The princess diaries

As I am an exponent of Americanism generally, and of Article I, Section 9, Clause 8 of the Constitution particularly, I’ve been watching my countryfolk react to Britain’s latest spin around the royal ballroom with some interest. The observations, I am sad to say, have not left me with an easy feeling, and I imagine that my fellow-travellers Thomases Paine and Jefferson would be similarly dismayed. We are so many generations removed from the memory of troops being quartered in our homes, and firmly embedded in the age when ecumenical celebrity culture embraces the remnants of an ancient regime, that the healthy anti-monarchism on which republican liberty was conceived is becoming dangerously inert.

In 1922, Carl Sandburg, insisting that it was inappropriate for young American children to be raised on an Old World diet of aristocratic fairy tales, published Rootabaga Stories. It is a transcript of American exceptionalism as told to children; in place of knights defeating dragons and princesses pissing around bored waiting for suitors, we have skyscrapers talking with the wind and the Potato-Face Blind Man. As Harry Golden said of the work, “Rootabaga Country is an American country. It has a railroad, ragpickers, policemen, ball teams, tall grass. It is mapped out. If it existed, you could get to it and find your way around. Geographic reality is what makes the Rootabaga Stories the first genuinely American fairy tales.”¹

Too few of my generation, it seems, were raised on Rootabaga. And so the enchantment of European aristocracy is more alluring than ever to North Americans. Far from detecting the “Meannesses, Servility, and Wretchedness” which Benjamin Franklin found in European royalty, many Americans now detect only a lovely blue sapphire ring. It turns out that the enemies of democracy didn’t need the War of 1812 or Waterloo to defend monarchism. They only needed to wait for the color photograph and the glossy magazine.