My housemate Blaise Hope and I cracked a pair of MGDs at his living room table, with the plan of discussing the royal wedding coming up this Friday to explain the whole crazy phenomenon to my thoroughly American readers. Milwaukee beer brings out the red-blooded American in me, and I was ready to drag some fighting words out of my London-born Medill friend.
The problem with the media, I growled, is they think we care about these foreigners and their fancy royal to-dos. What does a princess even do, anyway?
Blaise took a sip of his beer and stopped to think before he answered, a trait that I think may be more imported than domestic.
“They basically represent the country on a global scale and also on the national scale,” he told me, clearly unaware of my patriotic aversion to polite discourse. “It’s a pretty valuable thing, and it’s all they do. They’re a national face.”
You Brits have fish-and-chips for brains, if you think a queen is still valuable in 2011. It all seems to me like Brangelina in diamond tiaras, except with echoes of anti-Republicanism. What about democracy? What about freedom? And if you even try to argue, I may break out into “God Bless America.”
“(The royal family) obviously haven’t been tyrants for a very long time,” he reminded me. “It’s a testament to the history of the country.”
What history is that, Mr. Footy-at-the-Pitch? The history of losing revolutions? In my mind I was high-fiving Toby Keith on behalf of all of America.
“History for you guys, it centers around specific things and you can pretty much list them. History is about change over time and that’s what you guys have – but for really huge intense changes, you guys have had few.”
I had started this mostly to make fun of his accent, but the damn Limey was getting in the way with his arguments.
“I feel like you guys refer to history a lot more,” he told me. “There’s a very definite starting point for it here (with the Revolutionary War). Here it’s more like the evolution of that point. At home it’s a much more malleable concept – history in England refers to a lot of stuff and to pride, which obviously brings us back to the Queen. Here it refers to a series of events and consequences.”
Ok, so maybe you Harry Potter-soundalikes have a few good reasons to care about the media monster that this wedding has become. But why is it dragging otherwise-normal U.S. citizens into the hubbub? Stories about the wedding are plastered over the news, and people have planned watching parties and trips across the pond to celebrate the nuptuals. It even reached the full extent of assimilation in American culture – the cable channel has already released a Lifetime Original Movie about the royal couple and their wedding. Why would Americans waste their time on so much British poppycock?
“Be that person. If you’re that person, that represents something. The queen symbolizes something now. She symbolizes peace.”
Our amateur barrister was on a role.
“In a way, I can see how that (symbolism) would translate here because there wouldn’t be America without the Queen. It’s such a global thing now because people can identify with that. They see the same thing in it.”
So maybe the Redcoat had a point. I’d rolled my eyes at the media frenzy because it felt like celebrity gossip. For Blaise, it was at least a little different.
“For you guys it’s flags. You put flags everywhere. It influences everything, and you do that a lot. English people don’t really do that. For us, it’s the Queen – the Queen is the first thing you think of.”
History and patriotism? Even Toby Keith could understand that.
Mike Carson is a Weinberg senior. He can be reached at [email protected].
