Published in Pop Culture

By now everyone has met Julia, the lucky woman in the unusual Obama campaign commercial who is looked after from cradle to grave by a compassionate federal government.  With the help of the government, Julia is educated, gets free health care, free birth control, and subsidized student loans.  When she decides to have a child (with no significant other, of course), government is there to help with health care and school programs (but no daycare?).  When Julia retires, Medicare and Social Security look after her needs.  And so on.

This happy story made me wonder what the difference is between Julia and the people Alexis de Tocqueville calls "place-hunters" (see Democracy in America, Vol. II, Part 2, chapter 20).  The place-hunter is someone whose ambition finds its primary outlet in seeking a government job, a type that Tocqueville fears will arise in modern democracies.  True, Julia seems to be on her own when it comes to choosing a job (she's a web-designer), though she does get government subsidized small business loans and tax credits to get started.  But when so many of the major problems in life are solved by government, don't you become something like a place-hunter?  At the least, you rely on government almost as much as someone who does have a government job.

So what's the problem with that? Here's our French observer, writing in the 1830's, long before the full-blown welfare state had developed:

"I shall not say that this universal and immoderate desire for public offices is a great social evil; that it destroys the spirit of independence in each citizen and spreads a venal and servile humor in the whole body of the nation; that it suffocates the virile virtues; nor shall I have it observed that an industry of this kind creates only an unproductive activity and agitates the country without making it fruitful: all that is easily understood."

No, the real problem Tocqueville sees is more political.  In a "people of place-hunters" (think about that awful idea!), there can never be enough government jobs to satisfy the ever growing number of people who want such a job.  And this creates a permanent class of discontented people who demand change "solely out of the need to make some places vacant", or, we may add, solely to acquire more benefits.  And can there ever be enough money to satisfy the ever growing demand for more government assistance? Whether out of compassion or the desire to win political support, governments try to attract partisans by giving people jobs (or healthcare, retirement and vacation benefits, etc.); but instead, Tocqueville thinks governments end up endangering themselves, as we perhaps see in places like Greece. 

Tocqueville concludes that it would be "more honest and more sure" for governments to teach each citizen "the art of being self-sufficient."  Wouldn't that be better than a "people of place-hunters"?

Defending these other Julias--and not the woman in Orwell's 1984. From Robert Herrick:

WHENAS in silks my Julia goes,
Then, then, methinks, how sweetly flows
That liquefaction of her clothes.

... Next, when I cast mine eyes and see
That brave vibration each way free ;
O how that glittering taketh me !

You really wanna get rough with Julia, try John Donne's "Julia," Elegy 14:

Her hands, I know not how, used more to spill
The food of others than herself to fill ;
But O ! her mind, that Orcus, which includes
Legions of mischiefs, countless multitudes
Of formless curses, projects unmade up,
Abuses yet unfashion'd, thoughts corrupt,
Misshapen cavils, palpable untroths,
Inevitable errors, self-accusing loaths.
These, like those atoms swarming in the sun,
Throng in her bosom for creation.
I blush to give her halfe her due ; yet say,
No poison's half so bad as Julia.

Finally, try Julia Shaw, who unfavorably compares Obama's Julia to Tocqueville's American woman, whose superiority was responsible for American greatness.

At the AEI annual dinner Dr. Leon Kass explains life--work, love, service, and truth. He concludes with the need for hope:

In this most fundamental sense, hope is not a hope for change, but an affirmation of permanence, of the permanent possibility of a meaningful life in a hospitable world. Hope in this sense is not only a Judeo-Christian virtue. It is not only the most essential--and abundant--American virtue. It is the condition of the possibility of all human endeavor and all human fulfillment. Yes, there is still much spiritual poverty in America. But we go forward with confidence that our spiritual hungers can yet be nurtured in this almost promised land, provided that we have the courage to insist that the well-being of the spirit is central to our notion of national success and personal flourishing. This war on poverty--on our spiritual poverty--will not add a cent to the deficit. It can enrich our lives beyond measure.

Today, poverty, like pollution, needs a deeper understanding.

We misheard Rush on the 30 year-old law student demanding free contraception, via Obamacare mandate.

UPDATE: Now he apologizes.

NY Knicks point guard Jeremy Lin exhibits American virtues, not Chinese ones. One could conclude this from simple observation as well from this book on Chinese (PRC) professional baseketball. "Why are there no Jeremy Lins [point guards] coming out of China?" The answer lies in politics--the sports of a free society and those of a totalitarian one.

