I‘m back home in the great state of Maryland, and I’ve gone nearly a full week without anyone picking up on my nonnative accent and asking me whether I’m ecstatic about Britain’s new “royal baby.”
Such a question, if asked, would only prompt a curmudgeonly, “Bah, humbug.”
That was my retort many years ago when a breathless teller at the old Riggs Bank, opposite the U.S. Treasury near the White House, excitedly asked me whose side I was on in the great royal battle between Princess Diana and Prince Charles.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m sure Prince Harry and his American bride, now-Meghan, Duchess of Sussex, are lovely people and are very happy with their “bundle of joy,” as they should be. But I agreed with my old friend Christopher Hitchens when he complained about the gawking and “forced recruitment of everyone into the same emotional mold” when it comes to Britain’s royal soap opera.
I have seen no reason to change my mind since. “It can’t be good for people to lead vicarious lives, made up partly of prurience and partly of deference,” Hitchens noted in an article 18 years ago.
I’ve met briefly three members of the family over the years. Two of the occasions were stiff, awkward affairs and replete with falsity during royal visits to London newsrooms.
The third involved Princess Margaret, sister of the queen, at a private club in London’s Soho neighborhood. She arrived bundled up in a fur coat and was trailed by a strong odor of gin. My friends and I had a drink with her later, and she was, I must admit, tremendous fun and had a wicked sense of humor, mainly used to skewer her own close relatives.
My lips remain sealed.
But the badass princess couldn’t shake my deep-seated republicanism, not that she tried or could have given a damn.
My next favorite is the no-nonsense Princess Anne, the queen’s daughter, who eschews “celebrity status” and avoids playing the game of using the media when it serves her purpose and demanding privacy when it doesn’t. Her working principle has been to shun the media altogether, and good for her.
So, what’s one to make of the outpouring of gush from the U.S. media about this latest addition to the House of Windsor? Are editors unaware that the hereditary principle is un-American? For Benjamin Franklin, who feared the establishment of a new aristocracy following the ousting of the British, to reward descendants for an accident of birth was “absurd.”
Even Alexander Hamilton shied away from the hereditary principle when arguing for a monarch at the Constitutional Convention of 1787. His proposed sovereign was to be elected, rule for life (unless impeached), and to be succeeded by another elected monarch.
The Founding Fathers would have been turning in their graves if they caught wind of America’s TV news shows. Breaking the news of Archie Harrison Mountbatten-Windsor’s birth, a Fox News presenter announced: “Great day for America; America has now gone royal,” adding, “the proud mum is American, so that is great, so now we are all royal in our own special way.” Huh?
ABC’s “Good Morning America” could hardly contain itself. Correspondent Linsey Davis said, “This is the moment everybody has been waiting for, a chance to see the royal baby.”
Down in Edgewater, Md., people apparently could wait, hence no one mentioning the birth.
Aside from a British neighbor who insists on flying only the Union Jack without the presence of Old Glory, too — in breach of the flag code — no standards were being run up flagpoles. Nor were there other celebrations, not even fireworks in a neighborhood that normally seizes every opportunity to let off rockets and firecrackers.
What we have been keen to catch a glimpse of are fox cubs, the offspring of our latest additions, several fine red foxes, which are doing great service in reducing our squirrel population.
Jamie Dettmer is an international correspondent and broadcaster for VOA.
