Elizabeth Windsor died today.
This will be the subject of a lot of news coverage in the coming months, along with the installation of her successor.
That’s fine: she was the Queen of England (among many other titles). She was an important person to a closely-connected country; this is undeniably news.
That’s not the problem; the problem is in how it’s likely to be covered here.
This is America; we don’t do royalty.
I really shouldn’t have to remind anyone of this, especially not professional journalists, but we had our first war ever over whether we should care about British royalty and the “no” side won pretty decisively.
Our Declaration of Independence is specifically about telling the King of England to get stuffed.
You literally cannot get more Un-American than caring about the King or Queen of England.
So, American journalists, write about her as a person who had a long and frankly bizarre life but leave writing the fawning profiles to her subjects.
Because we were not, and we fought a war to prove it.