Speaking of Lincoln, note this 1860 cartoon of the presidential candidates, featuring baseball metaphors. Lincoln installed a baseball diamond on the White House grounds, as Diana Schaub relates in her classic essay on the All-American sport.

It made my day. "Halftime in America"--"Goddammit, somebody get me a throat lozenge."

Update: This one is my favorite (obscenity alert)--Obama does Henry V.

Plastic cutlery at the Ayers-Dohrns?  This is a sign of cultural rot.  Why is bankrupt Illinois still funding this outfit?

Or maybe plastique?

UPDATE:  State Humanities Councils receive support from the NEH.  The House should put the NEH Chairman before an oversight Committee.

Abstract art is easy to denigrate and abuse. But sometimes one must wonder if the folks who report on the laughable craft truly appreciate its many ironies. Today, CNN "reports on an unusual Canadian artist whose vivid abstracts are making a big splash." The artist, of course, is a painting monkey. He's a hit in the art world and is presently opening his first exhibition in Toronto. (You can't make this stuff up.)

Earlier in the year, a study was celebrated by the artistic community as confirming the objective worth of abstraction. Participants in the study were shown works of abstract art by celebrated artists and works by ... monkeys. 

The non-art majors preferred the artists 56% of the time, whereas the art majors preferred them 62% of the time. When it came to judging what was art (i.e., "better"), the non-art majors picked the artists a whopping 65.5% of the time, only slightly topped (67.5%) by the art majors. "In the aesthetic domain," the researchers concluded, "people can recognize that a work is good, but still not like it." In other words, people might dislike abstract art, but they can still tell when it belongs in a museum versus a kindergarten or a zoo. (You can take a version of the test here.)

While the distinction between personal preferences and artistic aesthetics deserves closer appraisal, that is for another day. At the moment, I'd simply point out the incredibly low standard of the art community - when only slightly above half of the general population prefers the craft of a professional, master abstract artist to the work of a monkey, it requires a particularly skewered perspective to claim victory. Even the artistic community can only identify their own work about two-thirds of the time.

I actually appreciate the impressionist movement's visual critique of the cold, heartless propensities to which realism was susceptible. The origins of abstraction were noble and timely - but the point of the movement might just as poignantly been summed up in a few journal articles and op-ed pieces. The point was to sacrifice craft for meaning, perfection for emotion - they were intentionally suppressing the prevailing obsession with procedural skill in order to expose a painting's soul. They wanted to breathe life into art again.

The heirs of the movement lack the underlying and verifying skill which provided their predecessors with credibility, just as they lack an appreciation of aesthetics capable of appealing to an unpretentious soul. Scripture defines man as "only a little lower than the angels" and the ancient Greek concept of metaxy locates man between beasts and gods. By these standards, the abstract artist's craft seems to be quite a bit lower than that of the angels and heavily favoring the beast side of the god-beast ledger. It has been argued that a monkey with a typewriter and an infinite amount of time would produce Shakespeare. That may be true, but it seems a monkey with a paint brush can produce abstract art in a matter of minutes. 

The Washington, DC Folger Theater presented a noble rendering of Shakespeare's Othello (through December 4). This tragedy deals with race, religion, tolerance, and the costs of living in a diverse society and serves as a companion to The Merchant of Venice.  Stagings of both often suffer from our contemporary views of these issues, which undermine Shakespeare's tragedy and quasi-comedy.  (For a contrast, see Dennis Teti's astounding study of the Merchant, which uncovers Cathollic themes.) The Folger's rendition does not condescend and brilliantly emphasizes the depravity of Iago in the last few seconds of the play--I won't spoil it for now by revealing the technique.

I can rarely think of the play without also recalling the old Redd Foxx Sanford and Son spoof on it.  Howl with laughter:  Part 1, part 2, part 3.  Instructive in its own way, as well.

Almost everything Dilbert creator Scott Adams says here is wrong--it's supersized Progressivism--but he makes a host of wise and witty comments along the way.  Examples of what I mean: 

If James Madison came back, he'd be peeved that he was the primary author of the Constitution and we honor his memory by not caring when his birthday is. When he stopped whining about that, and noticed that the system he designed has turned into a congealed ball of lard that eats money and excretes red tape, he'd probably be more humble about his contribution.

