Gah.

From the LA Times:

Gah. Whatever happened to “An American bows to no man?” Whatever happened to a polite handshake and a “Hey, how y’all doin’?”

Americans have no royalty. We threw off that tradition more than two centuries ago. The best of America involves the rejection of all that royalty stands for… caste systems, unearned political power, dictators who lord it over the “peasants.”

And yet, America has a love affair with royalty. If you look for it, it’s all around you. Look at Disney animated movies… how many of them have the “princess” as the heroine? How many products are aimed at little girls… with the notion that they are also “princesses?” Why was Michael jackson the “King of Pop,” and not the “President of Pop?” Why did much of the US go into spasms of grief when Princess Diana – who was not an American Princess, was not even an American, was not even any more in line to the throne – got mashed in a car wreck? Fortunately, we also have a vendetta agaisnt royalty: the closest we seem to come to it in the US are celebrities, who, like Jackson and whoever is the Pop Tart of the moment, get vast adoration ill-matched to their actual skills and accomplishments. But just as we liek to build up our royalty… we love even more to tear them down and see them ground into the mud. This, to my thinking, is a good thing. It means there’s hope that if anyone tries to become an *actual* King in this country… we will tear him to shreds.

From Twain’s “A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthurs Court:”

Well, it was a curious country, and full of interest. And the
people! They were the quaintest and simplest and trustingest race;
why, they were nothing but rabbits. It was pitiful for a person
born in a wholesome free atmosphere to listen to their humble
and hearty outpourings of loyalty toward their king and Church
and nobility; as if they had any more occasion to love and honor
king and Church and noble than a slave has to love and honor
the lash, or a dog has to love and honor the stranger that kicks him!
Why, dear me, _any_ kind of royalty, howsoever modified, _any_ kind
of aristocracy, howsoever pruned, is rightly an insult; but if you
are born and brought up under that sort of arrangement you probably
never find it out for yourself, and don’t believe it when somebody
else tells you. It is enough to make a body ashamed of his race
to think of the sort of froth that has always occupied its thrones
without shadow of right or reason, and the seventh-rate people
that have always figured as its aristocracies–a company of monarchs
and nobles who, as a rule, would have achieved only poverty and
obscurity if left, like their betters, to their own exertions.

If other nations want to have royalty… hey, great, whatever. But Americans are not supposed to have royalty, and should not view “royals” or “nobles” with any more respect than any other foreign government official. Bowing to royalty – be that royal the emperor of Japan or the king of Arabia – shows deference and lower status. And much as I dislike the current President, his status is *not* lower than some accident of birth. Obama should at least make an attempt at having some goddamned dignity.

For
instance, those people had inherited the idea that all men without
title and a long pedigree, whether they had great natural gifts
and acquirements or hadn’t, were creatures of no more consideration
than so many animals, bugs, insects; whereas I had inherited the idea
that human daws who can consent to masquerade in the peacock-shams
of inherited dignities and unearned titles, are of no good but
to be laughed at. 

…

Even down to my birth-century
that poison was still in the blood of Christendom, and the best
of English commoners was still content to see his inferiors
impudently continuing to hold a number of positions, such as
lordships and the throne, to which the grotesque laws of his country
did not allow him to aspire; in fact, he was not merely contented
with this strange condition of things, he was even able to persuade
himself that he was proud of it.  It seems to show that there isn’t
anything you can’t stand, if you are only born and bred to it.
Of course that taint, that reverence for rank and title, had been
in our American blood, too–I know that; but when I left America
it had disappeared–at least to all intents and purposes.  The
remnant of it was restricted to the dudes and dudesses.  When
a disease has worked its way down to that level, it may fairly
be said to be out of the system.