Fawning Over Fake Royals. There are things about the United States today that disgust me, and fawning over British "royals" is one of the most noxious. One of my ancestors was a private in the Continental Army that threw the British royal family — then real — out of this part of the world, in a Revolution that abolished monarchy for what became the United States. But somehow a lot of Americans seem to think they're British, and that the United States is a monarchy. They talk about "the Queen" as tho the "Queen of England" were our queen. We don't have a queen. Nor does England. Governmentally, we don't even pretend to have a queen. Britain does.
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Only 13% of Americans are of British ancestry, about the same percentage as black Americans. So why are people of German, Italian, Czech, Dutch, Russian, perhaps even Chinese, Arab, Peruvian, and other ancestries — including Irish, a nationality hideously abused by Britain — fawning over British "royals"?
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Let's be clear. A monarch is someone who could have your head cut off. Britain had such a monarch soon after the European discovery of America, Henry VIII (12th great-uncle of Liz2). George III, the monster who tried to keep the American colonies in thrall by force rather than by meeting their legitimate demands, was the last monarch of Britain who deserved the term, and by the end of his life, he had been stripped of his powers because he had gone mad.
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Ever since the rise of "Queen" Victoria, Britain has been playing a stupid game of pretend-monarchy, and the world indulges that stupidity. Miss America, a beauty "queen", is fully as much a queen as Elizabeth II.
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It's time to end the sham and declare an end to even the pretense that Britain's "Royal Family" is a political force — i.e., real royals. Britain and all its emotional colonies should forthrightly and forcefully renounce monarchy, and cashier out the parasites of the "Royal Family", which would save that country a fortune, a veritable king's ransom.
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Why on Earth would ABC or any other American broadcaster give further publicity to imitation-royal idiocy? I hate what has happened to this country, in so many ways. Americans have been alienated, literally, from their heritage, and are now a bunch of fawning imitation-Brits. Dozens, if not even hundreds of national commercials now affect British accents, often lower-class accents that ignorant Americans think classy. Oh, they're classy, alrite: lower-class-y.
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Americans have been better educated and richer than Brits almost from the beginning of this Republic. Many parts of the Nation had universal education when most Britons couldn't read or write. We had democracy long before Britain got rid of its "rotten boros" and villagers started ignoring the orders of the local lord as to how to vote.
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Britain is an imperial has-been, a FORMER great power that now can't even get NATO to stop standing idly by while Qaddafi slauters his people in trying to retake eastern Libya. So why this adoration of all things British?
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My great-great-...grandfather would be horrified at what has happened to the Nation that he and the other patriots of the Revolution established with such difficulty and sacrifice. Thomas Paine started to write The Crisis in my city, Newark, NJ. (That's the work that begins, "These are the times that try men's souls. The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of their country; but he that stands by it now, deserves the love and thanks of man and woman.") Newark is, in fact, mentioned by name in The Crisis. We also have major streets Downtown named for early patriots, from Washington Street to Adams, Jefferson, Hamilton, and so on. A lot of American cities have streets named for early patriots, but their residents seem to have forgotten what those men stood for.
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Thomas Paine and the great man whose camp he stayed in here in Newark, George Washington, would be disgusted with the traitors who are literally or figuratively bowing and scraping to the make-believe "royals" of a country that long ago should not just have admitted that the colonials were right, but also joined the United States, reuniting the English-speaking peoples in an egalitarian federal union.
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The Republican Party and the grotesquely misnamed Tea Party are now engaged, sadly, in destroying American egalitarianism and creating a nobility of wealth, and royalty of both wealth and power in the service of obscene wealth, that embraces inequality and lauds it as the highest good. The adoration of British royalty is not harmless, but part and parcel of the destruction of American socioeconomic democracy.
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(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 4,447 — for Israel.)
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 11:54 PM