I'm fairly certain Ben Franklin wouldn't be impressed by our pace of innovation. He invented the post office and showed us electricity, and it still took us 200 years to come up with email. We're not good at connecting the dots.

RTWT.  For a closer look at Madison principles see these newly published brief essays, especially this long one by Tony Peacock and this short one

Daily Caller has posted an article of mine tackling the truths and fictions of Occupy Wall Street coverage.

"Occupy Wall Street" has captured global attention and become the darling of the world press. CNN hosts a "Meet the 99%" webpage advertising the movement on cnn.com. MSNBC's praise of OWS has approached religious awe. Yet for all the attention, many assertions about the movement are flatly inaccurate.

I address fictional media accounts which report OWS as having a "global span" and "global importance," being a "historic movement" (in the image of the Tea Party, Arab Spring and civil rights movement) and having achieved "effectiveness." An example:

Global Span: Claims that OWS has spread to countries around the world - that is, Europe - fail to recall that circuses of this sort have been common in Europe for years. The OWS brand of demonstrator belongs to a quasi-professional cadre of anti-everything crusaders who follow protests like a Grateful Dead tour. Euro-protesters launch copy-cat OWS rallies because that's what they do - they follow protests, not issues. Euro-protests have now reached America, not vice versa.

Several factual accounts are also considered, such as the group promotion of "direct democracy," and projection of "diversity" and "independence." Of course, all of these qualities prove to be liabilities when explored rationally. An example:

Direct Democracy: Commentators report that OWS presents an alternative to established republican government and reacquaints Americans with a strain of direct democracy. This is true, but confuses virtue and vice. OWS looks like direct democracy because it is disorganized, leaderless, inefficient, susceptible to demagoguery, overly influenced by passions and incapable of articulating a coherent philosophy or forming a consistent governing policy. These are precisely the reasons the Founding Fathers prudently rejected direct democracy in favor of representative government.

As always, I hope you'll RTWT.

In his latest motion picture, Anonymous, apocalyptic film director Roland Emmerich brings to the big screen a conspiracy theory so lunatic that it is widely dismissed by the vast majority of scholars and historians in the world. His tale of William Shakespeare being a sham, the great bard's works written by some nobleman instead, should be treated with just the same incredulity as some of Emmerich's other blockbusters, 2012, The Day After Tomorrow, and 10,000 B.C.

While the authorship of Shakespeare's plays was never questioned during his lifetime or in the centuries following, a small number of individuals have begun to question that he actually wrote his great works within the last hundred years. They insist that the son of an illiterate glove-maker from some bumpkin village is incapable of showing us the ambition of Julius Caesar, the love of Romeo and Juliet, the intrigue of Macbeth, and the tragedy of King Lear. How could someone from such a humble beginning know royalty well enough to bring to us Hamlet or Antony and Cleopatra?

Though the conspiracy theorists insist that someone like Shakespeare could not have written the plays, the answer as to who did is still up in the air, splitting the Shakespeare-deniers into various camps. The dozens of potential alternatives include Francis Bacon, Miguel de Cervantes, Walter Raleigh, Jesuit priests, King James I, Queen Elizabeth I, and Edward de Vere, the Earl of Oxford whose candidacy Anonymous supports. The reason that there are so many potential alternatives is because there is no actual evidence that Shakespeare did not write the plays himself, thus making it difficult to declare outright that someone else must have.

The Oxfordian theory is based on a 1920 publication by J.T. Looney, "Shakespeare' Identified," which tells an unproven tale of how the Earl of Oxford was not only Queen Elizabeth's son, but her lover as well. In this fantastical explanation of events, the Earl of Oxford had to give up credit for his plays and poems because a nobleman could not degrade himself to join the lowest possible level in society--that of actor and playwright.

Why indulge in this delusion when there is no evidence to support it? Is it really that much easier for people to believe in such a conspiracy than to accept the genius of a common man? Is it so hard to believe that human beings, regardless of circumstances, are able to rise up from nothing to greatness? Are not men able to understand things without necessarily having experienced them firsthand? There is something rotten about beating up on a man's legacy centuries after he has been taken by that fell sergeant, death, no longer capable of defending himself against such slanderous conspiracy. His words and genius will live on, but we owe the Bard respect for what he was able to accomplish. Let us be honest about the legacy of he who wrote these masterpieces.

