on him has waned, as has Cumming’s career. ( His short-lived CBS series “Instinct,” where he played, badly, an academic who assists the NYPD solve crimes, was unwatchable.) And thus it is that he decided he could once again get headlines and stir social media controversy by marking his 58th birthday by announcing on Instagram,
“I returned my OBE. The Queen’s death and the ensuing conversations about the role of monarchy and especially the way the British Empire profited at the expense (and death) of indigenous peoples across the world really opened my eyes. Also, thankfully, times and laws in the US have changed, and the great good the award brought to the LGBTQ+ cause back in 2009 is now less potent than the misgivings I have being associated with the toxicity of empire (OBE stands for Officer of the British Empire).”
The OBE is an old honor, and despite its name, there is no British Empire for Cumming to have misgivings about. Cumming is a high school grad who has done nothing but act since he was a teenager; I doubt that he could last 5 minutes in a substantive conversation about the problems and benefits of England’s interactions with the rest of the world….one of the benefits being the existence of the United States of America. Without that exercise in colonialism and empire, Cumming would have grown up a Nazi. His juvenile protest—John Lennon would have approved—is the epitome of presentism, seeking cheap applause for announcing that he disapproves of attitudes and philosophies that flourished centuries ago. It is grandstanding, virtue-signaling, and ugly opportunism.
The Order is fortunate to be rid of him.
Ethics Alarms 
And pointless….nothing he does or doesn’t do with that award will change what has happened in the past.
I guess it’s a good thing he looks like a preening jerk. It seems a role made for him.
He could do a perfect Hillary Clinton.
I think his turn as Nightcrawler in X2 (the second X-Men movie) came before he picked up Cabaret (I knew who he was when he was cast in Cabaret, and that’s the only reason why I would.) He held his own among a great cast, but it was a juicy role and he was under fifty gallons of make-up. And he never went on to anything like the cultural relevance of Hugh Jackman, let alone Patrick Stewart and Ian McKellen.
He began his run as the MC in Cabaret on the West End in London in 1993. X2 was 2003.
Kind of like asking Jack a question about Red Sox personnel, Emily.
My mistake, I must have remembered reading about the Broadway revival in 2014 where he reprised the role, and missed the part of it being a reprisal.
Only in the sense of actually existing, and even then only if we ignore such things as the Falklands as immaterial despite the huge freight of action there. But to do that is to ignore the idea, which is as materialistic an error as ignoring the ideas of Zionism, of the Italian Risorgimento or (dare I tell it) the Greek Megalo Idea in past centuries. These concepts move people, and we should not dismiss them for much the same reasons as Edward Augustus Freeman gave for not dismissing racist currents of thought (https://sourcebooks.fordham.edu/mod/freeman-race.asp):-
How do you make that out as a benefit? The counterfactual is that, had the United States of America never existed at all, or failed early, nearly all its resources would have been available to Britain* earlier, either as manpower, capital and natural resources in that land mass or as manpower and capital accrued and growing up in the U.K. or Holland instead of being diverted there (with an offset for some manpower remaining in Germany instead). The counterfactual is not a dog in the manger one of all those things being taken off the board (indeed, the real factual is largely like that, for the opening phases of each World War, in that the U.S.A. first drew down allied resources before extending further resources of its own). One might as well argue that, without Zionist settlement, the economy of the Palestinian Mandate would simply have frozen once the Turks were kicked out (as in the Lebanon?).
* Or, less probably, France might have scooped some or all of the pool; but that would also have been favourable to the allied war effort of each World War.