British knighthood

The other night I saw a commercial for musical acts that are going to appear at a local venue.  One of them was Sir James Galway.  I wondered if it was the same James Galway who played the flute (I suspected it was but was hoping it wasn't).  I checked him out on Google and found out that in fact it was the same James Galway who had been knighted by that old lady across the Atlantic for some contribution or other to the Dying Empire.  At first I was appalled because I thought Galway was an Irishman which, technically, he is, having been born in Belfast.  But since he was born in the Six Counties the Evil Empire refuses to return to us, that makes him a British subject and his knighthood is understandable, no matter how noxious is it to my sensibilities.

But there is a line to this.  Why any American would deign to receive a knighthood from the British is beyond me.  That hypocrite Ted Kennedy received an honorary knighthood in his last year of life and the fool accepted it.  It's bad enough that an American would accept such a title, but an American of Irish ancestry whose family left at the height of the Famine due to the gentry's landgrab had no business accepting the knighthood.  That he did so only underscores the hypocrisy with which the Kennedy family has always operated.

Dwight D. Eisenhower also accepted a knighthood.  For someone who had to put up with the intractable and insufferable British superiority complex during World War II to accept a knighthood is amazing to me.  The argument can be made that he did so out of political expediency, but he could easily have quashed any feelers before the announcement was made.  I just shake my head at how Americans will come a'running whenever the British dangle anything that suggests royalty at them.

For a country that has as one of its most solid bases that all men are created equal, even if it hasn't always practiced this, it shows a perplexing propensity to kneel at the altar of British royalty.  Sure, the so-called royals are people too, but I'll be darned if I'm bowing to anyone, much less a person of putative royalty.  I can drag out the arguments that we kicked them out of our country twice and saved their bacon two other times, but those really only speak to the fact that we are a different culture and that we may be allies but that's it.  The notion that we should accept some knighthood because it's an honor is misguided; not one citizen is beneath Barack Obama but we pay respect to the office of the President of the United States.  That we should pay respect to a monarch who alleges to be superior by virtue of birth to anyone is a crock.

There may well be other knighthoods or honors that other monarchs bestow on Americans.  If there are, I'm not aware of them.  But even if they do, they're certainly no different, intriniscally, than the British knighthood.  The one difference is the shared history with Britain and, for me, the horrific history of British subjugation of Ireland for nearly a millenium that devalues any claim the British have to being in a position to bestow honors on anyone.  Again, mindful of Godwin's Law, it's as if I would accept some honor from the Third Reich.  That, to me, makes no sense.

(c) 2013 The Truxton Spangler Chronicles