Anonymous will surely be an entertaining and well-written film, with tremendous visual effects, intricate costumes, and decent acting. It may even have the great benefit of pushing people to revisit the works of Shakespeare, and get close once more to tragic Othello or knavish Puck. However, people should watch the movie with the same kind of incredulity as when they watched Emmerich's The Patriot--a film that tried to capture much of the detail and narrative of the time period, and laid forth some of the feelings and ideas of the American Revolution, but which was nonetheless a made-up story based in unserious history.

William Shakespeare was a genius, and held a greater command of our English language than anyone before and after him. He understood the human mind, heart, and soul, and knew not only how to make people laugh and cry, but how to get them to consider great and noble things. A Hollywood blockbuster will not be able to discredit this genius; it cannot take away what he gave us. But, in today's conspiracy-loving society, it can plant a poisonous seed of disbelief in certain minds. We must do what we can to protect the memory of Shakespeare and his legacy. Allow people to admire the fact that he, a simple peasant from an illiterate family, was able to rise to such genius and beauty. To rob people of the idea of such possibility does a disservice both to Shakespeare and humanity in general. Taking that away would be the most unkindest cut of all.

George Clooney's latest film depicts for us the cold, cruel, and calculating side of campaign politics. In it, Ryan Gosling is an idealistic young man working for an idealized presidential candidate, and the young idealist gets buried in a scandal that makes him forevermore see the world through jaded eyes, indulging in the cynicism that plagues so many in the public sphere. The title of the film draws the mind towards the tale of Julius Caesar. He, too, was a great politician capable of doing great things for his people. Yet Caesar was also corrupt, and the corruption of this great man led an idealistic young man who loved him to betray him--Brutus. The tale of Caesar is one of a republic's dying breaths, drowned for decades in a sea of decadence, corruption, and cynicism.

Compare, then, The Ides of March with Frank Capra's timeless classic, Mr. Smith Goes to Washington. In the film, Jimmy Stewart plays an idealistic young man who is thrust into the midst of a scandal in the United States Senate, and overcome with grief upon learning that his idealized senior colleague, whom he saw as a mentor and friend, was actually a corrupt pawn. Mr. Smith presents to us a Senate filled with greed, deception, and vanity, with one man standing alone against a seemingly insurmountable political machine.

While both Clooney's and Capra's films depict a political system rife with corruption, there is a hugely important difference between the two. Clooney's dark and pessimistic tale brings no closure to it, and no hope; one leaves the theater with a bitter sense of disappointment and cynical contempt for our political process. It is a tragedy where everyone loses, much like the tale of Julius Caesar that the title alludes to.

Mr. Smith, though, has a far different, more lasting, and more important tone. It depicts one decent and determined common man, surrounded by petty bunch of political thugs, who nonetheless makes a difference. This is not to say that its title character, Jefferson Smith, is alone in his feelings--the people support him, and there are even members of the Senate who likely support him as well, but are yet complicit with the villains through their silence. Smith still wins in the end, though.

Perhaps this is too idealistic. Perhaps the cynical transformation of Gosling's Stephen Myers is closer to the real thing than the determined support for lost causes exhibited by Stewart's Smith. If that is the case, though, then the fault is not with our system of government, but with us. We are the government.

Many Americans over the past few years seem to see our country through the same jaded vision of The Ides of March, and are tired of it. Perhaps, then, now is the perfect time to revisit the 1939 classic, which came out just in time for Nazis, Soviets, and Fascists to all ban it for its dangerous idea. When Hitler banned American movies in France, one Parisian theater played Mr. Smith nonstop for the month leading up to the ban. Tyrants are threatened by the idea that individuals have power; mortified by the possibility that one single person has the power to change the world. The reason they fear this is because it is true: good men, armed by the truth and common decency, can do more to change the world than all the armies and propaganda of tyranny and corruption in the world combined. It just takes hard determination in face of the harshest adversity.

Though our nation appears full of the broken hope in politics given to us in The Ides of March, we still have the ability to ensure that we remain a nation of the people, by the people, and for the people. It is within our grasp if only we have a rebirth of understanding our good old American principles, a support for our constitutional institutions, and a renewed emphasis on the importance of the individual. Then, if we are lucky, perhaps we can also find a Mr. Smith or two to send to Washington in order to remind them of these things too. "Great principles don't get lost once they come to light. They're right here; you just have to see them again!"

Ford's new commercial might represent a cultural milestone.

