May 2, 2007
Citizen Kane and Prince Charles IV Posted by Alexander Burns at 12:30 PM EST Well, it seems that John Steele Gordon and I agree on at least one thing: Gangs of New York was dreadful. Mr. Gordon makes a good point about Buckingham Palace: It “would be maintained in splendor whether a monarch or a President was living there.” I suppose it might just be a democratic (small d) hobbyhorse of mine, but I’d simply find the maintenance of such a massive palace more palatable if the residents were chosen by a process other than hereditary succession. I certainly don’t think it would be wasteful to maintain a historically significant building like Buckingham Palace if it were maintained as a public historical site. My objection, and my sense that its upkeep is wasteful, is grounded in the fact that Buckingham is a private residence paid for with public monies. More broadly, though, I think there’s at least a slight tension in Mr. Gordon’s discussion of the monarchy. On the one hand, he writes that royal heirs “could argue that they, like everyone else, did not get to choose their parents and therefore shouldn’t have to behave any better than everyone else.” On the other hand, Mr. Gordon says that a monarch is “someone with 1,200 years of the nation’s history in his or her veins . . . with all the very real if atavistic magnetism and charisma of a genuine monarch.” It seems to me that the royal family can either be embodiments of their nation’s spirit or flawed, philandering elites—but not both. An heir cannot really live a reckless life until the age of 50 and then expect to be viewed as a serious moral leader upon taking the throne. It also seems to me, sadly, that the younger generations of royals have decisively made the choice for vice. There’s also, I’ll add, something slightly unpersuasive about the argument that the civil list is a tolerable expense because it “amounts to about 11 pence per British subject per year.” This kind of argument is all too often deployed in order to avoid a substantive debate about public expenditures. I don’t mean to rap Mr. Gordon for this particular offense, since he actually is discussing the pros and cons of spending money on the royal family. The idea, though, that a large public expense can be reduced to a tiny per capita value is problematic. In the early 1990s, for example, defenders of the National Endowment for the Arts opposed cuts to the program by arguing that it cost each American only 64 cents. Arguing, in 2000, for large-scale Third World debt relief, Jeffrey Sachs touted a proposal that would require only 60 cents annually from each U.S. citizen, for only four years. I’m sympathetic to both Sachs and the NEA, but, obviously, tiny expenses like these eventually add up. The important question is not whether every citizen would willingly pay 50 cents or 95 or 12 to support a particular program, but, rather, whether the money should be spent at all. In the end, I suspect that Mr. Gordon and I have something of an irreconcilable difference of preference here. I don’t expect to persuade him that the royal family is useless, nor, I imagine, does he expect to convince me that my somewhat reactionary democratic impulse is a bad one. As has been the case before, though, this difference has led to a very productive conversation, and I thank him for that.
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