Of Unfinished Revolutions
America's insufferable fascination with the royals.
Here’s a series of questions for my “fellow” Americans. Answer honestly. Do you really need to know what Prince Harry and Meghan Markle named their son? Should you even give a blue shit? Is the fact that you have twelve years to stop your city from sinking underwater in any way impacted by the naming habits of people who have space reserved for them in the nearest sealed doomsday biodome?
The answer to all of these questions is, naturally, no. And yet you know his name. It’s Archie, the little bastard. You may wish that part of your brain was occupied by more useful information, but there you have it.
Gertrude Stein once said something to the effect that the United States is the world’s oldest country because it was the first to enter the 20th century. A fascist-sympathizing hack she may have been, but she was onto something when she said this. History never moves in a straight line, and as nations surge ahead their dominance creates complacency that soon renders them anachronistic. But we Americans love our linear time. It’s behind every single sanctimonious parable of American exceptionalism. And it’s why we’ve given the world some of its most insufferably thick historians.
We love to talk of progress. But the contradiction of progress is that in a society where resources are so unevenly distributed, it is always incomplete. The same progress can merely widen the gulf, transforming the mildly backward into a jarring rift in space-time.
And so it tracks, perfectly and tragically, that in a time of abject cultural decay, we have this homuncular notion of American culture that not only tolerates monarchy, in all its long history of parasitism, but outright celebrates it.
It’s an even more brazen example of what I described regarding Anna Sorokin. Industrial society moves toward democracy, stops halfway. That society has a need to valorize its limited social mobility compared to a system dominated by divine right. But as its organs of democracy both formal and everyday continue to atrophy, this valorization mediates the gap between the haves and have-nots. It obscures the gap’s causes by blurring the lines between meritocracy and self-entitlement. Divine right, mutated by two hundred years of partial sunlight, once again rears its head.
And here we are at the current conjuncture. When billionaire reality TV stars can become president despite losing the popular vote, when Kylie Jenner is defended with a straight face for “earning” her billion dollars, is it all that surprising that the British monarchy is the object of this particularly American form of fawning?
Yes, some of it is a reciprocation of the royal family’s twenty-year-long “We Didn’t Kill Diana” PR campaign, in which “commoners,” even American actors can seize the throne. For sure, it has made things easier on the royals themselves. Eighty years ago the king had to abdicate before marrying an American and meeting with Hitler. Now, all a royal has to do is dress like Hitler before marrying the American!
The American revolutionary experience was, to put it mildly, an uneven one. It hadn’t the involvement of plebeians or women that we saw in the French Revolution. And naturally its insistence on maintaining chattel slavery was one of the reasons that the Haitian Revolution and eventually the Civil War became necessary. If there is anything that it had going for it, though, it was its anti-royalism. Its belief that a bunch of oblivious, inbred, gout-ridden toffs had no business telling anyone what to do.
And now these same remorseless cretins have danced under the radar back into your hearts? Where is your spine? Where’s your sense of dignity? Where (sweet merciful crap, I never thought I would write this) is your patriotism?