Though Ramsey is an English name from southwest England, and I am 3/16th English, I was less than enamored with today’s coronation ceremony for King Charles in London. As a patriotic American, a blue-collar worker, and as a guy that grew up on a small farm in North Dakota, I love our constitutional republic.
I am deeply convinced that all people are created equal, and that elites in talent or wealth exist, and will, to some degree, under the Pareto distribution reality, but power in society should mostly be wielded by the common people from the bottom up as individuators-anarchist supercitizens.
That said, rituals for a society are cultural riches, and we need rituals in our lives locally and federally to be a united people, and to have meaning and structure in our lives. If the British or the English enjoy this pageantry, more power to them. Charles is a symbolic king and the Prime Minister wields the real power.
The little that I watched of the coronation did convince me that, were Charles an absolute monarch, it would be impossible not to be corrupted by so much adulation, fuss and elevation above the masses. Absolute power always or usually corrupts the heart of any fallen human, given enough time.
By coincidence, I saw this item on Facebook today about Clint Eastwood being photographed pumping his own gas just like an ordinary guy: “Old School. No Hollywood Self-Absorption. No celebrity elitism. Just Dirty Harry putting gas in his car.”
We in the Midwest prefer that each citizen be humble and modest. If we could combine that with the modest, polite, non-bragging but solid egoism of a courteous, diplomatic individuators, then we could have a people of elite ability and elite accomplishment, without all the strutting and pecking order junk that ruins societies for all.
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