"Chris," the character in the commercial, does not want to buy a car from a company that the government has bailed out.  Moreover, Chris attacks the basic idea of the entitlement state when he says "that's what America's about."  We try our best. "When you fail, you've got to pick yourself up, and go back to work." 

Behind the veil of ignorance, an American wants the opportunity to succeed or fail on his own merits.  That implies that failure has real consequences.  Hence the strictures against bailouts.

Since the 1960s, when commercials touched political themes they have tended to reflect Lefty themes, since, as a rule, Progressivism has had chic cachet.  That has not always been the case, but it has been the general rule.  But this commercial goes after the bailout state.

The Republicans' reading lists (as compiled by Tevi Troy) confirm one's prejudices about them--though in the case of Michele Bachmann, one is pleasantly surprised:  She attributes her conversion from the Democrats to having read Gore Vidal's Burr--a "snotty little novel" that "mocked our Founding Fathers."  

Obama's summer reading list is literary, as one might expect of the author of Dreams From My Father.  Among his reading is The Warmth of Other Suns, an account of the Great Migration of blacks from the South to, among other places, Chicago.  Its author includes a mention of having met Barack Obama and then voting for him.

Having toiled in the Washington bureaucracy, I most emphatically endorse non-policy wonk reading for our politicians (provided they have some clue about public policy).  And I like the idea of the political class reading sophisticated fiction to give them moral and intellectual depth, plus some imagination--though one would like to see less contemporary work and more classics on those lists.

BTW, I do not begrudge Obama his vacation.  He should tend to his family's well-being and his own re-energizing.  But what of the manner and mode of his form of vacationing?  My own view is that he treats his presidency with the same ironic mockery that he displayed in his autobiography.  From the first page of chapter 7, p.  133:

 In 1983, I decided to become a community organizer.

There wasn't much detail to the idea;  I didn't know anyone making a livng that way.  when classmates in college asked me just what it was that a community organizer did, I couldn't answer them directly.  Instead, I'd pronounce on the need for change....

That's what I'll do, I'll organize black folks.  At the grass roots.  For change.

What Obama's friends and most of his critics don't see is that this sardonic cynicism has carried over into the White House.  When I read his book the summer before his election, I thought that the insouciant attitudes it betrayed alone disqualified him from being President.  Now we can add his deeds to the word.  Politically, this means he doesn't care.  He's having the time of his life, and he gets to golf and party too. 

No leftist who read Obama's autobiography can possibly feel snookered, and no conservative who read it could be more outraged. 

How our would-be elites see it:

It was startling to hear what local broadcaster Steve Adubato, who has done informative programming, had to say with regard to the news that young women are hooking up with older men to exchange sex for payment of their college loans. He thought it perfectly fine. When asked if he would like to see his daughter do that, he said that she would not have to because of her higher socioeconomic status, but that for women of lower means, he thought it was fine. Pressed by his co-commentators to show more democratic spirit, he added that if his daughter were at a reduced socioeconomic status, unlikely to happen, it would be fine then too. It was really cringe-making to see a man reveal such an absence of values so absolute.

I am reminded of Irving Kristol's famous quip:

The liberal paradigm of regulation and license has led to a society where an 18-year-old girl has the right to public fornication in a pornographic movie--but only if she is paid the minimum wage.  Now, you don't have to be the father of a daughter to think that there is something crazy about this situation.

The class dimension, however, might be new, or at least more explicit.

Arthur Herman's post arguing that John Dollard is the real man behind the riots, reminds me that roughly the same idea was set to music a few years ago:

Dear kindly Sergeant Krupke,
You gotta understand,
It's just our bringin' up-ke
That gets us out of hand.
Our mothers all are junkies,
Our fathers all are drunks.
Golly Moses, natcherly we're punks!  . . .

Gee, Officer Krupke, we're very upset;
We never had the love that ev'ry child oughta get.
We ain't no delinquents,
We're misunderstood.
Deep down inside us there is good! 

In light of the London violence, Kevin Kosar (a frequent Weekly Standard contributor) reminds us of the late political scientist Edward Banfield's sly--and revealing--comment on urban riots.  It's not a lack of government spending, discrimination, poverty, etc.  Often young men riot because it's fun to do:

Often, though, people riot "mainly for fun and profit," as Banfield put it in The Unheavenly City. Riots, as he reminded us, have been around as long as there have been cities. "In Pittsburgh in 1809 an editor proposed satirically that the city establish a 'conflagration fund' from which to buy twelve houses, one to be burned each month in civil celebration."

