King Xmastime

Matt Yglesias has been lobbying for a constitutional monarchy for a while now, although his reasoning has been based on how the president would therein be treated and respected by both foreign and domestic leaders. Now it's occurred to me that maybe we SHOULD have a king or queen, but only because it seems to be what voters like.  As much as we like to pat ourselves on the back for the "American Dream", already even the people that voted for Barack Obama have "had it!" with him and have no confidence in his almost five decades of intellectual pragmatism and over-achieving, and of course a segment of his opposition is still very suspicious about his birth, where he came from, how he got through college and his jobs early in his career etc etc. Meanwhile, something that's forgotten in the wake of his historic election is the fact that 50 million people voted AGAINST him and for a guy who was born into his life of prestige and, excepting his years as a POW, never had to overcome any real obstacles in his own path to feeling he was in line to become president by some natural law or order. And this of course was after eight years of a president who was the very antithesis of the "American Dream" whose biggest pelt in the battle of accomplishments was being able to quit drinking and tell everybody that God told him to run for president. Nobody really questioned Bush on how he got there, we were all very satisfied that the role somehow belonged to him since he was already rich and famous, and the opposite seems to be true about Obama.

The point is, the American people like that. We like to feel that someone was somehow "ordained" to be president. They like it a whole lot more than Barack Obama's story for the same reason they insist on voting for the interest of the superwealthy - it's easier. Nobody REALLY wants to hear "if you start overachieving the day you enter kindergarten and do every bit of extra credit throughout your school years and nearly kill yourself from exhaustion outhustling the next guy and studying every inch of American history and philosophy, then one day you MIGHT have a chance of even dreaming of running for President." They wanna feel like one day they'll magically get the call from God or whatever and will somehow become President overnight. This of course is just like the fact that nobody REALLY wants to hear that if they demand that politicians act in their interests and set up a society in which if one busts his or her ass every day they'll have a mildly successful life wherein wealth and power is based on a real meritocracy when in actuality, they want politicians to set things up in case they win the lottery or wake up as a member of the New York Yankees.

So let Sarah Palin be "Queen" because she "got the call", and let her go around to mall openings and throw out first pitches, and let Obama quietly go about the Senate floor slashing throats and making deals that actually affect lives. This will eliminate our uneasiness with accepting the idea that there might be smarter people than ourselves running things, and we can focus on Baby Jesus having shone his light on so-and-so being our "leader."