kii said:

buffy said:

kii said:

It’s another day. My toes are cold. My head is blerghy and my throat is still scratchy.
My new slippers aren’t here yet.
My brain keeps circling around a response to KFC3’s, King Fucking Charles the 3rd, speech in the USA. I’ll round up my thoughts when I have the energy.

Let it wash over you. It’s pretty much irrelevent to us.

Nah, it’s a worthy convoluted thought.

Some of you may remember that during Trump’s first administration, people on social media often joked about having Britain declare the US’s independence as null and void due to how stupid the country was for electing the idiot. There were memes, I am sure of it, and it brought great amusement to many people.

This second administration is 1,000 times worse, and the people STILL supporting Trump are even crazier and stoopider.

So, KFC3 comes over under the guise of the 250 year celebration of the USA’s independence and makes a perfect speech about what their country’s independence actually means. A well-crafted reminder about what the founding fathers wanted for the USA.

Anyway, that’s what my brain has been dealing with as I embrace this lurgy or whatever it is.

Simon Schama
Financial Times

That went well. In fact, one might say, without a trace of irony, it could have hardly gone better. But then those who wanted the royal US visit to be called off could hardly have anticipated King Charles triggering bursts of applause from Republicans as well as Democrats as they listened to a speech studded with views diametrically opposed to those of the president and his administration.

Some of this warm reception across the aisle was, I think, sheer pleasure at the recovery of institutional dignity: the collective response of a Congress that was paid the unfamiliar compliment of being taken seriously as a forum where thoughtfulness and the public interest could find an attentive hearing, rather than sinking into a mudhole of rancid partisanship, puerile catcalling and vainglorious self-congratulation. “America’s words carry weight and meaning as they have since independence,” the King emphasised towards the end of his speech, flattering the significance of American history as an embodiment of something other than the exercise of raw power. Cue the standing ovation.

The rhetorical cunning of the speech (you could hear Cicero applauding from the tomb) was to couple positions anathema to Trump with glosses from which it would be impossible for a patriotic American to dissent. Thus, praise of interfaith co-operation was prefaced by a profession of Christian faith as “a firm anchor”; the indispensability of Nato and “unyielding resolve” in the defence of Ukraine by remembering the invocation of Article 5, and the allied response following the catastrophe of 9/11; and a call to address climate change by quoting Theodore Roosevelt (one of Donald Trump’s idols) on the “glorious heritage” of the American landscape. If Woody Guthrie can’t persuade Republicans and the president to see that “this land is your land”, then the environmentally crusading British king was there to remind them. The Speaker of the House applauded, while the vice-president remained unmoved.

Following the speech, a CNN commentator remarked on the King’s directness, the obvious regal comparison being his mother’s address to a joint session of Congress in 1991, mindful as she habitually was of never violating the monarchy’s unwritten law of political restraint.

King Charles preferred to stress a legacy of distinctively British political thought and action: the restraints on absolutism imposed by Magna Carta (the barons would not have been pleased by the arbitrary warrants and seizures of ICE); the Declaration of Right of 1689 that was the foundational document of the British constitutional monarchy, to which the writers of state declarations in the spring of 1776, and the subsequent writers of the July Declaration of Independence, looked for inspiration. In some respects, as the King correctly noted, the American Bill of Rights of 1791 drew on the very wording of the British Bill of Rights of 1689. Camilla, Queen Consort, King Charles III, President Donald Trump, and first lady Melania Trump watch troops in historical uniforms march past at the White House. The King and President Trump, with Queen Camilla and first lady Melania Trump, watch the US Army Old Guard Fife and Drum Corps march past the White House balcony on Tuesday.

Framing the core principles of liberal democracy as a common inheritance of both the Founding Fathers and the monarchy against which they rebelled, the King was calling for another America to bestir itself. Better to take Abraham Lincoln and the Gettysburg Address as a model than the authoritarianism of Putin and Xi Jinping, much less the busted flush of Viktor Orbán. The cause of constitutionally protected liberal democracy, and that of the fate of planet Earth itself, were not yet lost, unless wilfully surrendered.

Thus, in one of history’s happier paradoxes, a British king came to Washington to speak against absolute monarchy, of the sort on which predecessors bearing the same royal name rested, as they supposed, their own divinely ordained authority; and also to speak, by strong implication, against the great autocrats and kleptocrats of our own age.