The Chris Moeller Archives

The Royal Scam

I wish I might live fifty years longer; I believe I should see the thrones of Europe selling at auction for old iron. I believe I should really see the end of what is surely the grotesquest of all the swindles ever invented by man-- monarchy.

Mark Twain, the author of this paragraph in 1889, would be terribly disappointed to have witnessed the lasting tolerance for monarchies around the globe and in his home country now a full century after his death in 1910. A royal wedding engagement was announced in Britain today, that of Prince William of Wales, to a commoner, Kate Middleton, and quite possibly only one news organization anywhere, "theawl.com," got the headline precisely correct-- "Unemployed English girl to wed soldier from welfare family."

I awoke to find the morning "news" shows in these former colonies going ape over the announcement. Summer 2011 makes sense for the ceremony, said one reporter, because it will prevent it from conflicting with the Queen's "Diamond Jubilee" in 2012. (At last, the Queen will get the spotlight!) The happy couple, he said, had to also coordinate their wedding around preparations for the Olympic games, presumably not unlike Tonya Harding and Jeff Gillooly years ago.

Early on a Monday morning, Yankee news reporters were desperate to provide any inside information to us that they could-- but with a promise of more to come! William and Kate have a lot in common, one analyst gushed, they have a shared love for the outdoors and they're both very physically active. Oh, are they now? It's important to them that they spend time together away from prying tabloid photographers. Oh, they do? I thought they fucked in the park.

In the United States, where the word "commoner" has no cultural meaning, and where a grown woman wearing a tiara is almost assuredly a woman being forced to do so by her friends on her birthday, we have just those couple of things still going for us. The vigilance of our intolerance towards the royal family wanes 234 years after the Declaration of Independence, and too seldom does a Sam Clemens or a John McEnroe come along to thumb his nose at the crown. Approximately 750 million people around the world, many of them in the U.S. well ahead of their alarm clocks, tuned in to watch William's parents wed back in 1981, and this union-to-be already features the very same sapphire engagement ring passed down from the Charles and Diana fairy tale so expect a similar round of voyeuristic obsession and idolatry from the peasant stock.

How does this elaborate and expensive foolishness engaged in by a group of British clods impact us? Well, Twain suggested in "Life On the Mississippi" that it led to the Civil War, for one thing. He blamed the writings of monarchist Sir Walter Scott, and the romanticism of the Middle-Ages, for creating the South's mindset to war. "It was Sir Walter that made every gentleman in the South a Major or a Colonel, or a General or a Judge, before the war; and it was he, also, that made these gentlemen value these bogus decorations. For it was he that created rank and caste down there, and also reverence for rank and caste, and pride and pleasure in them."

British imperialism in the 18th and 19th centuries begat 19th, 20th, and 21st Century U.S. imperialism, and today, the U.S. President, in addition to his being allowed to act like royalty in suspending the rule of law, torturing prisoners, and ordering the assassination of American citizens, he has been struggling to find the personal and political stones to raise the taxes on even the top 1% of American income earners. The American people, who are told that monarchy has evolved into a harmless and benign concept even in England, tolerate these very traits of monarchy without quibble. (Says Pudd'nhead Wilson, American: "In our country we have those three unspeakably precious things: freedom of speech, freedom of conscience, and the prudence never to exercise either of them.") Indeed, one could argue that nobody, not even the British, takes first place ahead of the United States in its tolerance of the scepter.

But one of those steadfast Americans, Twain, that splendid small-D democrat, made his criticisms blunt in "A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court" in 1889, describing the farmers and the artisans of the country as "the nation" itself. "To subtract them," he said, "would... leave behind some dregs, some refuse in the shape of a King, nobility and gentry; idle, unproductive, acquainted many with the art of wasting and destroying, and of no sort of use or value in any rationally constructed world."

posted by CM @ 7:45 AM