Marc Fisher had an excellent blog post yesterday about the absurdity of Americans bowing for Queen Elizabeth II. I don’t have a problem with England having a monarchy; I find it interesting aspect of Anglo culture, but I don’t want one here.
“We are Elizabeth’s subjects and she our monarch for a day,” editorialized the Virginian-Pilot newspaper.
No. We are no one’s subjects. We do not bow to kings and queens. When we forget this, we sully ourselves.
snipOur revolution was not against King George III so much as the concept of the monarch, the notion that power and status are inherited from one generation to the next. Paine called this idea “unwise, unjust, unnatural — an insult and an imposition on posterity.”
Every word of Paine’s booklet applies as much today as it did in 1776, when he warned that people who believe they are born to be in charge of others “are early poisoned by importance. . . . The world they act in differs so materially from the world at large that they have but little opportunity of knowing its true interests.”
Today, as we enter the eighth consecutive presidential campaign involving a Clinton or a Bush on the ticket — a span of 28 years — it is sad to see Americans bowing and curtsying to a monarch, a descendant of the very king against whom we fought a revolution.
Well put Fisher.
