Are you going to get up early on Friday to watch the royal wedding? I will not. I need to get some rest. Later in the day I am heading out to Pittsburgh where I will be speaking about Was America Founded as a Christian Nation? to a group of atheists and skeptics at the Carnegie Science Center. (I also have no real interest in royal weddings or the kind of gown Kate will be wearing).
Mark Oppenheimer, writing at Slate, uses the phrase “Anglophilic wusses” to describe those Americans who will be waking up at 3am to catch the wedding. He also describes them as traitors to their country. He reminds us that “Americans are supposed to loathe and reject monarchs.”
Oppenheimer concludes:
I certainly mean no disrespect to the English, that island people that gave us abolitionism, church-ratified divorce, the modern novel, and the Beatles. Rather, I simply want to recall to us our own inheritance, which is of a vision still quite radical: that we are all created equal. Being human, some number of us will always have the urge to ogle couture wedding dresses and generally wonder how the other half gets married. And the American version of that will involve people named Trump, Kennedy, or Kardashian. That tendency is not the United States of America at its best. But at least it is our bad tendency, born here, of a free people, one that calls each of us “Mr.” or “Ms.”—that, in fact, encourages the familiarity of “Kim,” “Kourtney,” and “Khloe.” That is worth something, and it is worth sleeping on Friday morning.
Best post title on your blog, ever.
Oppenheimer gets all the credit.