For those of you that have either been in a coma for the last few months or managed to avoid reading the newspaper, going on the internet, listening to the radio or hearing people’s voices when they talk to you, Prince William and his longtime girlfriend Kate Middleton are getting married on the 29th of April. At this point, a Google search for ‘Prince William and Kate Middleton’ will garner approximately one kajillion results (I might have made that number up). The day, nay the moment, the engagement was announced, the entirety of Britain experienced an unprecedented Kate and Wills onslaught by every form of media, and somewhat alarmingly, it hasn’t stopped. I was in the gym at the time and heard it on Radio One when I was wiping down the elliptical trainer and had my earbuds out. Sweaty, wheezing a bit and full of endorphins, it didn’t fully hit me. But I try and make my way through about four papers a day (Times, Telegraph, Guardian and Financial Times) and by the time I finished my morning reads a few hours later, I knew more about these two people than I did about most of my first cousins.
Another little factoid for the coma victims and ignoramuses out there: Kate and Wills met and indeed starting dating at none other than the University of St Andrews, a few feet from where I’m sitting right now. Cue news vans descending upon our very staid little town for a scoop that doesn’t really exist and the university milking the event for all it’s worth.
The future king and queen: they had to meet somewhere
Without contributing to the ever-expanding pile of royal wedding-related media drivel, I just want to mention something rather central to the topic: I don’t actually get to have an opinion about the Royal Family. No, no one is censoring me per se—I don’t live in Belarus or Saudi Arabia—but it is truly a situation of damned-if-you-do-damned-if-you-don’t. The reason for this resides in the drawer of my bedside table next to my Nyquil stash: a fat little beat-up navy blue booklet featuring the stamps and visas bearing testament to my layovers in Amsterdam and my summer spent working in Shanghai. Yes, it is the passport issued to me from the government of United States of America. As an American, I simply don’t bother espousing an opinion on the monarchy, because no matter what I say, I will most likely be patronised, ridiculed, or just disregarded, and I don’t particularly enjoy any of those. I don’t even bother having an opinion, not even a little inconsequential one that I hold close, tell no one, and can ponder when I’m lying in bed just after I’ve turned off the light and before I start dreaming of axe murderers on tandem bikes chasing me around Lake Geneva.
From personal observation, it would seem that most Americans fall into one of two categories when it comes to the British Royal Fam.
Category A: ‘Democratic republicanism is the VERY BEST SYSTEM EVER, so if it’s not a democratic republic, it’s just wrong’.
The America with which the West is familiar can be boiled down to essentially three things. Number one is an ideological emphasis on liberalism that is so extreme I’m failing to come up with an adequate word to describe it. Number two is the fact that the United States, as a result of its post-World War II adoption of the superpower moniker, has been able to do pretty much whatever it wants—and get away with it!—for the better part of a century. Number three is an utter conviction in America’s moral righteousness thanks the Protestant nutjobs that were kicked out of Britain and founded the country in the first place. Mash all these together and you get a lot of people that believe democracy is unequivocally and unerringly the universally best system, and of course everyone wants democracy, and if you don’t yearn for democracy, you’re probably just unenlightened. Add to this conviction an old grudge about being taxed without representation and you can easily trace the origin of American resentment of the British monarchy. This opinion knows no political divisions; you see it in Americans of the jingoistic right-wing variety who cannot fathom that the ’merican way ain’t the best way and in Americans of the uber-politically correct left-wing variety who cannot fathom a people willingly living under the tyranny of a despot (even if that despot exercises no political power whatsoever).
You can’t deny that the American who jumps up and shouts, ‘My spidey sense is tingling! The liberal republican in me senses that this monarchy is just—not—RIGHT!’ is obnoxious and probably deserves a swat with a rolled-up newspaper. But voicing an opinion that carries a much less annoying and toned-down connotation of such thinking will elicit copious eye-rolling should the voicer be American, for the opinion will be dismissed as ‘knee-jerk American’. The modern-day British counterpart of Edward Said will snap, ‘Oh, you’ll never get it, because you’re not British. Americans really just don’t understand it’. The underlying message is that an American’s opinion is simultaneously not real and wrong…despite the fact that that makes no sense.
Category B: ‘I love the Royal Family! Europe and its little traditions are so cute! How can anyone dream of getting rid of the monarchy?’
Frankly, this is just irritating. Unless you’re talking about, I don’t know, gnomes, squealing over foreign things because they’re ‘cute’ reveals a person to be not merely an idiot but a condescending, uninformed and generally insensitive idiot. The European monarchies are institutions that have been around for hundreds if not thousands of years and are products of long-term cultural, religious and political trends—not a theme park attraction dreamt up for the purpose of entertaining New World tourists. Sadly, though (and annoyingly), it seems like quite a lot of Americans view the world as such.
However, if I were ever to come out with anything like the aforementioned statement (albeit something much more understated because I try and make it a point not to sound like a total moron), I would immediately be dismissed, scoffed at, you name it. That opinion, after all, would be simply irrelevant because it came from a naïve American who only thought that way because the idea of having a royal family is ‘novel’ and ‘quaint’. And our modern-day British counterpart of Edward Said would say something along the lines of ‘oh, you’ll never get it, because you’re not British. Americans really just don’t understand it’.
And…well…yeah. There are quite a lot of frighteningly uninformed and poorly read people from the US of A that don’t really seem to understand a lot of things. We get them in St Andrews, too; they’re the ones who spoil my Starbucks time by conducting a conversation at 900 decibels about how they couldn’t figure out how to take the train to ‘Edin-berggg’. Thanks to these twits and the numerous other twits that venture abroad without ever picking up a newspaper, Americans are all tarred with the same twitty brush, which means even the non-twits don’t get to have an opinion about the Royal Family.
To give you an idea of how a depressingly large number of Americans view the rest of the world, aka 'them'
There are a lot of people out there who don't seem to realise that Scotland, Northern Ireland etc exist at all and refer to the UK simply as 'England'
Which is why I remain completely and utterly ambivalent about the issue. If you want an opinion, ask me about Bill Clinton. I don’t care what was going on under his desk; what a champ of a president.
