American Monarchy and the Fourth of July

Since the program I’m teaching at this summer has a four-day weekend for the Fourth of July, to give the kids a treat we cut back on normal classes this week and instead had them rehearse and perform a couple scenes and songs from a classic movie; in our case, The Lion King. The performance was cute and wonderful, though if you take our version of the script as a one-act play in its own right, it’s horribly depressing; we end as the lion prince Simba is happily on his way to the liar of the Hyenas, ignorant that it’s all part of his evil uncle Scar’s plot to murder him, so for all we know he gets eaten immediately and Scar takes the throne. Real downer*. But, before we started rehearsal, we had to watch the movie in class first because a lot of the kids had never seen it. And, aside from watching the Spanish dub once when a kindergarten teacher ran out of ideas, I hadn’t either. The whole story struck me as sort of morally dated. It’s about a Lion named Simba, born to be the king over all the animals, but his jealous uncle Scar kills Simba’s father and tricks Simba into running away, leaving no king and no heir so that the throne becomes his. So the real core of the story is Simba reluctantly growing into his role as a king and overcoming cowardice to confront his uncle Scar. It struck me as deeply emotional in parts, contrasting Simba’s childhood fantasies of his future kingship with the grim reality of facing his father’s killer and governing a devastated land. But why is Simba the only one who can face Scar anyway? Temperamentally, he seems like the worst candidate: whiny, entitled, self-centered. It’s a nice journey of emotional growth to see him overcome those qualities, but it seems like the least efficient way to actually solve the problem. The reason why it has to be Simba and only Simba, according to the movie, is that the animals need to be governed by a lion, specifically one  who is strong, male, and descended from a royal bloodline. This casts the allegorical world of the film as an innate hierarchy, one that gets balanced in death, sure (ergo the famous “Circle of Life”), but a hierarchy all the same.

I bring this up on my Fourth of July post because it seems like a distinctly un-American idea. In the land of democracy, we’ve got an odd obsession with royalty and human hierarchy**. The Lion King is a Disney movie, of course, a company that is maybe the standard-bearer for U.S. cultural influence around the world, yet they made a name for themselves with movies about princesses and now run the Marvel universe (which is infested with kings and royalty) and Star Wars (where fans rioted when it turned out Rey wasn’t from the Skywalker bloodline). Tolkien and C.S. Lewis might be British, but Americans really like The Lord of the Rings and The Chronicles of Narnia too, both of which tend to favor rightful kings. And then there’s the “chosen hero” trope in Harry Potter and Percy Jackson (one British, one American, but both loved in the U.S.) where destiny works as a kind of divine right to choose heroes. I hope I’m not complaining too much, I really like a lot of these stories. But it just seems weird that we all seem to love kings so much, when our most famous achievement as a nation is ditching one and making sure we’d never have another.

To generalize way too much, I’d like to suggest that Americans only half-heartedly accepted our own values. A lot of what we think of as mainstream American culture and identity came from European immigrants and their children, of course, so it’s only reasonable to expect that they’d be reluctant to let go of their kings and queens and the notions that came with them. I heard once that most vegetarians actually eat meat when drunk, and I think Americans and democracy work in much the same way: we respect all people as equals, but only on our best behavior. And if alcohol is to people as literature is to nations, then we kind of have a drinking problem.

You can see it in Fourth of July celebrations more than anything. Americans tend to celebrate the founders not as people (many of whom chose to own other people) but as cultural heroes above critique. People tout the Declaration and Constitution, but treat them like sacred texts rather than human creations in the same way that some Christians seem more fond of waving Bibles in the air than reading them. Generalizations abound in this synopsis of our culture, and I’m sorry about that, but I think anyone living in the U.S. can understand what I’m getting at, whether they agree with my conclusions or not. The real irony is that everyone seems to agree on our nation’s best idea: leveling out an unfair world and giving everyone a voice (even if it took us a really, really long time to make any real movement towards that goal). But a lot of people celebrate that good idea by raising up symbols and long dead people, not the American population as it is today or as it ever was. The Trump administration seems like the best and most disgusting example of this American royalty: prioritizing an individual ego above human rights or basic reality. 

Which isn’t to say that I don’t love fireworks or parades as much as the next guy***. But I think they represent the wrong things to too many people. Our land was made and blessed by God, but so was every other country. And so was every other person, political hero in 1776 or random person in the world today. We should take today to celebrate that our society has come so far towards real equality, and recognizing how far we have to go.

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* Not as dreary as the first graders’ depiction of Annie, though. Their plot goes something like, “Annie is an orphan living a miserable life at a cruel orphanage, holding onto a desperate but ultimately naive hope that her parents are still alive and will find her someday. The end.”

** And, to be clear, identity is a big factor here. You don’t see many depictions of divine right that aren’t white, male, cisgender, able-bodied, and so on and so on. But, in the worlds of these stories, even most winners of the identity lottery end up unimportant commoners.

*** Actually, I hate parades. Unless I manage to exploit a loophole to get my underground satirical newspaper a float, which I actually did once and loved.