Kosar concludes, "[O]ne sure accelerant to riots present and future, Banfield explained, is the widespread belief that one can get away with it."  RTWT for clear thinking and illuminating links.  Kosar's website, covering higher education, reviews, Banfieldiana, and whiskey, can be found  here. 

In a breathtaking essay Joshua Lerner uses the concept of the political from Carl Schmitt to illustrate the radicalism of Progressivism.  Schmitt was the German legal theorist whom Leo Strauss critiqued in an essay central to his return to the ancients.  See his early work and Strauss's here.  Schmitt became a supporter of the Nazis. 

Lerner does not engage in drive-by slander of the Progressives as Nazis.  Rather, he paints a compelling portrait of the perilous parallels between the two radical movements:

In many ways, seeking redemption via politics is the quintessence of the primacy of the political. But once we have established that politics is of at least some primacy and provides a meaningful source of ethical values--again, think of any number of liberals or leftists who feel the need to politicize even the most mundane of consumer activities--we must move on to another very powerful conclusion: political primacy means the irrelevancy of the practice of politics.

       It is rather well known that Progressives were rather contemptuous of common politics; they hoped to replace it with scientific administration of essential tasks....

Lerner is the co-editor of Counterpoint, the undergraduate University of Chicago conservative journal, where his essay appears.  The current issue features a symposium on conservative films, including Diana Schaub on Shane, Abe Shulsky on Casablanca, and Thomas Pavel on Bladerunner.  

John Lennon, the right-wing, reagonite war-hawk? So say's Lennon's last personal assistant:

John, basically, made it very clear that if he were an American he would vote for Reagan because he was really sour on (Democrat) Jimmy Carter.

...

I also saw John embark in some really brutal arguments with my uncle, who's an old-time communist... He enjoyed really provoking my uncle... Maybe he was being provocative... but it was pretty obvious to me he had moved away from his earlier radicalism.

He was a very different person back in 1979 and 80 than he'd been when he wrote Imagine. By 1979 he looked back on that guy and was embarrassed by that guy's naivete.

I don't know if Lennon's alleged conservative conversion is genuine, but it would make listening to Come Together all the sweeter.  

Chicago has long been a favorite city--not exotic in the way San Francisco and New York are, with less history than comparatively tiny Boston, but even so it has a character that still speaks to us.  This came to sight as I sunned on Ohio Beach, next to the Navy Pier.  From this vantage point the city's vista is spectacular.  Vision, ambition, low politics, greed but above all pride created such a scene.  The skyscrapers are the sensuous products of these noble and base passions.   One cannot look at Chicago without being affirmed that this is a country full of ambition, a great country bent on even greater things.  

But the perspective from the water taxi into Michigan Avenue notes weaknesses in the facade.  The local Trump Tower lacks the seriousness of the older buildings, some with Gothic pretensions. 

I am staying in the "Dick Tracy" house, in the Chicago suburbs, the one in which the young Chester Gould got his family and cartooning career started.   How appropriate that the always proper Dick Tracy was given birth in mob-fascinated Chicago.  Contrast the steady Tracy with our psychically tortured Batman.  Shouldn't virtuous acts be done with pleasure, in order to be virtuous?

All this puts into perspective the strange case of our Chicago-based President, who has brought to the national scene all that is low about Chicago and who seems intent on suppressing all the grand motives that made America a great nation.  His vision of American destiny would rob America of all its distinctiveness.

34 years ago today, in a galaxy far, far away, Star Wars hit the silver screen.

Just for perspective, I was 3 months old.

Columbus' own "Macho Man" Randy Savage died today. To loyal fans of the legendary faux wrestler, our most respectfully over-the-top and larger-than-life condolences. He was a colorful entertainer who helped define an entire genre.

Married to a commoner Englishwoman himself, Alexis de Tocqueville would have approved of the latest royal union.  Using insights from Democracy in America, Julia Shaw argues the splendid moment was "quite an American affair."  What the visiting, onlooking Americans "were watching was not some imaginary fairy tale or even a typical lavish royal wedding. It was another American love story."  They went abroad to meet themselves.

My favorite commentary on royalty in the modern world is on a less fortunate royal couple. Mark Helprin's splendid comic novel, Freddy and Fredericka, describes Charles and Di romping incognito across America and acquiring its virtues to make them fit for the royal throne.