Mini-Rant About Royalty

I thought the wedding was lovely, the bride radiant, and the groom handsome, but as soon as the ceremony ended and all the idiotic newscasters started gabbing, the spell was broken.  Rant below the fold.




For the moron -- I hesitate to use the word "journalist" -- whom I shall not name on a news channel that I shall not name either, I say: YOU ARE AN EASILY OVERAWED IDIOT.  A little pomp, a little circumstance, a lot of gorgeous outfits and pageantry, and you turn into a starry-eyed six-year-old girl who actually said, "We have no royalty in the US.  This is as close as we're going to get."  You make it sound as if it were a regrettable thing that we haven't some hereditary, ossified monarchical rule in the US.  You know, we once did.  Then we fought for bloody, miserable years to throw off that entire system and secure our right to rule ourselves.  It's called the AMERICAN REVOLUTION.  You might want to look into it.  We don't want royalty in the US.  We're citizens, not subjects.

One reason that the royalty business is just a charming anachronism now is because it's now largely symbolic.  The monarch is a figurehead of a constitutional monarchy.  The royals are rich and privileged and all, but they basically have no actual power.  I for now do NOT mourn the passing of the days when rulers who got to be rulers based on their bloodline could wreak unholy havoc across Europe and Asia.   Let the modern royals now pursue their charity work and be ambassadors for the United Kingdom and play polo and occasionally dazzle us with ceremonial splendor -- that's all great.  What's even greater is the fact that what they do has no significant bearing on the actual governance of the country, either theirs or mine.

OK, back to blogging about how elegant Kate's dress was -- no frilly frou-frou, yay!  It was a Grace Kelly kind of classic, elegant sophistication.  Now I'm wondering about her shoes, though!


Oh, yes, yes, I KNOW -- by the time of the American Revolution, the British monarch's power was already less than it had been and Parliament gaining authority.  You don't have to tell me about the Magna Carta or the Glorious Revolution of 1688 or all that.  My point is that we specifically rejected the monarchy.  Go read the Declaration of Independence and the bit at the very end about renouncing all allegiance to the British Crown and dissolving all political connection with the state of Great Britain.