Let's leave Krugman on Detroit for tomorrow
Guardian caption, posted early today: "A correspondent for Mother and Baby magazine sets up a tent outside St. Mary's hospital in London, where the Duchess of Cambridge will give birth."by KenAs I write, we don't know what the name of the new little prince, eventual heir to the throne of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, will be. So what do you say we call him Thurman? Or maybe Pete? How about Lamont? Or Francis?What, you mean we don't get a say? Come on, Kate and Will, wouldn't a Prince Calvin be, like, a cool change of pace?These are only the first four of the 20 question that make up the Guardian's Hadley Freeman's "Royal baby quiz -- how much do you know?" (Click to enlarge.)SORRY ABOUT THE ROYAL INTERVENTION, BUT . . .Here I was, all set to write about Paul Krugman writing today about "Detroit, the New Greece," the impending campaign of disinformation to be expected from the Deficit-Hawk Wing of the Village School of Economics. ("So now the deficit scolds have a new case to misinterpret.")But here we have it -- history intervening. How often is an infant born destined to be king of England. Okay, make that the United Kingdom. Actually there is a correct numerical answer to that question, and somebody can certainly come up with it. But you can't just go fishing in Wikipedia for a list of Kings and Queens of England. First, because a whole bunch of those kings weren't destined to be king when they were born. And then because there were a whole bunch of baby boys who were born destined to be king, only things didn't work out, so you'd have to add them to your total.(The future queens of England don't come into this discussion, because none of them were born destined to be queen. They only ascended to the throne because the royal line at that point found itself devoid of suitable male heirs.)I know this is another occasion for anti-royalists to point out what a ridiculous institution is this monarchy, whereby some kid, or rather some boy kid, is born to be king just 'cause he arranged the circumstances of his birth fortuitously. But I ask you, do we really want to go making a king out of some kid who didn't know how to get his birth right?Oh, those royal ears!It's also an occasion for me to once again trot out my best Royal Family story, with apologies to those who've already heard it. It goes back a few decades, to a time when the current heir apparent, Prince Charles, paternal grandfather of the new prince, wasn't yet an old duffer waiting around for his mum to kick off. He was just a sort of middle-aged duffer waiting around for . . . . And my mother, as she told the story after returning from that trip, was visiting the English cousins. These are people, you need to know, who were and are highly sophisticated and worldly, with a prominent streak of, you know, lawyers. So they were sitting around one evening watching the telly, and who should appear on the screen but the prince of Wales himself? And my mother piped up: "Wouldn't you think with all their money they could co something about his ears?" And there was dead silence in the room. Shock-and-horror silence.From which you might guess that my mother wasn't overly respectful of the institution or personages of the British monarchy. And you would be wrong. She really cared about the Royal Family. Which probably explains why it bothered her that they didn't do anything about those damned cartoon ears.My mother actually subscribed to a glossy magazine called, as I recall, Royalty, at a time when the magazine itself was going through its share of troubles. In those last years, when I was taking care of matters like my mother's magazine subscriptions, her renewals were being dispatched more regularly than issues of the magazine.She even managed to stretch the usefulness of those magazines. She was living at the time (which I would describe as her last good years) in a senior residence where he was, as she once put it, "happier than I imagined I could be," not far from where she had lived for the previous 25 or so years, since she and my stepfather moved to Florida for his health. And among the staff was an activities director who was an ex-pat Brit, and when she finished with each issue of the magazine she passed it on to him and his wife, and for them, for a bit, it was like being back in England. Never mind that they had both left the place for what surely seemed to them good and sufficient reason. They loved their queen.Here's to you, Prince Rufus! And hearty best wishes to the whole family.#For a "Sunday Classics" fix anytime, visit the stand-alone "Sunday Classics with Ken."
